Journey Lead Singer Replaced Again, 2006-Present
 In 1981, Journey's seventh studio album, Escape, went to No. 1 on the album charts and would go on to become their biggest selling and most popular studio album (nine times platinum). The hits Who's Crying Now, Don't Stop Believin' and Open Arms all reached the Top 10 as singles. The band's polished sound, fronted by Perry's distinctive and soon-to-be widely imitated voice, became a popular radio presence.
In particular, Don't Stop Believin' showcased how well Perry's soaring tenor could interlace with Cain's full piano chords and Schon's dynamic guitar work, while Open Arms — which spent six weeks at No. 2 on the charts — helped establish Perry as the standard for 1980s arena rock power ballad vocals.
Such success did not help Journey with rock critics. The 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide gave each of their albums only one star, with Dave Marsh writing that Journey was a dead end for San Francisco area rock ... utter triviality ... banality ... reek[s] of exploitative cynicism. Marsh later would anoint Escape as one of the worst number-one albums of all time. Fairly or not, critics often lumped Journey together with other one-word-named corporate rock bands such as Boston, Foreigner, Asia, Survivor and so forth. Journey was also one of the first bands to be sponsored by a major advertiser (Budweiser Beer) which they acknowledged in the credits on their album covers. This contributed to their critics labeling them corporate rock, or more precisely, corporate-sponsored rock. Manager Herbie Herbert, however, has made light of such criticism, saying You gotta make hay while the sun shines. The band had clearly left behind its Haight-Ashbury hippie roots.
In 1982, the band contributed the track Only Solutions to the Disney feature film Tron. Coincidentally, later that year the group became the first rock band to inspire a video game: both the Journey arcade game by Bally/Midway, and Journey Escape by Data Age for the Atari 2600.
Journey's next album, 1983's Frontiers, continued their commercial success. It reached No. 2 on the album charts and scored four hit singles, with Faithfully and Separate Ways reaching the highest at Nos. 12 and 8, respectively. Cain's presence continued to be felt on this album, both in his songwriting (he was the sole writer of Faithfully) and in his increased use of synthesizers.
It was now the MTV era, and Journey's popularity was boosted by a documentary-like music video for Faithfully, which showed various band members and their families on tour and which helped earn the song a place, along with Bob Seger's Turn the Page and Jackson Browne's The Load Out, as a life-on-the-road favorite.
A short time later, the band received a request from a dying 16-year-old boy named Kenny Sykaluk, who was battling cystic fibrosis. Kenny wanted to meet the band. The band honored the request and not only visited Kenny at his bedside, but gave him a walkman with their newest single, Only The Young. Kenny died less than a day later. In Journey's episode of Behind the Music, Jonathan Cain remembered the encounter in tears, while Neal Schon noted that it changed my outlook on life.
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