When Neal Schon was 16, he was playing and touring with Santana—one of the biggest-selling bands of all time. He did that for three years, and cut...
When Neal Schon was 16, he was playing and touring with Santana—one of the biggest-selling bands of all time. He did that for three years, and cut three albums with them. Now, he is the central figure in a new band—Journey—that has already established a national reputation. Neal is 21 now.
The obvious question about Schon is, how did he get so good so young?
Well, like many other players who got very good while very young, he had two things going for him: He started at age ten, and he had a musician parent—his father Matt—who got him started, helped him along, and, most of all, provided Neal with an example of how to make one’s living out of a love for playing.
His father, a woodwind player who does one-nighters at San Francisco hotels like the Fairmont and the Hilton and teaches music in San Mateo, California, had Neal playing piano when he was five. Neal took up the guitar at age ten, and later played oboe in his high school band.
“I could read music, and I learned theory,” says Schon, “but it took me away from what I wanted to do, and what was natural for me to do. I can’t do any of the theoretical stuff anymore. I could if I brushed up on it, but I haven’t had any reason to go back to it, because now things just flow out of me naturally.”
At those early stages, Neal was pretty good on the oboe.
“I was first chair oboe with my high school concert band,” he recalls. “I got to play all the solos, and there are a lot of oboe solos in concert music. I was getting that down until, one day, I dropped the oboe, and