Classic Tracks: Steve Perry’s “Oh Sherrie”

Journey was on top of the world in 1983. The year kicked off with the release of Frontiers in February and the album soon reached number two on the Billboard charts, spawning three hit singles and a world tour as it went on to sell more than six million copies. That’s enough excitement for any year, but for frontman Steve Perry, things were just getting started.

That summer, the singer and engineer Niko Bolas casually began working on a few demos, and by the following spring, those songs had become the foundation of Street Talk, Perry’s first solo project. Released in April 1984, the album was an instant smash, going double-platinum in large part due to its first single, “Oh Sherrie,” a tuneful paean to the singer’s girlfriend at the time, Sherrie Swafford.

Perry and Bolas had previously been introduced by drummer Craig Krampf, who followed up by bringing Perry to Record One in Los Angeles one day to potentially work with Bolas. They ended up cutting four songs over the July 4th weekend, and “we became buds,” Bolas recalls. “We had a great time, and Steve loved it.”

BIRTH OF A SONG

However, the work began months before that holiday in the studio, when Krampf and fellow musician Bill Cuomo joined Perry at his home for an initial songwriting session. It was the first time that Perry and Cuomo met, again introduced by Krampf. It was also the night that the three began writing “Oh Sherrie.” (Randy Goodrum also shares a songwriting credit.)

“We set up a drum machine that played an upbeat backbeat,” Krampf recalls. “Steve and Bill were working on a verse and I had nothing much to contribute. I said, ‘I’m not really offering anything.’ After a while, I went to the bathroom, and I came out and said, ‘Guys, I’ve got the chorus!’”

Krampf sang the “Oh Sherrie” hook in the moment, and from then on, it became the standing joke that Krampf should “go pee” if they wanted to write a song.

When it came time to do the album, Perry chose a new rhythm section, which for “Oh Sherrie” included Larrie Londin on drums, Bob Glaub on bass, Randy Goodrum on Rhodes, Mike Landau on rhythm guitar, and Waddy Wachtel laying down a rock and roll solo. Cuomo played the instantly recognizable keyboard intro and outro, although Bolas says the idea for that was Krampf’s.

Krampf confirms that the concept for the opening came to him while driving through Laurel Canyon with his wife Susie after seeing the film The Right Stuff. The movie’s music sparked the recollection of Cuomo’s synth part on Kim Carnes’ “More Love,” which Krampf and Cuomo had recorded together, and when he got home, he called Perry and suggested that Cuomo write an intro using that idea. Perry agreed, and Cuomo wrote an intro that tied into the outro.

TRACKING AT RECORD ONE

The basic track was cut live for the most part, with one exception being Wachtel’s guitar solo, which Bolas says hadn’t always been part of the plan. “I think originally Steve thought about having a sax play the solo, and Waddy said, ‘No, I’m gonna play a guitar,” Bolas laughs. “And Steve, of course, went nuts.”

Glaub, meanwhile, recalls being called in to replace the originally hired bass player. “I think after living with the track for a week or so, they decided to try me on it,” he says. “I remember sitting in the control room at Record One next to Steve and Niko and Bruce Botnick, and they played me the track and I said, ‘That sounds really good, what do you want me to do?’”

Glaub really didn’t know what he could do to make it better, but now, looking back, he assumes that they probably just wanted his feel. “Everybody has a different time feel, or how they lock in with the drums,” he explains. “I remember it sounded just fine, but they said they wanted me to play on it, and we got it pretty fast because the band was spot-on. I didn’t do anything very different from what he had done, maybe just the way I accented the bass notes on the eighth-notes in the verses and chorus. I’m just guessing.

“Here’s a bit of trivia,” he continues. “There’s a little part that I think most people think is a guitar part on the B part of the song. The song has a little bit of a non-conventional verse-chorus-B section order, and the B-section has a little single note kind of telegraph a part that you’ve heard on Supremes songs or Motown songs, and that’s me playing this part I came up with as an overdub, with a pick on the bass to have that section move along.”

Val Garay’s Record One was equipped with a custom-built API console. Bolas kept his approach pretty simple, he says—he was young and “I was so afraid of making a mistake that I didn’t try anything new; I just did what I learned.”

Thankfully, youth doesn’t require much sleep and Bolas was on the rise and working around the clock on Street Talk, while simultaneously engineering a record for Timothy B. Schmitt, so he spent any available down time “napping” on the couch. “Steve would come into the studio in the morning and bring me breakfast and vitamins,” Bolas recalls fondly.

On the technical side, Bolas recalls setting up the drum mics with Telefunken 251s for overheads, a Shure 57 on the snare, 57 on the hi-hat, 421 on the kick, and Telefunkens or 421s on the toms.

Krampf supplied the slap/clap sound on the chorus, which he overdubbed by taking two pieces of wood connected by a piano hinge and clapping them together. He couldn’t recall how he came up with the idea.

“He would do four tracks and I would tell him what pass he was on, and he would make one a little later than the other,” Bolas recalls. “I would tell him, ‘This is pass one,’ and he would play it, and then pass two, he would play a little later, pass three even a little later, and pass four even a little later, and we got that delayed clacky sound but it actually wasn’t a delay; it was how he played it.”

VOCALS AND REVERB

Perry sang live and then overdubbed vocals using a Neumann U 67 and an old-fashioned pop foam screen, into an API compressor. “One of the things you learn from Val is how to ride vocals,” Bolas notes. “That’s what I did. It worked and he loved it.”

Backgrounds took a little more time, Bolas says, because Perry tries different parts and stacks them. “He has something in his head and you don’t hear it until he’s done,” the engineer says, with a bit of admiration. “His background parts are like keyboard parts. He’s a whole orchestra when he sings. It depends on what he’s hearing.”

However, Bolas says, the biggest element that stands out about “Oh Sherrie” is the reverb. “Perry had always wanted to use Capitol [Studio’s] chambers, so Record One chief tech Denny Densmore got Class-A phone lines set up from Record One to Hollywood and right into Capitol chamber five, and I think they Dolby-encoded the return and sent it back to us, so when we mixed, one knob went to Hollywood to chamber five, and came back. That’s the reverb on his voice. That’s the biggest thing about the intro—it had this beautiful, huge Frank Sinatra chamber. That was another idea of Steve’s. He wanted to have a live chamber, and Denny figured out how to do it.

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“He heard the finished product the day we went in to cut it,” Bolas continues, noting the singer’s vision. “When he sings, he sings to the reverb he wants. When he overdubs, he has to hear the effects so he knows how to phrase. There’s no ego. He just wants it right. If anybody has an idea, he insists it gets pursued. He’s a collaborator, but he knows what he wants. He was a drummer and he was also an engineer. He was working at Cherokee for the Robb brothers, so he knows a little bit about a lot of things—so if he says something, it comes with knowledge. It’s not just trying to be the center of attention.”

In fact, Bolas adds, Perry will just show up at one of his sessions to this day just to help out and sometimes lend a vocal to a fledgling artist’s project. “I might credit him with a different name, but he’s helped me mix a dozen records,” Bolas reveals. “He’s just like all of us. He just loves making records.”

“Oh Sherrie” is still the biggest single of Perry’s solo career, reaching No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and No. 1 on its Rock chart.