Aging & Wisdom Quote by Neal Schon

There’s a sly pride in calling your own band a “monster.” Neal Schon isn’t just remembering success; he’s describing scale as something that mutates, something that escapes the tidy narrative of hard work paying off. “Grow” makes fame feel organic and inevitable, but “monster” slips in the darker truth: once a rock band reaches arena size, it stops behaving like a band and starts operating like a force. You can feed it, steer it, maybe even love it, but you don’t fully control it.

The line also captures a very specific classic-rock phenomenon: the jump from hungry club circuit to corporate-sized spectacle. “Enormous gigs” isn’t only about crowd numbers; it’s shorthand for the whole apparatus - promoters, radio, record labels, lighting rigs, expectations, and a fanbase large enough to turn songs into shared ritual. Schon’s phrasing suggests he’s watching it happen almost from the outside, like he’s both participant and spectator to the escalation.

Intent-wise, this is a musician mythologizing the moment when the dream becomes infrastructure. The subtext is ambivalence: awe at the power, nostalgia for the climb, and an implicit acknowledgment that “huge” comes with pressure and distortion. A monster needs constant motion; it can’t go back to being a scrappy creature in a small room. In a single sentence, Schon frames Journey’s ascent as thrilling, unnatural, and irreversible.