Hot blooded: Lou Gramm brings Foreigner to Lee County
Lou Gramm is back leading Foreigner, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers responsible for some of the most recognizable hits of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Songs like “I Want to Know What Love Is,” “Feels Like the First Time,” “Hot Blooded,” “Juke Box Hero,” “Urgent,” and “Waiting for A Girl Like You” that all have the unforgettable hallmarks of Gramm’s soaring vocals.
On Sunday, April 19, Gramm will be at the Hertz Arena in Estero to perform with the reformed group.
“This year is going to be a lot of fun because we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the band. That is very special,” Gramm said in an interview with Breeze Newspapers ahead of Foreigner’s upcoming Lee County appearance.
Gramm, who has lived in Southwest Florida for the past four years, reunited with Foreigner after their long-overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024. He started touring again with Foreigner last year after a two-decade hiatus with the group aside from a few reunion shows. The 75-year-old Gramm said he has been on the road for 15 years straight, mostly with his solo act.
Gramm, who is the only original member still with Foreigner, will be singing on about a half dozen of the group’s songs during the performance. The group will be missing their founding guitarist and main songwriter Mick Jones, who has been battling Parkinson’s Disease for several years. “He is not doing well,” Gramm said.
Gramm is still also touring with his solo act and just released a new album called “Released.” Gramm is eager to talk about the new songs, which are some of the best solo material he has recorded. The album includes some songs he started working on for his solo albums in the 1980’s but never finished.
Though he is proud of the millions of records he has sold with Foreigner, Gramm still wants to talk about the band that got away. That group, Black Sheep, was his band before Foreigner. They recorded two albums and were opening up for Kiss in Boston in December of 1975 before Gramm’s whole world changed. An accident involving the band’s road crew on the icy New York Thruway on their way back from the show, destroyed all of their equipment. Their label, Capitol Records, didn’t replace their equipment and their spot on the Kiss “Alive! Tour” was over.
While holed up in his hometown of Rochester and band members too broke to buy new equipment, Gramm went out one night to see the band Spooky Tooth. At the show, he gave a copy of his Black Sheep album to Spooky Tooth guitarist Mick Jones backstage. Little did he know that Jones was about to form a new chart-storming rock group for the ages.
“I had my two Black Sheep albums. I talked to Mick and I said ‘here are two Black Sheep albums. That is the band I am in. Give these a listen and I hope you like it.'”
Jones was on the phone with Gramm just a few months later. “He told me he was not in Spooky Tooth anymore and was putting together a new band, and he really liked the way I sang,” Gramm said. Jones flew Gramm down to his apartment in Manhattan and Gramm auditioned to the song “Feels Like the First Time,” which had been already written and mostly finished. The song, carried by the synthesizer, organ and keys of Al Greenwood, and the group vocals of the band, would set the tone on their multi-platinum, self-titled debut album and has continued to live on decades later as one of the group’s most memorable creations. Gramm’s audition went so well, that night he helped write “A Long, Long Way From Home,” one of the group’s signature take-charge songs.
Jones, who had built up musical connections through his time as a session guitarist in England and through his touring in the U.S., brought on King Crimson co-founder Ian McDonald on guitar, reeds and keys, former Ian Hunter drummer Dennis Elliott, and New York-based bassist Ed Gagliardi.
Before Gramm was singing, he was a drummer from the age of 7. On occasion, Gramm would join Elliott on stage for a double-drum performance on songs like “Starrider,” one of the more underrated Foreigner hits to feature both Gramm and Jones on lead vocals.
While Jones was the main songwriter in the group, Gramm is credited with writing many of the lyrics in their biggest hits. Gramm is also credited with co-writing the music for top hits like “Cold as Ice,” “Double Vision,” and “Jukebox Hero.”
Gramm credited Jones not only for his songwriting ability but for his guitar-playing, which he compared to George Harrison. Gramm said the strengths of his guitar playing was in his chord structures, as well as his solos on songs like “Hot Blooded” and “Jukebox Hero.” Gramm said “his lead guitars weren’t up to the levels of Jimmy Page but his chord structures were beyond any of theirs.”
The band first came to prominence on their first record, with their wide range of styles, from the hard-rocking muscle car sounding songs like “At War With The World,” “Long, Long Way From Home” and “Headknocker” to the arena rock feel of “Feels Like The First Time,” “I Need You” and “Starrider” to the rock opera sounds of “Cold As Ice,” the folksy “Fool For Your Anyway,” all the way to the dreamy, synthesizer sounds of “Woman Oh Woman.”
Gramm said the band took pride in the diversity of their songs in those years.
“Mick and I took great pains to make sure (of that),” Gramm said. “We felt we had a style that people could recognize but we tried to make sure all of the songs sounded different to each other. We didn’t want to be known as a one-trick pony.”
It took a slowed-down, keyboard-led song “I Want To Know What Love Is,” to bring Foreigner to the top of the charts in 1985. On the group’s No. 1 song, Gramm said “I put a lot into that. It’s a great, great song. It reached number one all around the world,” Gramm said. They played the song at Farm Aid in 1985. “It was massive,” Gramm said of the famous benefit concert. “It was unbelievable. There was wall to wall people as far as you could see.”
The song had Thomas Bailey, of the Thompson Twins, playing keys and synthesizers. “A very easy, down to earth guy, very cool,” Gramm said. That album, “Agent Provocateur, was produced by the late Alan Sadkin, who had worked with Duran Duran and Neil Young. “He was low key, easy to work with,” Gramm said.
Another power ballad three years earlier was about as successful, reaching No. 2 on the pop charts. “Waiting On A Girl Like You,” with the memorable synthesizer keys of Thomas Dolby), is still one of their most indelible classics. Gramm said he thinks a lot of children were born to the song. He said “it’s a good feeling” that the romantic song was shared by many couples growing up at the time who are still together. “It’s not my song now, it’s their song,” Gramm said.
Perhaps the group’s most signature rock standard was “Hot Blooded,” which Gramm wrote the lyrics for, and co-wrote the music with Jones. “Mick and I worked on that song for a number of days, getting the feel just right and the rhythm of the song just right,” Gramm said. He said the song and its suggestive lyrics wwere not about any one moment in particular. “The lyrics were a lot of fun to write. As a rocker, you could just about tell any story you want,” he said. “You can grab a glimpse of something you have done and use your imagination to make it into lyrics.”
Talking about the band’s heyday in the late 70’s and early 80s, Gramm said “That time was really special because for us, especially when we started the band in 76′ and 77,’ we feel that us and Boston and Cheap Trick, were the bands that put an end to disco,” Gramm said. “Those days were great because radio loved our kinds of bands. You couldn’t turn on a station without hearing one of those bands,” he said. “We were a young band at that time and we were kicking butt and so were our compatriots.”
The sound of Foreigner change forever before the recording of Foreigner 4, which took place between 1980 and 1981. The band had been through a bitter time after their previous album “Head Games” was a disappointment commercially. “Head Games had been recorded with Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker. “All the stuff and things he did with Queen, we were hoping that was what he would do for our rough ideas for songs,” Gramm said. “The album was finished and you think Joe Schmo produced it.”
Gramm and Jones decided they wanted to take the music in a different direction.
“After the Head Games album, we kind of talked to all of the guys in the band, the album didn’t sell many, the song ideas were great but was unproduced. We have to fix our standing with the rock fans. We have to come out with something better than any of the songs we have so far,” Gramm said.
The album would produce some of the band’s greatest hits. The recordings, with famed producer Robert “Mutt” Lange fresh off recording two megahit albums with AC/DC, included songs like “Juke Box Hero,” “Urgent” and Waiting for a Girl Like You.”
Those new hits were not without a price though.
Early on in the recording sessions, Greenwood and McDonald were let go over musical differences. They would not appear on any of Foreigner 4’s tracks. “It was unbelievably tough to do. They really took it very painfully,” Gramm said.
Greenwood and McDonald would have various reunion shows with Foreigner in later years though they would never record again with the group.
Gramm called Greenwood, who is based in New York City, “unbelievable, unbelievably creative.” He last appeared a few years ago at various Foreigner shows.
In 2022, McDonald died of cancer, which Gramm said was difficult on him. “He was a great guy. He played a lot of different things, he played the flute, he played with King Crimson.” Among McDonald’s great contributions was the memorable piano playing on “Cold As Ice,” the flute on “Starrider,” the saxophone on “Long, Long Way from Home” and the reeds on “Back to Where You Belong.” McDonald, who was known for having played nine instruments on the classic King Crimson album “In the Court of Crimson King,” was also given co-production credits with Jones on Foreigner’s first two albums. McDonald’s death preceded the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Gramm would leave the group too a few times. He started working on his first album not long after the success of their biggest hit “I Want to Know What Love Is,” which topped the charts in 1985. Gramm said he started to grow tired of the focus of the album on the keyboards. “After Foreigner 4, Mick started becoming enamored with all of the new keyboards that were coming out. He bought all of them,” Gramm said. Gramm said he didn’t understand agree with the concentration of the songs around keyboards. He thought the guitar-oriented songs were not as good. “I was very disenchanted with the direction the band was going,” he said.
Gramm said he also was tired of the constant touring. He said after the Foreigner 4 album, the band toured for about a year and a half straight with few breaks. When he came home, he said, his toddler son didn’t recognize him. “I didn’t get over it,” he said. “I didn’t want to go out for that length of time.”
Gramm grew up in a musical family. His dad Ben, who worked at a sheetmetal plant, was a trumpet player who formed a big jazz band. “He was a bandleader and a great trumpet player,” Gramm said. Through searching for a vocalist, he met Lou’s future mother Nikki, who became the singer.
Gramm grew up around a lot of jazz. On weekends, there would be jazz playing on the radio in the house. At the age of seven, Gramm was given a drum set to play and would sometimes play along with his parents while his dad played the trumpet and his mother sang. “I didn’t know what was going on but I was in heaven,” he said.
Gramm’s new solo album includes songs that feature remnants of unfinished songs from his solo album sessions in the 1980’s.
The songs include material that was being worked on during the recording of Gramm’s first solo records, 1987’s “Ready or Not” and 1989’s “Long Hard Look.” That first album featured guitarist Nils Lofgren (of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and Neil Youn’g Crazy Horse) and Gramm’s old Black Sheep bandmate Bruce Turgon on bass. The second album would also include Campbell (who has not yet joined Def Leppard) and keyboardist Peter Wolf, known for laying the keys and arrangements to hits like Staship’s “We Built This City,” “Sara,” Heart’s “What About Love?” and Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.”
“There were about three or four other ideas (on each album) that were (butt) kickers,” Gramm said. “I just didn’t have enough time to finish those songs.”
Gramm said he thought those unfinished songs were “gangbusters.”
He finally has finished those songs. He particularly likes “Walk the Walk” and “Young Love.”
Gramm said his influences when he wrote those songs were the rock bands that first influenced him like Free, Spooky Tooth, Traffic, Humble Pie and “mostly The Beatles,” he said. All groups that influenced Foreigner’s sound.
After Gramm recorded his second solo album “Long Hard Look” in 1989 and left the group the following year. He was replaced by Johnny Edwards but the break didn’t last long. Gramm returned in 1992 and stayed with the group until 2003. In between his return to the band and his departure, he found sobriety and overcame some serious health issues.
Gramm said its miraculous that he still can perform. “I still can do it. I thank God I came out the other side,” he said.
How does he like his move to Florida? “I love it,” Gramm said.
Fort Myers Beach Observer Editor Nathan Mayberg can be reached at NMayberg@breezenewspapers.com