Lou Gramm Talks Foreigner
The band’s original lead singer returns to the fold
During the 1980s, Foreigner became one of the most successful bands in the world.
Their hits were numerous and ubiquitous: “I Want to Know What Love Is,” “Juke Box Hero,” “Hot Blooded,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” “Urgent,” “Cold As Ice,” “Feels Like the First Time,” “Double Vision,” “Blue Morning, Blue Day” and many more.
Lou Gramm was the vocalist on all of these songs (and he also was one of the main songwriters in the band, along with guitarist Mick Jones). Although he stepped back from the group in 2003, he has occasionally returned as a guest performer for various shows — and he will do so again when he joins the band for a special 50th anniversary show on Ellis Island in New York City (see details on the limited ticket giveaway here), then further shows in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut in December.
“I was invited to be a part of this, and I definitely wanted to do it,” Gramm says, calling from his home in Rochester, New York. “This is the current Foreigner lineup, and I’m representing the original lineup. I’ve done a number of shows with the band over the last year and a half, and they’re very good. Excellent band. We have a lot of fun, and I think the audience loves it, too.”
Besides Gramm, there’s Luis Maldonado, who has been selected as Foreigner’s new full-time vocalist moving forward. Additionally, Constantine Maroulis —best known for his successful appearance on American Idol, as well as starring in the Broadway hit Rock of Ages — will also be on hand as the show’s opening act.
Although Gramm was the singer who made these songs famous in the first place, he has no problem making room for these other performers. “If we find that each of us want to do the same song, we fight it out until the first one gets knocked down, and then the other person who did the knocking down picks the song he wants,” he says, then bursts out laughing and adds, “I’m only kidding, you know. We manage to work it out. If two people want a song, the person who gives up the song gets to pick another good song.”
As for himself, Gramm says he also has no problem singing any of these songs, even though he’s done so thousands of times by now. “I think the fact that the audience is so turned on that it turns me on,” he says, “and I’m aware, before we take the stage, that there’s a limited number of shows that will be played live again, and I want to make every one count.”
Besides these shows, the band will also soon release a deluxe version of Foreigner 4, their multiplatinum-selling album that was originally released in 1981. (It’s set for release on Sept. 12, but can be pre-ordered here.) So named because it was their fourth studio album, Foreigner 4 it contained the massive hits “Urgent,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” and “Juke Box Hero.”
“Foreigner 4 was, I think, our biggest-selling album, and it was [our] only album that went to number one [on the U.S. Billboard album chart],” Gramm says. (It also landed on the charts in nearly a dozen other countries.) “I have great memories of recording that album and touring on it. We toured a year and a half, pretty much straight through, with very few breaks. We went around the world doing that.
“When Mick and I were writing it, we knew that we had good songs,” he continues. “Every song we wrote, we were like, ‘Wow, this could be really big.’ We just had a feeling. I think as songwriters, Mick and I were reaching our creative peak, and there was a lot of creative interaction between the two of us. It was almost supernatural. The songs weren’t easy to write, necessarily, but the more we worked on them, the more they became special. I think it was the best-sounding album we’d ever done.”
Beyond the catchy melodies, Gramm believes that these songs — and Foreigner’s other hits — resonate with listeners because they reflect the kinds of experiences and emotions that happen to many people. “A lot of the songs are about relationships, but there’s other songs about young men growing up, and the trials and tribulations of life,” he says.
Witnessing another band make this kind of connection with audiences inspired Gramm to want to become a musician himself: “I remember being nine or ten years old, sitting on the couch with my brothers and my parents, and seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. I think that clicked something with me, and I turned to my mom and dad and said, that’s what I want to do when I grow up. And they laughed.”
But he didn’t let their amusement dissuade him, and he began playing the drums in bands in Rochester. Eventually, he joined a band named Black Sheep, for whom he handled a lot of the lead singer duties as well as the drumming — but he soon found that this wasn’t enjoyable. “Many times, the vocal phrasing goes against your own beat that you’re playing, so it was difficult to do two different things at once, especially rhythmically,” he says, “and it was hard to put the emotion of the song across to the audience from behind a big set of drums.”
They solved the problem by finding a new drummer, and Gramm became the lead singer — but, he says, it wasn’t an easy transition. “It was very scary,” he says. “I had to go look at movie footage of other singers and see how they conducted themselves. I saw The Rolling Stones on TV, and I knew that I couldn’t be Mick Jagger. He was unique, and all arms and legs. So I had to find something in the middle, [where] I could conduct myself with class and still move to the music and still sing the best I could. It took a few years to find a comfortable persona as a frontman.”
AUDIO: Black Sheep “Woman”
Black Sheep went on to sign a record deal with a major label, and released two albums that did well enough that the group was chosen to open for KISS on a 1975-76 world tour — but then disaster struck. After just the first show, in Boston, the band’s truck full of equipment skidded on a patch of ice on the New York State Thruway, and the subsequent accident destroyed everything. When Gramm called the record company to ask for help with buying replacement gear so the band could continue on the tour, the label decided to drop them instead. Despondent, Black Sheep broke up.
But soon afterward, Gramm got a call from Mick Jones, who he’d met a year before when Jones’ band, Spooky Tooth, played in Rochester. Gramm had given him copies of Black Sheep’s albums, and Jones had liked what he heard. When Spooky Tooth disbanded, he invited Gramm to come to New York City to audition for a new group.
“So I went down and auditioned,” Gramm recalls. “They said they liked my voice, but they didn’t tell me if I was in the band or not.” Still, it seemed promising: he went to Jones’ apartment that night to have dinner with Jones and his wife, then afterwards Jones played some of his musical ideas for Gramm. They ended up writing the song “Long, Long Way from Home,” which would later appear on Foreigner’s 1977 self-titled debut album.
Gramm continued to work with Jones and the rest of the band, but he was confused about his status. “They never told me if I was in the band or not,” he says. “When I went down there to audition, I had two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, a couple of T-shirts, and one pair of jeans. For a week, every night I was washing out the socks and underwear and hanging them up in the bathroom with the heat lamp on them, and by morning they would be dry, or almost dry.” Finally, he asked if he got the job. “And they said, ‘Oh yeah, I thought you knew that.’ I said, ‘No, no one ever told me.’”
Things went more smoothly from there. Foreigner’s debut album yielded three major hit singles: the aforementioned “Long, Long Way from Home,” “Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold As Ice.” It was certainly an auspicious start, and it was a winning streak they’d continue through the rest of the 1970s and on through the 1980s. In all, Foreigner have had more than a dozen Top 20 hit singles in the U.S. alone, becoming one of the best-selling rock bands of all time.
VIDEO: Foreigner “Feels Like The First Time”
In 2024, Foreigner were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — but while Gramm is proud of this achievement, it also rankles him. “What’s very disappointing is that we were eligible to be inducted in 1990, and we were never even nominated, which I couldn’t figure out,” he says. “All the bands that were out when we first started, almost all of them are in, and we couldn’t figure out why we were never even nominated. So we did a little homework, and we found out that the guy who set up the nominations had a little grudge against us.”
The band went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Board of Directors with this revelation, “and when they found out that this guy had been keeping us out of the nominations for over 20 years, they fired this guy,” Gramm says. “And then the next time there was a nomination, we got in.”
But it was a bittersweet victory, because by then, Jones was suffering from Parkinson’s to the point where he couldn’t even attend the induction ceremony, and original member and multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald had passed away two years before. After performing at the induction ceremony, Gramm says, “I went away feeling proud to be inducted, but feeling incomplete because the whole band wasn’t there.”
This is why Gramm is so determined to be the one member of the original lineup who still performs with Foreigner now, as often as he is able. “There’s always people who haven’t heard it live, and you have to give them that opportunity,” he says. “I just know that the shows are fun, and the fans are always appreciative. We tear it up a little bit and get the fans involved. At the end of the night, we feel that we rocked the house.”
Upcoming Foreigner shows featuring Lou Gramm:
Sept. 6 – New York City – Ellis Island
Dec. 3 and 4 – Port Chester, NY – Capitol Theatre
Dec. 6 – Staten Island, NY – St. George Theatre
Dec. 7 – Bethlehem, PA – Wind Creek Event Theater
Dec. 9 – Wallingford, CT – Oakdale Theatre
Dec. 11 – Montclair, NJ – Wellmont Theater
Dec. 12 – Montclair, NJ – Wellmont Theater
Dec. 13 – Williamsport, PA – Community Arts Center
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