Lou Gramm: A Jaunt To Dimension Solo

Lou Gramm: A Jaunt To Dimension Solo

Chuck Eddy

by

Best way to kick this off is to can the corny suspense and letcha in on what the man told me, which I’m sure as shaving cream is what yer dyin’ to know: Foreigner is no more, kaput, zilch, a thing of the past, at least as far as Lou Gramm is concerned. Sweet Lou’s been beating around the bush on an airwave or two, diplomatically likening the Foreigner fission to a trial separation that could be patched up in no time.

But the straight poop is irreconcilable differences.

Goes something like this: Ever since there’s been a Foreigner, axewielder Mick Jones (“not the Sex Pistols guy,” Sammy Hagar once said—I thought that was pretty funny at the time) has been the main songwriter, and more or less the guy who decided what Foreigner did and what Foreigner didn’t do. Check the Rolling Stone Record Guide (first edition, 1978): ‘‘Led (my italics) by Spooky Tooth refugee Mick Jones.” Some four or five years ago, as its seriousness increased, this situation started to bother Black Sheep refugee Gramm, because he wanted more input, and he wasn’t getting it. “Mick dominated too much for his own good,” Lou says, adding that Mick has admitted as much. “I had songs that I thought were good songs, but it seemed that any song that I instigated would be shelved.” Two of the tracks Gramm unsuccessfully proposed to Foreigner, “Time” and “She’s Got To Know,” ended up on his solo album.

And it was that album, and its immediate commercial triumph, that finished Foreigner-with-Gramm for good. “It was kinda an inside joke with the band that Lou wanted to do a solo album. They said I was getting disruptive,” Gramm remembers. “They were a little worried that it would have a sub-par effect on Foreigner’s reputation if it flopped.” But it didn’t—released in February, Ready Or Not was a Top 40 album with a Top 20 single (“Midnight Blue”) by mid-March. This had an effect on Foreigner that the band hadn’t anticipated: they were set to enter the studio to start recording their sixth LP, and, since they didn’t want a Foreigner album to have to compete with a Lou Gramm album come summer, they decided to throw a wrench into the operation. “They didn’t want me to go out touring, and they wanted me to stop putting out singles after the second single, ‘Ready Or Not,’ ” the 36-year-old Gramm says. But the solo tour (of 2,000-3,000 seat halls and theaters, probably with semi-Skynyrds the Georgia Satellites or semi-Benatar Patty Smyth opening) was already scheduled to begin June 13, and Gramm figured his longplayer was good for a couple more 45s. So he tendered his resignation.

“The only way the situation could have been rectified would have been for Foreigner to say let’s prepare an album to come out around Thanksgiving,” Lou explains. Instead, the band went looking for a new singer, or a least that’s what’s suggested by the “reliable” rumors their old singer has heard. Even if his long-time bandmates offered to help him out on his tour or on his next LP, Gramm would say no. “I wouldn’t even consider it at all,” he told me. “I have to sever the ties at this point.”

There’s probably a gaggle or two of purple-haired hepsters out there wonderin’ what the big tragedy of Foreigner breakin’ up is, anyway. And I guess I oughta interject here that I sorta sympathize with the hepsters—I mean, it’s not like we’re talkin’ about the Three Johns or, urn, AC/DC, or somebody really important to the future of mankind like that, is it? I mean, Dean of Famous Rock Critics Robert Christgau once called Foreigner the “world’s dullest band.” And Late Famous Rock Critic Lester Bangs once listed Foreigner as one of those “faceless corporate bands with interchangeable one-word monickers.” But what these usually very smart gentlemen ignored is the fact that, well, Foreigner is hip. I know this because when I went to see Soul Asylum—this punk band from Minnesota who are considered so hip right now that I bet they follow the Replacements and Husker Du to the big leagues before this year’s over—they covered “Jukebox Hero,” off Foreigner 4 (They also covered “Chevy Van” by Sammy Johns.)

And in the last couple years, Foreigner has even been blessed with that very elusive and purely arbitrary substance known as “Rock Critic Respectability,” a very hip thing indeed. Famous Rock Critic Greil Marcus named “Dirty White Boy” his eighth-favorite single of 1979, then nanrted “I Want To Know What Love Is” his numero uno, no less, of 1985. SemiFamous Rock Critic Kristine McKenna named “Urgent” her tenth-favorite single of 1981. This New York fanzine called Slabbage selected “Hot Blooded” (“further probing the myth of the ever erect, dust eatin’ rock god who spies some thigh from an uno-night-stand stage”) as the seventh-greatest road song ever written (positions one through six and eight through ten all went to Grand Funk’s “American Band”). Even the aforementioned Mr. Christgau has admitted that “Hot Blooded” is a “a magnificent fluke,” on the order of “You’re So Vain.” If all these quite learned people, several of whom also like the Psychedelic Furs, can admit the primacy of Foreigner, why can’t you?

Me, I’ve sort of been a fan all along, and sort of not. The way I picture it, Foreigner is (er, was) a pretty ace popjunk,45s band across the board—I wholeheartedly recommend Records, their 1982 greatest-hits compilation^ though I wish it had “Women” and the studio version of “Hot Blooded” instead of “Feels Like The First Time” and the live version of “Hot Blooded.” Jerks who lump Foreigner into the Boston/Styx/Journey/Toto limbo are jerks, and they miss the point, because Foreigner had way more imagination, not to mention more oomph, than those other brand-name crews. “Cold As Ice” is an OK Who’s Next rip; “Jukebox Hero” (“... he bought a beat-up six-string/he didn’t know how to play it...”) is some grass-roots-life saved-by-rock anthem; “Hot Blooded” is as phallus-proud as a dumb drooling misogynist rant gets. Plus, Gramm agrees with my assertion that “Women” is a metal-billy item that would’ve been even neater if Duane “Cool Last Name” Eddy had played on it.

The mutant-gospel of “I Want To Know What Love Is” and the mutant-funk of “Urgent” are ingenious. Edwin Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day” inspired the band to get the New Jersey Mass Choir to harmonize on the former, Gramm says, and when Junior Walker was invited to blow sax on the latter, he had to be coaxed, because he figured Foreigner were nobodies. And Gramm confirmed my suspicions about “Dirty White Boy” when he confided that the hit was more or less an answer to punk rock—“It wasn’t jumping on a bandwagon, but it was a reaction, because we wanted to show that we could be rude and crude in our own way. So the band put out the roughest, fastest, most concise record of their career, a nugget that merges the ’60s-punk Standells’ “Dirty Water” and “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White” both melodically and texturally. How cool can you get?

There were, of course, people who thought Foreigner could have been a lot cooler, like f’rinstance the radio stations that boycotted “Women” because its lyric (along with the sleeve of Head Games, the album from whence it came) was deemed sexist. “And some of the same people were accusing ‘Dirty White Boy’ of having racial overtones,” Gramm recalls. “And I was lovin’ it, because I thought finally we’ve stirred up something.” But before too long, the controversy died down, and the group’s image changed. “Waiting For A Girl Like You,” Foreigner 4’s third single, was followed up by “I Want To Know What Love Is,” the first 45 from Agent Provocateur—and they were both slow jams (as they say on “Soul Train”), and that bugged Gramm.

“It was like Mick wanted us to be Adult Contemporary, and I didn’t feel like an adult. Rock radio didn’t even want to know about us anymore—they played the old stuff. When 45-year-old women started saying they love us, and when people started comparing us to Air Supply and telling us that we write the best ballads, it got to be just too much for me.” Gramm wanted to do harder stuff, and while he says the material Jones had been working on before the breakup was “raw, almost back to Double Vision,” he had hard stuff of his own he wanted to contribute. Jones wasn’t interested, hence, Ready Or Not.

Gramm’s album is a conscious move back to hard rock, and if your idea of hard rock is Double Vision or Head Games, you’ll probably eat it up. (My idea of hard rock is the Stooges or Slayer, so I can hardly stomach any of it, but that’s my problem, I guess.) “I toughened the sound up quite a bit—the crunch of the guitar approaches heavy metal in some places,” Gramm opines. It’s the first chance he’s had to make his own music since Black Sheep days, and one goal of Ready Or Not is to return him to the mindset he was in back then. “Black Sheep was kind of an R&B band with heavy metal tinges, like Free but with a big Hammond like in Traffic, with a little Jimmy Page in there maybe,” the vocalist explicates. "This album is a little more uptempo, a little more poppy. My friends say it sounds like how Black Sheep would have sounded 10 years on.”

One big reason for this comparison might be Bruce Turgon, who played bass for Black Sheep and on Ready Or Not, and who collaborated with Gramm on composition and arrangement. Gramm says he’d kept in touch with Turgon through the Foreigner era during which time the bassist was employed in heavy metal bands such as Warrior, “and we even talked about getting Black Sheep back together, but the chances didn’t look great for a couple of years.” Putting together the new LP, the old friend proved indispensible: “I’d sit down at the drums, and first come up with the beat, or sometimes Bruce would come up with a brash guitar riff, and we’d work from there, and once we had the sound, we’d try to figure out what the attitude of the song should be,” Gramm relates.

Also on the album is guitarist Nils Lofgren, whose early 70s band, Grin, Lou had been a big fan of, and who makes lots of the savage noise you hear on Neil Young’s deity-like Tonight’s The Night, and who’ll tour with Gramm this summer unless he tours with his other “Boss,” Bruce Springsteen. And Ready Or Not has drums from Lou’s big brother Ben (who’s toured with esoteric artsy-fartsy experimentalists such as Yoko Ono and Peter Frampton), guitar from Lou’s little brother Richard, and (on “She’s Got To Know”) a horn section led by Lou’s dad, Ben Grammatico Sr., who had a 16-piece big band in the ’40s. Lou’s mom, who sang for that swing combo, has been guaranteed a spot on solo LP number two. “She’s breaking my balls about it,” Gramm chuckles. “I’m not sure how I’m gonna get out of this one.”

My favorite cut on Ready Or Not is “Midnight Blue,” which Ken Barnes awarded single-of-the-month honors in this publication a couple months back, and which I consider the trash-hit-of-1987, so far. I first heard it on the way home from a Farmer Jack’s grocery and I thought it was really amazing how the words at the end of each line (follow/follow through, trouble boy/double dare) “answered” each other without actually rhyming. Gramm says the smasheroo actually started as a sort of old Dylan number, like “Positively 4th Street” or something, before Turgon robustified the sound. Lou calls the song “pretty introspective,” though he admits that the part where his dad tells him life is either gonna be “cherry red or midnight blue” ain’t to be taken literally—“Actually, he used to say, ‘You better take out the garbage, or you’ll be a homeless boy.” As for the non-rhyming factor, the composer of the masterpiece says, “It just happened that way—I’d never try to turn that into a formula.” He’s not only talented, he has integrity!

Lou Gramm doesn’t have MTV in his home, but he makes videos anyway. He lists his vocal influences as Otis Redding, old Marvin Gaye, old Aretha Franklin, Eric Burdon, the Everiy Brothers, the early Beatles, and Paul Rodgers. He recently found about a Lou Gramm: The Early Years album on the Canadian Polygram label that has Mick Jones’s picture on the cover, kinda like that 1969 Aurelio Rodriguez baseball card that had the batboy’s photo by mistake. And here’s what the wild and crazy guy has to say about his second solo LP, which he’ll start recording this fall: “I would like to make the arrangements a little more extreme, maybe give it more of a live sound, put more character in the performances, even make it less structured, but still infectious, maybe work on lyrical ideas a little out of the ordinary, not that I’m gonna deal with social issues or anything.” Soun(ls great doesn>t jt? be Lou.s got a Metal Machine Music up his sleeve, but we’ll never know till we hear the thing, I, for one, can’t stand the suspense. ®