Excerpt: Liners from Foreigner's DOUBLE VISION

Consider the cruelties of the infamous sophomore slump, a legacy that’s humbled many a promising young sports star and musician alike. You know the story: Phenom athlete/band emerges seemingly from nowhere to take the big leagues/record business by storm, only to be humbled by an all-too-familiar confluence of human frailty, hubris, and dumb luck for their second season/album.

After their eponymous 1977 debut spawned a pair of hits (“Feels Like The First Time,” “Cold As Ice”) that became enduring classic-rock radio staples, spent over a year on the charts, and ultimately went quadruple platinum, Foreigner seemed primed for a fall—a big one. The rock press, ever ready to follow a trend and/or issue a cutting rebuke, celebrated Foreigner’s AOR coronation largely by embracing the nascent strains of a vibrant, if oft-reactionary punk/new wave movement, whilst dubbing Mick Jones, Lou Gramm, and company as veritable apostates. Foreigner’s music was roundly summed up with a two-word epithet that seemed coined especially for them: corporate rock. In short, when the album you now hold in your hands was released in June 1978, more than a few forces were queuing up to grease Foreigner’s rails.

Problem is, somebody in the Cruel Fate Distribution Dept. forgot to cc: Foreigner on that sophomore jinx memo. Double Vision scored three more hits (the title track, “Hot Blooded,” and “Blue Morning, Blue Day”), and soared into that rarified six-times-platinum sales strata as well. Coupled with the continuing success of their debut, Foreigner had not only beaten the odds, but they also vaulted into the first ranks of rock stardom in the bargain. To paraphrase Marty Feldman’s Igor in Young Frankenstein: “Slump? What slump?”

But like most “overnight success stories,” Foreigner’s golden tale was belied by more than a little myth. The band that many pop cynics accused of being hand-tooled in some corporate boardroom was actually the third-career brainchild of English guitarist-producer Mick Jones, a journeyman musician who’d already toiled for better than a dozen years in the service of others, from Johnny Hallyday (the “French Elvis”) to stints with the second-edition Spooky Tooth and The Leslie West Band. Indeed, Foreigner’s very name was largely a tribute to Jones’ years as a professional musical expatriate. But when the West gig fell apart, Jones found himself stranded in New York City, “where I always wanted to be, with nothing. I was just surviving on royalties from what I’d done in France.”

But, crucially, West manager Bud Prager (who would eventually assume the same role in Foreigner’s career) had encouraged Jones to pursue a songwriting talent that had recently taken a backseat to guitar playing, offering a small work space in his offices as well. “‘Feels Like The First Time’ was the first one,” Jones recalls. “And I thought, This sounds alright, what do I do with this?! . . . Then I started to entertain the possibility of putting a band together.”

Ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald was an early recruit, the first of a mix of other English and American musicians Jones knew or had gigged with, including keyboardist Al Greenwood, bass player Ed Gagliardi, and drummer Dennis Elliott. Ian Lloyd (late of Stories) had handled early vocal chores, but wouldn’t become the final key piece of the Foreigner puzzle.

Jones says some 50 potential singers traipsed through his small Broadway rehearsal space during auditions, not because he didn’t know what he wanted in a band frontman, but more likely because he knew all too well. “I’d actually asked Steve Winwood to be the singer in this band at one point,” Jones says. “We’d gone out to dinner one night, and I asked him, but he was doing his own thing at the time. That was the kind of feeling I was shooting for.

“My identity had gotten forged in the early ’70s by the company of people I admired and where the music was coming from, the blues and roots. Foreigner was a continuation of that, plus what I had to offer myself, as a musical identity. My ‘French period’ added another dimension to it, my experience with orchestras. And maybe hearing all that accordion music at one point in my life!” he adds with a chuckle.

“I’d also learned how to work with people in the studio,” Jones continues. “That was a big part of being able to work with Lou and understand what it needed to be vocally. I put a tremendous amount of work in with Lou, developing his vocal technique, power, and expression. I was proud to have a voice like that, and I wanted to make it sound the best it could. I’d learned stuff from Otis Redding, who I’d been in the studio with, and passed it on—simple as that.”

But Lou Grammatico, onetime vocalist of a short-lived Rochester, New York, band called Black Sheep, wasn’t originally on Jones’ shortlist. In fact, the singer had since taken up drums—and day construction work—to make a living. “I’d met him on a Spooky Tooth tour up in Rochester,” Jones recalls. “Our label A&R guy at the time was also managing Lou’s band, and he brought them to one of our shows. That’s how I first met him. I’d been given an album he’d done with a band called Black Sheep, and that was the album I put on one afternoon when I was fussing about with songwriting. I heard the voice and the connection with the song, and I started to pursue Lou. It suddenly clicked that this was the guy.”

But, like many struggling musicians, Gramm had since succumbed to a once-bitten, twice-shy attitude about the music business and wasn’t particularly interested in Jones’ initial offer. “I finally talked him into coming down [to New York City],” Jones says. “Lou was working on a construction site in Rochester. I remember they had to call him down from a ladder to talk to me.”

The two quickly found both personal and musical common ground and soon began to write together, then recorded the demos for what would become one of rock’s most successful debuts. The demos were widely rejected, initially even by Atlantic, the label that would take them in. But the company took a chance, and when the record was finally released in March 1977, it clicked immediately with radio and the public at large. Though Foreigner had, ironically, yet to play their first gig in front of an audience, the band would soon be thrust into a grueling year-long tour that might as well have been baptism by fire.

“I found that writing that first album was sort of a release for me of everything that had been growing inside me for ten years,” Jones says. “I think it reflected a lot of my experiences in France, the people I’d played with, my personal life. I remember finishing the album and sitting down one night to listen to the finished master, and I knew inside that I’d done the most important thing I’d done in my life. I was in the songs, floating around, really like a spiritual moment: This is what I’m here to do! It was my first slightly spiritual awakening. I realized a lot of things at that moment; it wasn’t necessarily me, but that this thing was coming down through me, and I was in the right place to get it and convert it into music.”

The album’s instant success also gratified Jones professionally. “I thought, My God, I deserve this! I paid my dues!” he explains. “I’d had relative success here and there and had kept my head above water and stayed out of trouble, pretty much. In a way, I’m glad it did happen when I’d had that experience a bit and had the maturity to handle it. Because the kind of success that came after was heady, to say the least.”

-Jerry McCulley

This excerpt is pulled from Jerry McCulley's essay inside the liner notes of Foreigner's DOUBLE VISION (Expanded & Remastered).