Walker), to the shimmering soulfulness of “Waiting for a Girl like You,” on which Lou Gramm’s seamless and delicately shaded vocal uncannily recalls Curtis Mayfield’s mid-Sixties heyday with the Impressions. Given Foreigner’s commitment to hard rock, it’s a happy surprise to find tracks ranging from the headlong whoosh of “Luanne,” which sounds like a lost page out of the John Fogerty songbook, to the chicken-neck strutting of “Urgent,” with its screaming sax break (courtesy of the master himself, Jr. What’s most striking about 4 -– aside from the high quality of the songs, performances and state-of-the-art production -– is its stylistic variety. Jones’ aesthetic restlessness led to a sudden and radical restructuring of the group last fall, when founding members Ian McDonald and Al Greenwood were let go, and resulted in their latest album, 4, which reveals a reinvigorated band at the peak of its very considerable powers. But I guess I realized we weren’t doing things differently enough.” We’d never done anything really cheap, you know? I thought that we had really started something … not new, totally, but we had our own niche, we were doing things differently. I felt that what we’d done was quite dignified, in a way. “The criticism really got to me at one point. “There’s no use hiding it,” he acknowledges. Exactly what, Jones wondered, was he doing wrong? He has been hurt by the lambastings ritually inflicted whenever Foreigner, to the scribes’ gawping incomprehension, has launched yet another jackpot album into the commercial stratosphere. But ever since Foreigner made its debut in 1977 –- the year of punk –- Jones has been bedeviled by hostile rock critics, who have put down Foreigner as faceless hacks and tended to dismiss the group’s music as “pomp rock,” and thus Old Wave, and therefore irrelevant. And it’s also comforting that the merest mention of the band’s name is enough to start cash registers cranking in arenas around the world. It is, of course, gratifying to Jones that Foreigner’s first three albums -– buoyed by such barstool hits as “Cold as Ice,” “Feels like the First Time,” “Hot Blooded” and “Double Vision” –- have sold nearly 16 million copies worldwide. As guitarist, coproducer and chief songwriter (often in collaboration with Gramm), Jones is centrally responsible for the group’s resounding melange of gut-pummeling riffs, high-profile melodies and moon-shot vocals, all embroidered with dittering synthesizers and intricate harmonies. Jones is Foreigner’s creative core, around which the other members –- drummer Dennis Elliott, bassist Rick Wills and singer Lou Gramm, the lone American – are fitted like a hand-stitched suit of clothes. Today, Jones looks back on such epic encounters from a pinnacle of his own –- high asquat the heavy-pop heap with Foreigner, a formidable airwaves band cast very much in his image. Lou Reed Keyboardist Michael Fonfara Dead at 74 Lennon ambled over to the kid, who was in a considerable panic. They were issuing from the direction of Vartan’s guitarist, a dark-haired teenager whose guitar strap had just snapped, sending his shiny Gibson to the floor with an ominous crack. Eventually it would, but by showtime on the second night, the Beatles may well have wished they were back in Britain.Īnd so Lennon, standing in the wings between sets, must have been happy to hear a burst of familiar curses suddenly cut through the alien babble. Opening-night reviews of the main event had been desultory, and le Beatlemania had not yet ensued. Two of the support acts -– American folk-rocker Trini Lopez, internationally hot at the time with “If I Had a Hammer,” and Sylvie Vartan, a singer equally celebrated as the wife of Johnny Halliday, the French Elvis Presley -– had attracted enthusiastic constituencies of their own. The shows were a warmup for the Beatles’ impending descent upon the United States, but they had started off badly. It was January 1964, and the Beatles, having whipped Britain into a helpless froth, were headlining a three-week residency at the Olympia Theatre in Paris.
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