Foreigner “Mr. Moonlight”
While it may bear the patina of histrionics today, in 1977, it really did appear there was nuclear war brewing for the soul of popular music. Punk versus disco. Each form revolutionary in its own way. Each with its own politics, culture and uniforms. Each the subject of magazine trend pieces and earnest, academic essays. Each portending the end of Rock and Roll as we had come to know it.
Over forty years later, I’ve come to understand that there was another significant, though less publicized, war being waged within popular music in 1977. This was the actual war for the heart of Rock and Roll. Not the idea of Rock and Roll and the excess it represented, but the very form and sound that was being played on the radio. This war had no icons. There was no Sex Pistols. There was no Bee Gees. This war was not fought in dives or discotheques. This war was fought in arenas and on the airwaves. The players were, without exception, virtuoso talents. We knew their names (kind of) but not their faces. The men who fought this war were not especially handsome like Robert Plant or Roger Daltrey nor were they pioneering or cool like Jimmy Page and Keith Richards. These men arrived before MTV and before New Wave. They did not have to rock harder or heavier than Zeppelin or Sabbath. They did not have to design the costumes and theater like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. They did not have to be sensitive and literary like James Taylor or Leonard Cohen. No. These were the next generation of Rock cyborgs, aiming for sonic perfection and radio domination. So, unlike the predecessors or successor, all they had to do was write, play and sing Rock and Roll hits. And they had to do it better than anyone else in the world.
Of the many nameless, faceless bands engaged in this more populist war, about a handful had what it took. They had names like Journey, Toto, Boston and Styx. All of these bands were capable of producing a number one hit. Some made more than one. Each band could Rock hard, but never too hard. Each could write ballads that would cross charts and ignite lighters in concert. Each had exactly one half of one handsome member and one and one half members with a mustache. These were the bands that ostensibly owned FM radio from 1976 to 1982, before Michael Jackson and MTV landed like a planet-sized asteroid. All of these bands have enjoyed long careers, full of hit singles, beloved albums, gargantuan Greatest Hits compilations and arenas full of fans the world over. But none of these bands achieved the immediate success or the sustained creative peak of Foreigner. Of the faceless gods of Arena Rock, Foreigner stood a foot above the rest.
Formed in 1976 in a petri dish that was mostly the DNA of Bad Company and Air Supply, but also had some remnant genetic material from Queen and The Who, Foreigner were an almost perfect Rock radio machine. Across their first two albums, released in 1977 and 1978, they had eight consecutive top twenty radio hits -- a feat only achieved by The Beatles. By 1981, they had twelve top forty hits. And in 1984, having crossed over from mainstream Rock to Adult Contemporary, they scored an international number one hit that stayed on the top of the charts in America for roughly two months. Though today they are experienced as almost middle of the road, time capsules, “Cold as Ice,” “Urgent,” “Jukebox Hero” and “I Want to Know What Love Is” are practically flawless tracks. Foreigner is one of the very few bands that could make a twelve song greatest hits album wherein each song is genuinely a “great” “hit” and wherein no song suffers in comparison to the others. I own exactly zero Foreigner albums and, before this week, had listened to exactly zero Foreigner albums since 1987. But any time I hear their music on the radio, I think, “Fucking A -- those guys nailed it.” At their frequent best, Foreigner could make Led Zeppelin sound bloated and Queen sound lightweight.
The songwriting team behind this almost unprecedented radio success was guitarist, Mick Jones, and lead singer, Lou Gramm. Of the duo, Jones was the master craftsman who wanted to tinker with the form and break new ground. Gramm was the divine talent, gifted with a voice that had the range and power of Paul Rodgers but with more clarity and subtlety. Gramm wanted to make hard charging, hooky guitar songs that would open up at the bridge and chorus and just let him cook. The tension between the two -- the guitarist who wanted to make songs for radio and the singer who wanted to make songs for arenas -- worked extraordinarily well. Until it didn’t.
By 1984, though they’d only been a band for eight years and though they had just achieved their greatest success as songwriters, the two men were renowned frenemies. By 1987, the year of their final top twenty hit, they were nemeses. By the end of the decade, they were both substance abusers and fairly public combatants. Both men had made solo albums in recent years. And both seemed traumatized in some way by their early success and the pressure and expectations it created. Though both men were still on the under side of fifty and theoretically relevant in an era known for the heavy power ballad, Jones and Gramm could no longer collaborate. Already a viable, if middling, solo artist, Lou Gramm left Foreigner in 1990.
Between 1990 and 1992, Gramm released an album with his short lived side project, Shadow King, while Foreigner put out the commercially and critically maligned “Unusual Heat,” with lead singer Johnny Edwards. In 1992, Gramm, who had gotten sober and become a born again Christian, met with Jones at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles, hoping to patch things up. The two men remained sequestered in the hotel while the LA riots engulfed the city. When they eventually left their very safe and cozy confines, Lou Gramm had rejoined Foreigner. While both men and a nation of Foreigner fans were thrilled, at the dawn of Alternative Rock and mainstream Rap, it was fair to wonder if the band’s moment had passed for good.
It would be over two years from that moment of reconciliation before Foreigner would release their next album. That record, “Mr. Moonlight,” was made with the purported usual jockeying and stress that had come to define Jones and Gramm’s relationship. That tension, once Promethean, however, was now something else. Without a clear single and with rapidly changing popular tastes and radio formats, Foreigner’s label, Arista Records, opted to release the album first in Europe in late 1994 and then, finally, in the U.S. in early 1995. The label’s concern proved either well founded or causal in some way. “Mr. Moonlight” debuted outside of the top one hundred on the album chart and would barely sniff the Pop radio charts.
Widely considered the worst of the Foreigner albums that feature Lou Gramm, “Mr. Moonlight” proves to be more interesting upon return. Competing with a tectonic shift in culture that would produce a year end sales chart that featured Ace of Base, Pearl Jam, Counting Crows, Nirvana and Snoop Doggy Dogg, Foreigner appeared decidedly uncool if not totally irrelevant. It makes a great deal of sense that “Mr. Moonlight” was dismissed by consumers. In breaking no new ground and retreading their least interesting, but familiar terrain, it also makes sense that critics ravaged the album. But, listening to it in 2020, unencumbered by Foreigner’s past or the moment of “Mr. Moonlight’s” release, there is more than a little to appreciate.
“Mr. Moonlight” is restless. Given the band’s age and longstanding recent successes on Adult Contemporary radio, it would have made a lot of sense for the album to be paced slowly, loaded with Lou Gramm’s hoarse whisper in the verses and his big tenor in the choruses. On the album’s nominal hit, “Until the End of Time,” they do just that. They reference the trope of “I Want to Know What Love Is” -- the mid-tempo, the drama and the atmosphere -- but do so without the soaring chorus, the gospel choir or the melody that their biggest hit boasted. Roughly a third of “Mr. Moonlight” is weighed down with paceless plodders, cheap sentiment and lyrics that could quite literally be mistaken for a Ron Burgundy line read. On “Running the Risk,” Gramm has the gall to sing: “I'm lost drowning in a sea of emotion.” More times that is defensible, the singer conjures the image of a middle-aged man, staring at himself in the mirror and splashing water on his face.
Another third of the album is caught in the middle of Gramm and Jones’ tug of war, swinging from lab-made guitar hook to showman vocal to cumbaya sing-along to showy piano interludes. You can hear the debates and compromises being made between the two songwriters in these tracks that never commit to their form or idea. “White Lie” loses the fight between admirable Power Pop and tepid Don Henley Think Piece. “Big Dog” features a sharp, vintage Foreigner hook and some icy synth and saxophone. Mick Jones undeniably found to be proud of, only to then have Lou Gramm growl his way through a half-assed litany of dog jokes, though it’s not clear if they are intended to be jokes or sexual innuendo or threats. The song has the feel of Gramm’s sadism, utterly refusing to sing on a genuinely great track, in fear of letting his competitor win one. Elsewhere, on “Hole in my Soul,” (actual title), the inverse is true. Gramm belts out a shitty lyric so well that you want to love the song, but Jones does absolutely nothing with the twelve string guitar behind the singer. It’s a can’t miss sound that somehow lands nowhere near any target.
Lest I sound like most of the critics from the 1990s, let me say that Foreigner sounds pretty great and prescient on “Mr. Moonlight.” “Under the Gun” is just a big, chiming rocker with power chords that call to mind both AC/DC and The Gin Blossoms. Yes, the lyrics are tired. And, yes, they are not breaking any new ground. But the guitar sounds vast and immediate and the singer sounds vital and heroic. It’s a song that would not embarrass on any vintage Foreigner album and is the one moment on “Mr. Moonlight” where Jones and Gramm sound like they are part of the same band. Yes the lyrics could be mistaken for a young man’s journal entries if he were imagining middle age. Yes, some of the album reeks of straight to video soundtrack fare. But there are several moments when Jones nails a certain muscular, rootsy, soft Rock that is much like, but better than later 90s radio staples like The Goo Goo Dolls, Matchbox 20, etc. And there are also instances, though rarely sustained, where you cannot help but marvel at one of the great vocalists and one of the great songwriting duos of the late 1970s and 1980s. In between Bad Company and Air Supply, there were fortunes of radio gold. And Jones and Gramm, even in 1995, were expert miners.
Unlike the Foreigner of the 1970s, who were angry and impassioned in their heartbreak, the 1990s version sounds sad and tired in their lovelessness. They sound like the version of Rocky who lost the “Eye of the Tiger.” Or like an inordinately talented basketball team where the captain hates the second best player and the coach is a victim of this players’ drama. In spite of all of this, however, “Mr. Moonlight” is significantly better than I feared. I don’t listen to Foreigner for the lyrics. I listen for the hooks, the vocals and the playing. And, in 1995, before the next break up and before Lou Gramm’s brain tumor and before the recovery and before the reunions, they could still pull off two of those three.