‘Juke Box Hero’ muses on career

By day, Lou Gramm’s father reported to work at 7 a.m. at a Rochester, N.Y., steel plant, so he could cut metal sheets to size for desks and filing cabinets. By night, he played trumpet in a jazz orchestra, returning home regularly at 2:30 or 3 a.m. In the mid-’50s, 5-year-old Lou often overheard his parents talking about the punishing schedule.

“My mom was telling him in no uncertain terms that he can’t keep doing that. … Guys on the job before him, if they (weren’t) on the ball, could lose a finger or a hand,” recalls Gramm, 66, who grew up to become a famous musician himself, as lead singer of the hit rock band Foreigner. “So my mom told my dad: ‘If you want to stay safe, and be a whole father for your kids, and a husband to me, put the trumpet away.’ ”

Lou’s father, Ben, complied. Although Lou’s mother, Nikki, had been a singer and performed in her husband’s big bands, she had a point. “I don’t think my mom was being unreasonable,” Gramm said from his Rochester home. “The places he was playing, I’m sure there were loose women around — I’m sure that had something to do with it.”

It was Lou Gramm, of course, who got to live out the family’s musical dreams. In 1976, he showed up to a New York City audition run by experienced musicians, including British guitarist Mick Jones. By this point, Gramm, who’d spent much of his childhood playing drums, had switched to singing. In the studio, Jones sang Gramm the melodies for three songs (including “Feels Like the First Time”) and sent him to the microphone. Instead of jamming along, the band was in the control room, listening intently.

“It was pretty intense,” Gramm recalls. “For each song, they pushed me way past the point of an audition. I was thinking, ‘Why are they so damn picky?’ ”

It turned out Gramm’s performance was exactly what the band wanted. Soon they sent Gramm’s three audition recordings to record companies, and by 1977, Foreigner was putting out its self-titled debut, which included “Cold As Ice” and went multiplatinum.

Jones and Gramm became a formidable songwriting team, making melodramatic hits that sounded perfect on late ’70s/early ’80s radio in Gramm’s high pop-and-soul pitch: “Hot Blooded,” “Urgent,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and, above all, “Juke Box Hero.” Like REO Speedwagon and Def Leppard, the band played smoothed-out hard rock, with one killer ballad per album, and set the table for Bon Jovi and other hair-metal pop bands.

After the band’s debut came out, Gramm couldn’t afford to live in New York, so he rented a small apartment upstate. One day, he was driving to rehearsal with drummer Dennis Elliott, listening to rock station WNEW, when they crossed a bridge and heard “Feels Like the First Time.” “We were jumping up and down in the car,” Gramm said. “We had to pull over before we killed ourselves. That was the first time I heard us on the radio.”

Foreigner had huge hits through the mid-’80s, peaking with the album “4,” but over time, Jones and Gramm drifted apart, with the guitarist producing albums by Bad Company, Van Halen and others and the singer putting out “Ready or Not.” (The big hit from his solo debut was “Midnight Blue,” but Gramm more excitedly recalls the brass section on “She’s Got to Know” — including his brother, Ben, and his father, reunited with his trumpet at last.)

Gramm and Jones clashed over instrumentation and the number of ballads per album. “It was much more give and take on the earlier albums,” Gramm said. “I said, ‘I don’t know if you can see it, Mick, but there’s a lot less people at our shows, and we’ve lost our identity. You’ve got people swooning and rocking back and forth to these ballads, but you don’t see these rock guys shaking their fists anymore. They’re gone.’ ”

Gramm went on the road after “Ready or Not,” and Jones called him toward the beginning to demand he cancel the tour to work with Foreigner. Gramm refused. “He went through the roof,” he says. “Next thing I knew, he’s got another singer.”

Gramm and Jones have reunited periodically in Foreigner, even after Gramm learned in 1997 that he had what he called an “egg-sized tumor with tentaclelike appendages” in his frontal lobe. He received a “death sentence,” as he writes in his memoir “Juke Box Hero,” even though the tumor was benign. He recovered, but it took years to retrain himself as a singer. Gramm, a born-again Christian, has released sporadic solo albums in recent years, including 2009’s “The Lou Gramm Band.” He’s planning to play a few Foreigner shows this summer but has given contradictory statements about his enthusiasm.

“I’ve been doing this for 45 years, and I just feel like a baseball or football player. I just got the feeling I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do, and I’m at a point where it’s never going to happen again. It’s been a lot of fun, but I feel like I’m slogging it out now,” he says. “It’s just about time. And I’m going to go with that.”