Way back in 1976 when I was a senior in high school a band was formed with a home town boy, Louis Grammatico, better known as Lou Gramm as the lead singer. The band?
Foreigner.
That's Gramm with the curly hair. They've had lots of albums (oops, showing my age) and top ten hits. Gramm left the band and returned several times, one time due to a brain tumor.This afternoon after school I had on Ellen (never Oprah in my house) and Foreigner was on. Oh nice I thought, I haven't seen them in many years. Well I was quite surprised.
My first thought when I saw Mick Jones was "wow, these guys are getting old" . My second thought was "who are these guys? That's not Foreigner!" They sounded like Foreigner even though the lead singer is now Kelly Hansen and not Lou Gramm. He has the same sort of gravely voice. Thanks to the trusty Internet I found out that the only original member of the group is Mick Jones. It makes me wonder how they can call themselves Foreigner when all but one member of the band is new and not original. It seems like they're more of a tribute band. They sang several of their oldies but goodies from back in the day and it was obvious the goal was to sound as original as possible.
If Paul McCartney formed a band that sounded just like The Beatles it wouldn't really be The Beatles.
Maybe it's just me.
4 comments:
that makes sense to me. :)
One member does NOT a band make unless the band name is eponymous.
I agree with you. There seems to be a few old bands around with only one or two original members. I don't get it. And wow, they are looking old!
There are actually a number of bands that are suffering from this dilemma; Styx, Starship,Chicago, just to name a few. Sometimes greed is the underlying factor, sometimes the members are tired, or sometimes they are just off on their own little planet like former Starship lead singer Grace Slick.....
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