Foreigner is no stranger to modern audiences even though they crossed their first rock 'n' roll borders four decades ago.
The crew assembled by guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones has cranked out an artillery barrage of hit songs and built a rock empire that has sustained itself for 40 years around the world.
Some of their apex tunes are Juke Box Hero, Urgent, Cold As Ice, Feels Like The First Time, Hot Blooded, and the epic rock ballad I Want To Know What Love Is, but many more besides. It has been a Hall Of Fame hit-list.
Foreigner brings their mission of rock 'n' roll diplomacy for a state visit to Prince George on Oct. 20. The British-American band has fondly visited Canada scores of times over the years, and an experimental mini-tour of Alberta got the band's credit for launching a whole different side career for them, playing full concerts of acoustic versions of their stellar stuff.
Multi-instrumentalist and backup vocalist Thom Gimbel built up a rich resume in the music industry before he got recruited by Jones to be a regular member of today's Foreigner lineup, and part of his prior success is rooted in Canada, and British Columbia specifically. It began with a call he received from Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry asking him to audition over the phone for a touring band member. Aerosmith had just wrapped the stratospheric success of their Permanent Vacation album and were just getting into their almost as massive Pump project. Gimbel's phone audition went well enough that Perry invited him to come to the recording studio for the next round of auditions. Gimbel was on the next available flight to Vancouver.
"They recorded a lot of stuff in Canada, some of their best albums, with (famed Canadian rock producer) Bruce Fairbairn," said Gimbel, who was aware of all this as he arrived at Little Mountain Sound that day. Even that building had an intimidating reputation for success.
He expected he was likely going to be asked to sing, play piano, perhaps guitar, percussion, and any number of the horns and woodwind instruments he knew how to play, honed by his years at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
"Bruce was there, and (superstar songwriter from Vanderhoof) Jim Vallance was around, but Bruce was always so nice to me because he was a trumpet guy - the brotherhood of horn players," said Gimbel, grinning through the memory of it like it happened yesterday.
Gimbel said he was expecting to stand alone on a stage in front of a panel of music executives, in a lineup of other musicians waiting their turn to give a solo flourish until the panel called "next."
"I get there and it's Steven Tyler behind the drum set. That's it. And me with my saxophone. Why I was with a saxophone, I had no idea. Steven says 'let's jam' and starts playing a drum beat, and singing 'swatz-doobity-bobbity-waaa' and I would answer with my sax 'womp-woobity-doobity-wowww' and we would just do that back and forth until he got tired of that little game. Then we'd go over to the piano and sing together a little bit. It was just marvelous. The strange part was when Joe Perry came in with his guitar. There was no 'rest of the band,' no management people, no clipboards, no nothing. Just me and those two guys in one of those little rooms off to the side at Little Mountain Studio. So Joe is playing and Steven is playing and I said 'you know, those two instruments are out of tune with each other' and Steven says 'yeah I know, but it's kinda coooool. Just let it ride.' And then Joe says "hey, you know any Chuck Berry?' and I'd gotten that tip about Joe so yeah, I'd been playing nothing but Chuck Berry for the past three weeks. So that's how I got the job."
A six-year stint with Aerosmith led him to eventually get the call to be a permanent member of Foreigner. He's been with Jones and company on a full-time basis since 1995.
One of the highlights of any Foreigner concert is the song Urgent. It contains a saxophone solo originally laid down in the studio by a Motown legend, the late Junior Walker. Gimbel gets to build off the Walker riff and wail to his heart's content in a hot white spotlight.
Gimbel has a lot of visceral fun with that moment every night but he also considers it an honour to represent brass players in the rock world. In those moments, he's an ambassador of sax.
"It's there, man, I'm telling you, it's there (in many rock songs)," Gimbel said. "It's in Bob Seger music, it's in Springsteen music, it's in Pink Floyd music, the Stones have saxophone. It hangs around. James Brown! That's the roots of it, in soul, but in the modern context you'll find it in Dave Matthews music - tremendous sax in his music. Amy Winehouse used the baritone sax. It's going through a hipster popularity phase. You have to have a beard and an IPA in one hand with a baritone sax in the other to be a bona fide hipster."
He's gotten to be a global emissary of horns, through his associations with Aerosmith and Foreigner. Hundreds of thousands of people come out to the festivals in Europe where Foreigner routinely tours. But the biggest crowd of all was with Aerosmith in 1994 when they headlined the Saturday night of Woodstock 2 with more than half a million people in the audience.
"When they'd just politely applaud between songs it sounded like a jet engine taking off," said Gimbel. "Then when they'd roar, it was like a space rocket."
One pleasantly fateful day not that long ago, at a festival in Europe, Aerosmith and Foreigner ended up on the same concert bill. It brought Gimbel to a strange point of full circle.
"I went backstage to talk to the guys. Steven Tyler just couldn't have been nicer. Joe Perry, I got to talk to him, also, and I said isn't it kinda strange that we end up on the same stage after all these years, and he said in some ways it was inevitable, because there aren't that many rock bands from the '70s still touring. Joe has a lot of insight. He really sees things clearly."
Mick Jones is another who has had the vision to thrive and survive the fickle winds of rock music and popular culture. In addition to his renowned career as a songwriter and Foreigner bandleader, Jones also has one of the most heralded studio ears in the production business. Among many other credits as a producer, Jones was called in to shape the cool, smooth soul sound of Ben E. King's Save The Last Dance For Me material, but then also the power pop of Billy Joel on his seminal Storm Front album, then the bluesy metal of Van Halen's crushing 5150 album.
Jones is the only original member of Foreigner still on the stage, these days. His most notable cohort in the band over the years, powerful vocalist Lou Gramm, had to bow out due to health issues many years ago. Jones, with the help of Gimbel and other bandmates, found a high-energy replacement in Kelly Hansen who was once the frontman for the band Hurricane and later a band called Needle Park with Poison's guitar player C.C. DeVille. Despite the drug-soaked inference of that band name, said Gimbel, Hansen is actually a fit and healthy guy who takes the physicality of lead vocalist very seriously.
"Kelly is a riot. He's out of his mind," said Gimbel. "He climbed on me once. He climbs on scaffolds. He runs around, he's kissing girls, he'll steal people's cell phones if they're texting or something and tells them 'hey, you'll get this back at the end of the show' like the teacher in class. But he's just kidding, he usually gives it right back. He's so unpredictable. If it's super hot I've seen him lay down on stage and take a nap for 18 seconds to get his wind back. He's just so much fun."
Best of all, he comes Gramm-approved.
"Those guys get along no problem," Gimbel said of Jones, Gramm and the ex-members. "We're not sure what the future will bring. I know Mick has invited all the past members from over the years to come down and play for this 40th anniversary celebration. (When they do) I see a lift in Mick Jones. He stands a little taller, has a little more fun, and they get telling these great stories. The stories are some of the best part, the best benefit (for the current Foreigner guys) of when those guys get together. We're the beneficiaries. We get to hear them."
The crowds still come out in droves to hear those radio classics, the tunes that helped define the pop-rock genre. In Prince George, Foreigner is set to perform at CN Centre with special guests Honeymoon Suite on Friday night.
