Lou Gramm, second from left, with Black Sheep bandmates, from left, Mike Bonafede, Don Mancuso and Larry Crozier. Black Sheep will be performing two reunion concerts at the Pratt Event Center on Main Street in Albion this afternoon and tonight. (Photo courtesy of DJ Button)
By Mike Pettinella
For Video News Service
Rochester native Lou Gramm, the original lead singer of legendary rock band Foreigner, is back in Western New York today to sing with his bandmates from the early and mid-1970s – Black Sheep – at the Pratt Events Center in Albion. Shows are at 2 p.m. (sold out) and 6 p.m.
On Thursday, he sat down with freelance writer Mike Pettinella at the theater in Albion for nearly an hour, talking about his time with Black Sheep (see Saturday’s Batavia Daily News) and sharing intimate details of his life during his time with Foreigner (below).
Foreigner – Gramm, founder Mick Jones, Dennis Elliott, Ed Gagliardi, Al Greenwood, Ian McDonald and Rick Wills — will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Oct. 19 in Cleveland.
Lou Gramm autographing a poster about today’s shows, which also feature the Pratt Pit Band and Choir. (Photo courtesy of DJ Button)
Q. When you think back to Black Sheep breaking up (in 1976), did you ever imagine that you, Lou Grammatico, would become Lou Gramm, lead singer and superstar with Foreigner?
A. (Following an accident that destroyed all Black Sheep’s equipment and, ultimately, ended the group) we all had part-time jobs in Rochester. We said we would meet once a week and see if there was anything we could do to stay together. We had no (record) contract and no tour anymore. We’re just a bunch of guys with no equipment. We had enough money saved from our part-time jobs maybe to get some little Fender crimson amps and a set of drums and stuff like that. We’re going to start playing clubs again – which we hated doing.
And then we used to meet at our bass player’s house; he lived out in … Scottsville, I think. So, my dad called his dad and said, ‘Could you tell Lou there’s somebody who called me named Mick Jones and he wants Lou to call him back?’ Let me preface this by saying that Mick was playing in a band called Spooky Tooth from England for a while.
Black Sheep’s manager at the time was an A&M Records representative and Spooky Tooth was on A&M Records. So, when they came to Rochester and played at the Auditorium Theatre, our manager got all of our band together to see Spooky Tooth, because we were fans. And they sounded great. We went back stage to meet them and I took the two Black Sheep albums with me, met all the guys and gave the two albums to Mick. I said this is what we’re all about and I hope you like it.
And sure enough, several months later – when the accident happened – he called me. I called him back and he said he wasn’t with Spooky Tooth anymore … he had a new manager in Manhattan and he was putting his own band together. He said he had most of the players. Mick said, ‘I heard your voice on the Black Sheep albums; the albums are pretty good and you’ve got a great voice. Would you come to New York and audition for the band?’ I said that’s a real tempting offer and I appreciate it, but I’ve got a band and we hit a really bad stretch of luck. And I don’t know if we’re going to make it but I’ve got to see it through. I can’t just walk. He said that he understood and would call me back in about a month.
Q. So, you were loyal to your guys?
A. At our next (Black Sheep) meeting I told them who had called and that he wanted me to audition. And they said, ‘What did you say?’ I said, ‘What do you think I said? I told him that I was in a band already and that our band had a lot of promise, and I believed in what we were doing.’ The guys said, ‘Lou, that’s nice, but you’re crazy. We’re done. Can’t you see that?’
Q. Your bandmates encouraged you to take a chance. What happened next?
A. So, their manager sent me a ticket and I went to New York. They had about three or four songs; they had the music recorded and they had a couple tracks left open for me to sing the vocals. And I did. And I sang them again. And then Mick says, ‘Why don’t you come over for supper at my apartment?’ So, I had supper with him and his wife and we went to his little music cubby room where he had a small amp, microphone and speaker and an electric keyboard. We started working on Long, Long Way from Home (released in 1977 on Foreigner’s first album).
I stayed there for two weeks, and I had only two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two T-shirts and two pairs of pants. After my second week there, when I would go back to where I was staying, I would rinse all the underwear out, wash it, soap it, rinse it out and hang it over the shower curtains to dry. And I said, ‘Mick, I really enjoy writing with you.’ We were practicing during the day at the manager’s penthouse suite where there were offices all around the outside and the inner part of it was a rehearsal studio.
Q. You used to practice at Mike Bonafede’s farm in Albion with Black Sheep, right?
A. Yeah and from my garage in Gates, too. So, at any rate, I said to Mick that I really had a lot of fun, ‘but you haven’t told me if I’m in or not? You just haven’t said anything. I have no more clothes, so I suppose I’m going to fly home. Think about what we have done and let me know if I’m in.’ The next day, we went to the manager’s office and all the guys gathered around me, slapped me on the back and said you’re in – you’re our singer now.
Q. Who else did they try out?
A. I don’t know. I knew there were other singers that had an amount of popularity. Mick never, in all the years I’ve known him, would tell me who some of the other people who auditioned were. He wouldn’t tell me.
Q. And you ended up staying with Foreigner until about 2005 and reaching around 80 million in album sales. Unreal. Growing up in Gates, did you perform in school at all? Were you in the drama club or chorus?
A. When I was in second and third grade I was in the choir and by the time the third grade had ended, I started playing snare drum. A couple years later, I ended up being in the elementary school orchestra. I stopped choir, although I kept singing. I went into Gates-Chili High School and was in the marching band. I had one of those big chrome field drums with the strap around it and a knee brace. I was about 5-foot-3 then, maybe around 130 pounds. My biggest height was 5-7 and for most of my adult life I weighed 145 pounds.
Eventually, my dad (Ben Grammatico) got me a used set of drums and I set them up in my basement and practiced. He was a big band jazz trumpeter. And when he was putting his own band together in high school – they were a good band but they needed a singer so they started auditioning singers. And my mom, Nikki (maiden name Masetta) won the audition. That’s how they met and fell in love. (Lou’s parents died in 2003).
Q. Why did you change your name to Gramm?
A. My uncle Mike was a plumber … and he had a wagon, and he called it Mike Gramm Plumbing. He shortened it for the same reason that Foreigner’s manager called me in the office before we started recording, and said, ‘Would you ever consider shortening your last name?’ I said, ‘No way, why?’ He said that it’s not there’s so many problems with people who don’t like Italians, that’s in the past, but you’re going to find whether it’s promoters or people who are interviewing you or just anybody you meet along the way, they’re going to mispronounce your name. That’s going to put you at odds with them before you even starting talking to them. He said it was just for business reasons.
He suggested changing my name to Gram – g-r-a-m. For your home banking records and checking accounts, Grammatico is fine but for this business a stage name would be good. So, I didn’t use g-r-a-m, I used g-r-a-m-m. When I told my parents, at first they didn’t understand but when I explained to them what the manager told me, they were like, he’s got a point.
Q. Tell me about your voice. Did you know at a young age that you had this special voice and did you lose your voice when you got sick with a brain tumor in 1997?
A. I didn’t lose my voice. But everything inside my head was in a state of shock. And my voice was too. I had a brain tumor the size of a large egg. My right frontal lobe had tentacles that went across my forehead and wrapped around my optic nerve. It destroyed my adrenals. I have no adrenal glands; no adrenaline in the case of an emergency or anything else. My pituitary operates at 30 percent. And I take about 45 or 50 pills each day just to have a normal life,
Q. Are you OK?
A. I feel OK. They’ve got it dialed in now to where there’s very little in my life where I’m going, ‘What’s that?’ Before, while they were playing around with different medications, trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t, I was going through a living hell.
Q. It sounds as though your life as a rock & roll superstar, sometimes, was tough?
A. Very tough. You know, when I when I joined Foreigner, they were all partiers. I had smoked a couple of joints back in Rochester, but I had no inclination what cocaine or anything else was and it didn’t bother me. I’d have a couple tokes on a joint every once in a while; I didn’t see anything wrong with it. And I wasn’t smoking all the time or anything. But when I when I joined Foreigner …
Q. Was it peer pressure?
A. It wasn’t the peer pressure. I think that I wanted to be like everybody else. It wasn’t you who was pressuring me; it was me who was pressuring me. Before you know it, we’d be in the studio working 18 hours a day and they would all catch cabs down the streets to their apartments in Manhattan. I couldn’t afford an apartment in Manhattan. I had to drive an hour and a half north to Westchester County – Katonah, beautiful town.
So, when we would come in every night to work in the studio, I’d be in there at about nine o’clock in the morning. And I wouldn’t leave until about three in the morning the next day. And half the time I was in the bag. Exhausted and high.
Q. So, did you get to a point where you hit rock bottom?
A. I hit rock bottom. I had an episode where I had to pee so bad that I pulled off to the side of the road, turned my headlights off and put my flashers on. There was nobody on the road except, out of the corner of my eye, I saw flashing lights. This was on the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York City. So, I zipped up and the officer says, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ I told him that I had to pull over to pee really bad. He put his flashlight in my eyes and asked where I was tonight, I told him that I was working and was a studio musician and working on a new album, I ended up telling him what I did and who I was and stuff.
He didn’t go in the car but he shined the light in the car. And in the back seat I had a gym satchel that was partly open and had three Heinekens in there. No hard liquor. No drugs or anything. But he could see that I wasn’t 100 percent. He looked and looked and he thought and looked at me again and says, ‘Go. Get out of here.’
Q. So, your life includes time in rehab. When did that happen?
A. In 1991, we played Madison Square Garden. Two years earlier, I had moved back to Rochester because my parents were getting old. My children didn’t know them that well. They had seen my parents and my wife’s parents, but they weren’t really close to them. They didn’t know my aunts or uncles or my cousins or anything. They lived completely removed from that stuff and my wife and I felt bad that other than us, they had no family.
So, we decided at the point where Foreigner was at, it didn’t make a difference where we lived. So, I sold my house on eight acres in Katonah and moved back to Rochester and built a house in Penfield. Everything was good.
But then when I had to record or something, I had to fly into New York, stay at a hotel for sometimes a month or more. When I played Madison Square Garden in 1991, my wife stayed in Rochester with the kids. After the show – a sensational show that brought the house down – people from the record company were there and they were slapping us on the back, telling us how wonderful we were. And we drank and we snorted and we smoked.
When I finally got back to my apartment about three in the morning, I opened the door with the key, shut the door and locked it. I took two steps toward my bed and fell face down on the floor. I slept that way for 4 ½ hours on the floor. When I got up, I wasn’t sick to my stomach – miraculously – but I felt like I had been hit with the butt of a rifle.
Q. What did you do after that?
A. When I woke up, I should have been on the plane back to Rochester an hour earlier. So, I called my attorney – I had done a lot of thinking when I first woke up — and said that I can’t go home now. My wife will know why I missed my plane and I think she’s just about had enough of me, anyways, and I’ve had enough of me. I said that I heard that Hazelden (Betty Ford in Minnesota) is a good rehab place. I asked him to book me into Hazelden that day.
So, my flight to Rochester turned into a flight to Minneapolis and the Hazelden people were waiting when I got off the plane in case I changed my mind. They weren’t waiting at the gate or in the luggage compartment. They were waiting right there. When I got off the plane, they introduced themselves, put their arms under my arms and walked me out. They took my luggage, we went to Hazelden and, I swear, it’s the best thing in my whole life that I’ve ever done for myself.
Q. So, was that the last time you used alcohol or drugs?
A. Yes, I’ve been clean and sober for 32 years. I went to AA for a while but found it extremely uncomfortable because at some point, most of them knew who I was and it wasn’t AA anymore. I was a big interview.
Q. I understand that you became a born-again Christian?
A. At rehab. I believed in God and wanted God in my life. And I finally went to a pastor who worked at the rehab and poured it all out to him, crying my eyes out and stuff. He comforted me and told me that in spite of everything that I think I’ve done that was so bad, that God loves me just as if I was an angel. He encouraged me to keep my sobriety as something first and foremost in my life for the sake of my wife, my children and my family. And my ticket to Heaven.
He was an awesome pastor. And for a while I stayed in touch with some of the guys in my unit. It was like a fraternity there. There were four units – two men’s units and two women’s. And there were some characters there. One of the guys in my unit was a Mafia hitman. He told some stories. He said he was out of that and wanted to clean himself up and whatever he had left of his life, he wanted to be normal. I heard a lot of stories from all these adult men, sitting in a circle, and we’d all be bawling our eyes out.
Q. Well, you’re 74 now and you’re still performing. What’s next for you?
A. I’m retiring at the end of this year after the tour with my current band (Lou Gramm’s All-Stars) ends. I’ve been in this business for 52 years
Q. Success can be defined in different ways. You’ve made a lot of money, but I think you’d agree, there’s a lot more to it than that?
A. Yes there is. I sacrificed my older kids relationship with them in their youth because I was never home. In those early years of Foreigner, we used to be out on tour over a year, and every three months we’d be home for two or three days. And then back out again.
Q. Do you have a relationship with your kids now?
A. Yes, I do. My eldest son is 42, my second oldest son is 40 and I have 25-year-old twins – a son and daughter – and a 6-year-old daughter, Lucci.
Proud to hear you’re a Christian and all is good with your family and health. Stay strong and much love to you and yours💖Joe on crew’s Momma.