Recently I was researching something on the Rolling Stone DVD-ROM set (which I highly recommend: you can get it for just $11 used, and the one I received came with a free voucher for a year’s worth of RS that they recognized as valid), and I came across a headline that was too juicy to pass up.
It comes from the October 2, 1980, issue, and the byline (not visible) is Kurt Loder. Frankly, I think ol’ Kurt knew he was onto something good when he submitted this article. Here it is:
The thrust of the story is that Foreigner was just coming off a massively successful album, 1979’s Head Games, and was promising fans that their next album would be something special indeed. (To be fair, they lived up to that promise: 4, which was released in July 1981, is one of their best albums and was #1 for 10 weeks in the U.S.)
Just for fun, and I know this is totally 20/20 hindsight (I was 10 years old in 1980, and it’s safe to say I didn’t know about any of these releases), here’s a little list of albums that came out between January 1 and September 30, 1980:
AC/DC, Back In Black
Alice Cooper, Flush The Fashion
Bob Dylan, Saved
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Doc at the Radar Station
Cars, Panorama
Chic, Real People
Cure, Seventeen Seconds
David Bowie, Scary Monsters
Electric Light Orchestra, Xanadu
Elvis Costello, Get Happy!!
English Beat, I Just Can’t Stop It
Feelies, Crazy Rhythms
Joy Division, Closer
Lou Reed, Growing Up In Public
Paul McCartney, McCartney II
Pete Townshend, Empty Glass
Peter Gabriel, s/t (“Melt”)
Queen, The Game
Ramones, End Of The Century
Rolling Stones, Emotional Rescue
Roxy Music, Flesh + Blood
The Angry Samoans, Inside My Brain
The B-52’s, Wild Planet
The Psychedelic Furs, s/t
The Selecter, Too Much Pressure
Tom Waits, Heartattack And Vine
Undertones, Hypnotised
X, Los Angeles
Sure, not all of these albums are good—Saved is atrocious—and it’s hardly fair to point to Pete Townshend or Paul McCartney and insist on the vitality of the music scene. But on the other hand, there are also vital acts of the moment, like the Clash and Gang of Four and The Jam, who happened not to have a major release fall within my dates and are thus not even listed here.
A musician friend of mine suspects that Mick Jones wasn’t being an idiot when he said this; he knew perfectly well what Foreigner’s place in the musical ecosystem was—what else was he gonna say, confronted with Kurt Loder’s grubby mitts clutching a pen and paper? Foreigner may not have been exciting, but they did serve their fans honorably.
I’m going to go out on a limb and prolcaim this the first time that Foreigner’s ever been embedded in a DM page. Anyway, here they are, absolutely killing “Urgent” in Germany, 1982: