Sometime late on a recent morning, two 50ish men are holed up in rooms at a South Fort Lauderdale Holiday Inn chuckling over their debauched younger days.
Then, Lou Gramm casually throws out the fact that he hasn't touched alcohol in 11 years and no longer stumbles home at 10 a.m. after a night cruising the bars. And Mick Jones admits that he's more likely to be found at a health club than a strip club these days, since he started hitting the treadmill 45 minutes daily.
Which makes for a rather incongruous mental image.
These aren't just any 50-somethings with wild pasts we're talking about. These are Mick Jones and Lou Gramm - the two big-haired, leather-clad, rocker-dude front men from Foreigner, the group that has sold more than 50 million records since it made its debut on the rock scene in 1977 with what would become classic hits like "Feels Like the First Time" and "Cold As Ice."
This year, however, as Jones and Gramm celebrate Foreigner's 25th anniversary with a rigorous concert tour that kicked off in Florida last month and takes them to the Merriweather Post Pavilion tomorow, they're quick to point out that they have matured.
"We don't throw toilets out of hotel windows anymore," Jones, 57, said in a phone interview from his room at the Holiday Inn. "I just discovered other ways of getting high; just being in shape and really enjoying life, taking notice of what goes on in life a bit more - and waking up the next day and remembering what happened."
"I just think that we have a little more respect for our surroundings," added Gramm, 52, who co-founded the group with Jones, "and the bill that goes along with the destruction."
These are sobering updates from lead singer Gramm and guitarist Jones, who were part of the wild rock scene that dominated the world in the '70s and '80s. But the past 25 years have dealt the pair both successes, disappointments and grave experiences such as a temporary split and Gramm's brain tumor five years ago. Gramm has since undergone surgery and radiation treatment and is on the mend.
This year, they have a new greatest-hits album out, a retrospective DVD in the works, a VH1 special on the group and an album of original songs due next year. And they say they're approaching these projects and their tour with a far greater appreciation for their work than before.
"We just have a renewed kind of energy now," said Jones, who attributed the group's new outlook in large part to Gramm's illness.
"It was just a huge shock for him, obviously, and for everybody else," he added. "The main concern was whether he was going to make it or not. It made everybody sort of stop and reflect a little bit about the important things in life and how, if you don't have your health, you don't have much. It could have been a tragedy, but he's kind of turned it around into a great, happy ending."
Jones began his music career in his native England, where he wrote songs with French pop star Johnny Halliday and worked with George Harrison and Peter Frampton. As a teen, he got his first brush with stardom while playing with a French band that opened for the Beatles.
"[The Beatles] kind of took me under their wing," said Jones, who now lives in New York City's leafy Gramercy Park neighborhood. "I was this young English kid, 17 or 18. One night the curtain came down. ... It snagged my guitar and almost lifted it off my shoulders, and I screamed this swearword, and John Lennon was just behind me. He said, 'Hey, I didn't know you were English ... come drink with the lads afterwards.'
"I was such a huge fan," he added. "They took me around with them and it was like Hard Day's Night. That's exactly like they were - the running in and out of the cars, screaming girls and big limousines, the madness."
Growing up in public
In 1974, he crossed the Atlantic and assembled Foreigner two years later, after meeting Gramm.
"If anybody told me when the first album came out that we were going to be around this long, I would have said they were crazy," Jones said. "I thought we were going to make two or three albums and make a name for ourselves and take it from there. As it happened, we went straight out of the gate right away. We had busy record sales and success so we had to kind of do our growing up in public as a band."
Foreigner's self-titled debut album brought them instant fame, and the ensuing albums - 1978's Double Vision, 1979's Head Games and 4 in 1981 - only made the group bigger, with hits like "Jukebox Hero" and "Hot Blooded" becoming rock and roll staples.
In the 1980s, the group gradually shifted to power ballads like the soul-searching "I Want to Know What Love Is." But the shift also marked a split between Jones and Gramm, who eventually left to pursue a solo career. Jones found a singer to replace Gramm but Foreigner's buzz had faded by then. Then in the early 1990s, after the success of a greatest-hits album that sold 700,000 copies in Europe, Atlantic Records persuaded Jones and Gramm to team up again.
But just before the group was to embark on a concert tour in Japan in 1997, Gramm was diagnosed with the brain tumor. Gramm, who lives in Rochester, N.Y., with his 22-year-old son Nick, said the experience changed him spiritually.
"I know that it's due to my Lord's help and will that I survived that tumor and the intricacies of the operation and the aftermath," Gramm said. "I desperately want to do a Christian album that rocks hard and speaks about the things that have gone on in my life and why I'm still here today."
Second lease on life
Fred Jacobs, president of Jacobs Media, a Detroit-based consulting company that works with radio stations across the country on developing classic rock formats, said Foreigner's hits from the '70s and '80s remain on high rotation on the airwaves today for several reasons.
"At any time, there are at least half a dozen Foreigner songs that continue to test extremely well, that people never get tired of hearing," Jacobs said. "They wrote great hooks, the music was really melodic, heavy on the power chords. The lyrics weren't ever particularly breakthrough but hey, it's rock and roll. It didn't make you think. It was just a lot of fun to listen to.
Gramm said he was looking forward to the tour this summer because it marks the group's first performances since he started feeling better. This summer, he and Jones are touring with Bruce Turgon on bass, Jeff Jacobs playing keyboards, Tom Kimbel on the sax and guitar and Denny Carnassi (formerly of Heart) on drums.
During Foreigner's 1999 tour, Gramm said he was suffering bouts of memory loss that led him to tape lyrics to stage floors as reminders. He had gained about 100 pounds from the steroids doctors prescribed after his surgery. The medication also caused rosacea, a skin disorder that left his face flushed and swollen.
"I was having fun but also feeling very self-conscious," Gramm said. "Although it was covered in the press everywhere we went about how I looked and why I looked that way, I could definitely see people staring at me with that look of, 'What happened to him?' It was making me feel bad on one hand, but I was alive and able to continue my profession on the other hand."
As for the future, Gramm and Jones know from the past 25 years that it would be hard to predict what's going to happen over the next 25. For now, however, they're both intent on savoring Gramm's - and Foreigner's - second lease on life.
"Today you get people like Eric Clapton and the Stones still going out and touring, and they make us feel young," Jones said. "It's kind of cool. The band's in great shape physically, everybody's still together, and there's still a hell of a lot of energy in the band. We're going to keep on keeping on until it doesn't feel right."
Concert
What: Foreigner and Bad Company
When: 7 p.m. tomorrow
Where: Merriweather Post Pavilion
Tickets: $21, $26 and $33.50
Call: 410-481-SEAT or visit www.ticketmaster.com