Foreigner coming to P.G. Friday
The Citizen talks to band-member Thom Gimbel about his experience with the group
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 ‘wompwoobity-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!”