Foreigner, Feels Like the First Time box set
For three minutes in the mid-1970s, Foreigner had the patina of hipness. That’s when the coldblooded video for “Cold as Ice” was broadcast as a short film on the coolest show on TV, Saturday Night Live. This two-CD, one-DVD set shows how Foreigner squandered that cachet. Instead of SNL, the live concert here will be broadcast on PBS. The obligatory “unplugged” set is pretentiously titled “Acoustique.” The other disk is, whoops, “brand new digital recordings” of Foreigner’s greatest hits, as interpreted by the band’s current line-up. Has that gambit ever worked, except as some legal runaround? For decades now, Foreigner’s featured only one founding member, Mick Jones. The rest of the current bunch were assembled to tour in 2004 or ’05: vocalist Kelly Hansen, guitarist/wind instrumentalist Thom GImbel and bassist Jeff Pilson , more recent recruit Michael Bluestein on keyboards and drummer Mark Schulman, who’s been with Foreigner on and off since 1992.
I won’t be listening to this ever. But I will note that Mick Jones did do one other cool thing since 1976—he co-wrote an award-winning Brit-rock pastiche “The Flame Still Burns,” performed by Les Wickes and Strange Fruit in the cult rock movie Still Crazy in 1998. That song is done by Foreigner for the first time on the acoustic disk.