Lou Gramm Was Also Unhappy With Foreigner’s Treatment At Rock Hall Induction

Foreigner were welcomed into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame this year, but the band didn’t feel very welcomed. Drummer Dennis Elliott skipped the induction ceremony — reportedly because his wife was not invited to walk the red carpet, though lead singer Lou Gramm offered a different explanation for Elliott’s absence. (Read on!) Mick Jones also missed the event, but that was due to his battle with Parkinson’s disease. Now comes word that lead singer Lou Gramm was also displeased with the ordeal.

Gramm’s previous relations with the Rock Hall have not exactly been warm. Last summer he blamed Foreigner’s decades of snubs on “a personal vendetta between the gentleman who owns Rolling Stone and Mick.” That gentleman, Jann Wenner, was removed from the Rock Hall’s board weeks later after offering up racist, sexist comments to an interviewer while promoting his book, and voila, Foreigner got in, so maybe Gramm was on to something there, though the vote to get them in may have also been related to a slew of rock-star testimonials compiled by super-producer Mark Ronson, Jones’ stepson.

Gramm, alongside bandmates Al Greenwood and Rick Wills, did show up to Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse last month to be inducted and take the stage with guests including Kelly Clarkson, Demi Lovato, Sammy Hagar, Slash, and Chad Smith. But as Gramm told Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation, he was not happy with his limited time on the mic at the event, and he was extremely upset that the original Foreigner members were not invited to play instruments at the show. Lovato sang “Feels Like The First Time” and Hagar did “Hot Blooded,” leaving Gramm to only sing “I Want To Know What Love Is.” He told Trunk that he should have been able to rock out a little bit at his own Rock Hall induction:

It was mentioned to me that it was time restraints. I don’t think anybody else sang “Jukebox Hero,” but I know they did “Hot Blooded” and “Feels Like The First Time.” So I thought an edited version of “I Want To Know What Love Is” into an edited version of “Jukebox Hero” would have been OK! But he didn’t explain to me, he just said, “No, it’s not going to work.”

He elaborated, “The thing for me is, I am first and foremost a rock singer, and somehow I couldn’t sing a rock song at the Rock Hall Of Fame when I’m being inducted? It doesn’t make any sense to me, and it sticks in my craw.” As for Elliott’s absence:

The reason Dennis didn’t come was because he found out from management, a number of days before Rick and Al and I found out, that we weren’t going to play. As soon as Dennis found out that we weren’t performing on our night, he decided he wasn’t going to come… We found out the afternoon of the show that we weren’t performing. We thought we were going to be performing and Dennis was going to be there and we’d have the guitar player from the new Foreigner play Mick’s parts and play a couple songs. And then we found out at the last minute that it was the new Foreigner who would be playing, and Rick and Al would be standing there singing background vocals.

When Trunk asked whether Gramm would have skipped too if he’d known earlier about the run of show, he said he wasn’t sure. “When I found out that’s why he didn’t come, I even got more anger, but not at him,” Gramm said. “It’s almost like there was a fast one being played.”

Hear Gramm explain all this in an audio excerpt below, where you can also see clips of Clarkson and Lovato’s appearances with Fauxreigner.