Singer Lou Gramm Reveals Mick Jones Kept Ownership Of Foreigner Hit ‘Out Of Greed’
via Farm Aid / Youtube
Foreigner former singer Lou Gramm publicly claimed that his ex-bandmate, Mick Jones, kept complete ownership of the classic hit “I Want to Know What Love Is” out of “greed.”
During an appearance on The Sessions, Gramm explained insisting that he was instrumental in the song’s creation:
“I didn’t get any credit for ‘I Want to Know What Love Is.’
“[Jones’] home was about 15 minutes from my home. So I would drive over to his house and we would work on that song. There’d be moments where it was just magic and then we’d hit our head on something creatively that we couldn’t get to the next point. And so we almost had to put the song away for a couple of weeks and come back to it again. I felt we had worked our tails off to make that song what it is.”
Gramm noted that he and Jones had a routine at the end of every album, they’d “run down a list of the songs” and decide the percentage of ownership on each track based on each musician’s contribution. He said they have been doing this process even before the 1984 album Agent Provocateur, which includes “I Want to Know What Love Is.”
He recalled:
“When it was time to decide what the percentages were, I wrote down what I thought it should be and he wrote down what he thought it should be. I think I wrote down 65-35 — 35 for me, 65 for him. And I opened the little piece of paper that [had] what he thought [the correct split] was, and he wrote down 95-5. I was so stunned and crushed that he’d think I contributed next to nothing to that song.
“I should get 25 [percent] just for the vocal performance. All I could think of was greed. It was an awesome song. We all knew it was gonna be a smash. This was his chance to step on me. And you know what I told him after 95-5? I said, ‘Five, Mick?’ I said, ‘You should just keep it all.’ And he did. He didn’t say, ‘No, Lou. Please. Let’s work it out.’ I said, ‘Five percent for me after all the work I did on the song?’ I said, ‘You should just keep it all.’ And he didn’t say anything. He just kept it all. And you know the millions and millions that that song has brought in?”
