Tailor-made for the airwaves, “Dirty White Boy” and “Head Games” kept Foreigner at the top of the arena rock heap as the decade came to a close and the supergroup’s successes would continue well into the ‘80s.You could easily populate this list with numerous Beatles album covers, and one of the most iconic is the gloriously overstuffed pop art moment that was "Sgt. By the time Head Games was released, FM radio had fully embraced bands like Foreigner, Journey, and Boston, whose slick hard rock was tough enough to appeal to suburban teens, but smooth enough to be non-threatening to their parents. A couple of years later, Lisanne actually embarked on a successful acting career, most notably co-starring as Heather McNamara in the 1989 high-school-set black comedy classic ‘Heathers’.įoreigner continued its platinum winning streak on Head Games, the band’s third album. Still, it was the ’70s, so the Head Games brouhaha barely cut through the anything-goes culture of the moment. Also like Brooke Shields, when Head Games came out, Lisanne was all of three years shy of even meeting the age laid out in the album’s FM-Radio hit, “Seventeen”! So yeah, putting a 14 year old in a highly sexually charged and possibly threatening image was questionable at best. The photo created enough controversy on its own, but it swelled into a minor cause celebre when the girl was revealed to be Lisanne Frank, a Ford Agency model who had come up alongside Brooke Shields. Many people never even saw the connection of her trying to remove the writing - it could (and was) taken as a girl trapped in the bathroom, possibly the victim of an assault. The album’s biggest claim to fame (or infamy) though, was the album cover - it boasted one of the most instantly scandalous and unforgettable images in the history of rock LPs, depicting what appears to be a panicked, scantily attired young girl getting caught in a men’s room as she frantically attempts to scrub her graffiti-scrawled name off a stall wall with toilet paper. By now, Head Games has gained a 5x Multi-Platinum status for selling at least 5 million copies in the United States, cementing Foreigner as one of the world’s best selling bands of all time. Still, ‘Head Games’ was a big hit for the band, climbing to number 5 on the Billboard 200 chart and receiving a Platinum certification four months after it hit the stores. With many of the other cuts though, you can already hear the shift to the softer ‘pop’ sound that the band would turn to with their following ‘Foreigner 4′ and onward. This album was their third studio release, and continued Foreigner’s string of hits and popularity, with the aid of co-producer Roy Thomas Baker, best known for working on Queen’s classic albums - although it marked their final album of their original ‘hard rocking’ sound, with blood-pumpers like ‘Head Games’, ‘Dirty White Boy’, ‘Women’ etc.
Foreigner was formed in 1976 by veteran English musician Mick Jones and fellow Briton and ex-King Crimson member Ian McDonald, along with American vocalist Lou Gramm, and they instantly became one of the top AOR (Album Oriented Rock) groups of the 70s, with monster radio hits and concert tours. The Vinyl of the Day is ‘Head Games’ by Foreigner, 1979.
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