Juke Box Hero: My Five Decades in Rock 'n' Roll

Lou Gramm rose from humble, working-class roots in Rochester, New York, to become one of rock’s most popular and distinctive voices in the 1970s and ’80s, singing and cowriting more than a dozen hits with the band Foreigner. Songs such as “Cold As Ice,” “I Want to Know What Love Is,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” “Double Vision,” “Urgent,” and “Midnight Blue” are among 20 Gramm songs that achieved Top 40 status on the Billboard charts and became rock classics still played often, nearly three decades after they first hit the airwaves and the record store shelves. Juke Box Hero: The My Five Decades in Rock 'n' Roll chronicles, with remarkable candor, the ups and downs of this popular rocker’s amazing life—a life which saw him achieve worldwide fame and fortune, then succumb to its trappings before summoning the courage and faith to overcome his drug addiction and a life-threatening brain tumor. Gramm takes the reader behind the scenes—into the recording studio, back stage, on the bus trips and beyond—to give an insider’s look into the life of the man Rolling Stone magazine referred to as “the Pavarotti of rock.”

Lou Gramm was the lead singer and songwriter for the band Foreigner during the height of the band’s success in the 1970s and 1980s. He wrote or cowrote 20 songs that achieved Top 40 status. He lives in Webster, New York. Scott Pitoniak is an award-winning journalist and the author of 14 books, including Color Him Orange: The Jim Boeheim Story. He lives in Rochester, New York.