Prologue

But Satisfaction Brought Him Back

Cat Stevens had suffered from writer’s block before, but early in the New Year of 1973, he acknowledged that, finally, he had reached a stopping point. He was still writing songs; that faucet had never stopped dripping. But they were the same songs he’d always been writing, and he was sick of singing songs like that. He’d already made the decision to drop all his older numbers from his live show, but what was the sense in that if the new ones he was penning slipped seamlessly into their place?

He wanted to make a new album; his public demanded it, his record label suggested it, and his own work ethic insisted upon it. But it had to be something new, something different. He had now made six Cat Stevens albums. It was time to make a different one.

Three decades later, he looked back on that dilemma and laughed. “I realized it was all going terribly wrong, or a little bit out of control. So I did another whole ‘let’s do something different’ thing. And I went to Jamaica and made Foreigner.”

Foreigner is the album that banged the last nail into a musical coffin whose contents had been awaiting burial for a couple of years, but which—with the same tenacity that always attends the music industry’s refusal to acknowledge the passing of its greatest cash cows—had been clinging to life regardless.

The cult of the singer-songwriter was a short-lived one but a powerful one as well. It was born of the folk scenes that devoured early-1960s America and late-1960s Britain, but eschewed the most common methodology of both (Arran sweaters, bushy beards, fingers in the ear, and a nearly nasal twang notwithstanding) in favor of a contemporary beat, a cosmopolitan sheen, and a lyrical thesaurus that was predicated almost exclusively around the word I. Or me.

“I’ve Got a Thing About Seeing My Grandson Grow Old.”

“Let Me Ride.”

“I Thought I Was a Child.”

“I Want to Live in a Wigwam.”

“Hey Mister, That’s Me.…”

“Places in My Past.”

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.…”

These were not rock ’n’ roll songs, although they would be filed in the “rock” section in the record store. But neither were they a part of any of the other musical genres that the music press of the day tried to file things into. They weren’t pop, they weren’t vaudeville, they weren’t even (although they didn’t always admit it) middle-of-the-road. They weren’t country and they weren’t folk. They were just there, a handful at first that drifted past your ears, a little laconic, a little bit sad, a touch of melancholy and a slice of psychiatry.

And the people who wrote the songs, well, they were a little laconic, a little bit sad, and a touch melancholic as well, and a few of them had been treated by psychiatrists too—which, said their supporters, was what gave them the right to psychoanalyze the rest of us; to question the standards by which we passed our lives and suggest alternate ways of living and giving.

None of which sounds like something—or anything—that could ever have set the world afire. But then you look at the charts for the first years of the seventies, and you realize that the world wasn’t simply burning, it was consumed by an uncontrollable conflagration, a wildfire that swept in from so many different directions that even the firemen turned out to be arsonists, and the only thing that could stop the flames was the flames themselves.

By 1973, a lot of the fury had already been damped down, and the majority of the most egregious singer-songwriters had either faded away or not really flickered into life in the first place. There was the handful of names that everybody knew, who were the true kings of the musical heap, and they were still making records that sold. But beyond them there were dozens who never took off, or who scored a minor hit or two and then drifted away to a new life in plumbing or highway maintenance.

And then there was Cat Stevens, who had been in on the boom long before it was heard, and had been trying to claw his way out of it ever since. Six albums into a lifetime of almost painfully thoughtful lyricism, four albums into a career as the college campus bard whom everyone sang along with, Stevens was tired of his music, tired of his reputation, and tired especially of still being lumped in with the same sordid band of sad-sack sorry balladeers.

So it was time to do something about it. Something so raw, so radical, and, by his standards, so brutal that even if he’d recanted the next day and returned once more to his old benign self, the shock waves would still be reverberating.

It was during the U.S. leg of his 1972 world tour that he told Stereo Review magazine, “My next LP…is very different from the others. Some people will like it, and other people will not. I’ve got this sound people associate with me, and yet I want to move and change. What I want them to see in all my work is clarity. I can’t stand music that’s unclear.” Or, as he told Circus magazine once the album was complete, “I don’t want to go on playing predictable me. I’ve got to introduce an element of shock.”

No specific incident stuck in his mind, no Rubicon was crossed as he crisscrossed the continent. Rather, he was haunted by the sheer grind of the outing, the repetition, and the nightly need to play exactly the same show to what increasingly felt like exactly the same people. “I wasn’t really enjoying going onstage every night. I got very paranoid and started to think I was drying up. I said, ‘What’s wrong with me? This wasn’t the reason I started.’”

There certainly was an element of predictability in his life. In early 1973, Music Scene’s Rosemary Horidee described Stevens as “now rank[ing] with James Taylor, Neil Diamond, and Neil Young as one of the world’s greatest singer-songwriters.” But Star caught a very different artist at work.

“I want the next album to really be something very special. I’ve got lots of songs at home which could be used for another album with a similar formula to [my last], Catch Bull at Four. But that wouldn’t give me any real satisfaction. I want the next one to stand up on its own.… I want my next LP to be a real progression. This is my chance.”

What he wanted, he determined, would be all new, all different. All alien, all foreign. So foreign that Stevens knew precisely what to call the new album. It would be Foreigner, and the man who had made his name on short songs of introspection would now be hanging his heart out on a side-long single sequence, a full-blown concept piece that he titled “The Foreigner Suite.”

Everything changed. Out went the producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, with whom Stevens had spent the last three years and four albums; Stevens would be producing himself this time.

Out went the provincial London studios where he normally plied his trade. Cat Stevens was Jamaica-bound, heading for the same Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston that Paul Simon and the Rolling Stones had utilized in the past, but pushing the studio to new heights as he did so.

Out went the cozy coterie of musicians who had performed on those same past discs. Drummer Gerry Conway survived the cull, and so did pianist Jean Roussel. But there was no room for his other old colleagues, not even for Alun Davies, the fingerpicking genius whose guitar sound, as much as Stevens’s voice, had hallmarked each of those previous LPs.

In their stead, he called up a host of hit super-sessioners pulled from London and New York: Paul Martinez and Bernard Purdie, Herbie Flowers, and Phil Upchurch. Later still, invited by the NBC television network to premiere Foreigner on nationwide television, he cast the net even further.

Guitarist Danny Kortchmar, one of the kings of the Los Angeles session scene of the day, was among the musicians invited to partake. “There was a show on NBC called In Concert, and this thing was for that. He hired a big band to play the entire album, and so we all got together. I was completely over the moon, because the drummer was Bernard Purdie, and they tried to get David T. Walker, who was the principal R&B guitar player in Los Angeles at that time, a great musician. He was the man, but they couldn’t get him, so they got me. I was over the moon to even be in the same sentence as David T., and absolutely thrilled to be playing with Bernard, and that’s what I mainly remember about that gig.”

In truth, that is all that many viewers remembered about the gig; the sight of some of America’s greatest musicians playing their way through an album that…Well, put it this way: It’s unlikely any of them would have actually wanted to own a copy if they’d not been asked to play on it.

That’s how radical it was. That’s how different it was. That’s how un-Cat-like it was.

Stevens was thrilled. “This is a good album,” he reassured the trickle of journalists who were airlifted to Kingston to catch the recordings in progress.

“In no way could I have made this album in London. There’s no distraction whatsoever in this place. No phones or people wanting to meet you tomorrow for this, that, and a hundred and one other things. In this place, everything’s done purely on a day-to-day work basis. You come in the studio feeling good and you get a good track down. This album is the quickest one I’ve ever recorded.”

He laid out his intentions. “Those first three albums I did for Island were very nice and very chummy, but I don’t want to come up with albums that are safe and predictable. I can only think of what’s happening now. Before coming here to make this album, I made up my mind that from now on I’m not going to plan anything.”

He talked of life becoming an “energy rush and storm,” and looked to the future with such wide and bright eyes that it must have crucified him when Foreigner was almost unanimously slain in the press of the day. And years later, he remained puzzled by its reception, but not only by the bad reviews.

“Some people think it’s my best album, which is strange,” Stevens told Mojo. “But it just shows you that I had something more in me. I didn’t want to become a parody of myself.”

The key to the album was not, in fact, its title track, but a song that Stevens wrote back in September 1970, during his first ever visit to New York. “How Many Times,” he told Circus, was born out of his preconceptions, and the ease with which the city destroyed them. “I had hoped the States would be different for me than England had been. I had a romantic, delightful image of New York, and suddenly I got there and couldn’t believe the aggression that was going on.”

It was that aggression that he wanted to funnel into Foreigner. “You see, I think just lately I’ve been listening to more black music than anything. I’ve found the rest rather insipid, really. Those guys, though, are not going round any corners. They’re coming out with the facts as they are.” No matter that music made under the influence of that immediacy might sound dated ten minutes later. Immediacy, spontaneity, the sudden shock of turning around and doing something that nobody expected; that is what Stevens wanted to deliver with Foreigner, because those are the things he had not been allowed to do from the day he first walked into a recording studio.

“I wanted an immediate feel to it,” he told Rolling Stone. That was why he was producing himself. Paul Samwell-Smith, he said, “is a great producer, but he is very clean; if a note is wrong, he wants to fix it up. This time I wanted to do a certain part, I wanted to just play it, and let it be.”

Later he would describe Foreigner as having been finished “completely subconsciously. It’s an album that you can listen to without listening to it, if you see what I mean. I don’t think Foreigner was a mistake, as some people have suggested.

“Before Foreigner I was planning ahead and living almost two months ahead of what I was doing in my head. So Foreigner brought me up to date and enabled me to start again; it was more or less a recycle.”

And to Melody Maker: “This is the age of personal revolutions and that’s when people and things change,” he said firmly. “I want this album to be a shock. I want it to cause some kind of reaction. I don’t just want people to say, ‘Oh, the new Cat Stevens album is out this month. Have you got it?’”

In fact, he gave them something else, something very different indeed, to say about him, as Rolling Stone reported.

“A Stevens hit single played a part in a recent controversy in Britain. A music newspaper printed a picture of Stevens, and two readers who noticed he was wearing a swastika wrote the paper advising Stevens he could ‘shove his “Peace Train” up his ass.’”

There was, of course, a flood of correspondence in the aftermath, with many of the letter writers knowledgeably defending Stevens by delving into the history of the swastika itself, and further venerating an ancient symbol whose hijacking by the Nazi party represented barely fifteen years out of over two thousand. Which, Stevens smiled, was a good thing.

“I’m glad it happened in that it showed the good behind a symbol that some might think represents evil. Of course, it was [also] an opportunity for someone to say that Cat Stevens is a cunt.”

A cunt who had just released the most unexpected album of the year. And, ultimately, the most purging.

“Having a constant sound, like Glen Campbell or someone, bores me silly, so it’s good to have changes. It’s mysterious, and I like mysteries. I don’t know where the hell Foreigner came from anyway. It was exactly what the title said, a foreign record for me. It didn’t fit in with my usual pattern. I don’t want people to judge me by my looks, my appearance or my image, or whatever I manage to get across, but by the music. Maybe that’s why I put out Foreigner, to have a break from the predictable.”