Foreigner’s Road Map: Destination Top Ten

IN THE SPRING of 1976, Mick Jones found himself. With a dwindling bank account and dim prospects, even after twelve years of playing guitar and singing for Nero and the Gladiators, French pop idol Johnny Hallyday, Wonderwheel, Spooky Tooth and Leslie West. But rather than returning to his native England or plunging from atop the Pan Am building in Manhattan, where fate and his management had brought him, he began to compose in earnest and to envision a group of which he would be mastermind.