Foghat
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Foghat was an English rock band that had its greatest success in the mid- to late-1970s. Their music was straight-ahead blues-rock, dominated by electric & electric slide guitar, and the band achieved five gold records. The group remained popular during the disco era, but after the emergence of punk rock, the band no longer had a substantial audience, and they stopped performing live in 1984.
The band featured Dave Peverett ("Lonesome Dave") on guitar and vocal, Tony Stevens on bass, and Roger Earl on drums. They added Rod Price on guitar/slide guitar and formed Foghat upon leaving Savoy Brown in the early 1970s. Their 1972 album Foghat had a hit with a cover of Willie Dixon's "I Just Want to Make Love to You". The second album was also called Foghat (known as "rock and roll" for the cover photo of a rock and a roll), and it went gold. Energized came out in 1974, followed by Rock and Roll Outlaws and Fool for the City in 1975, the year that Stevens left the band. Stevens was replaced temporarily by Nick Jameson in 1975 and then permanently by Craig MacGregor in 1976, and the group produced Night Shift in 1976, a live album in 1977, and Stone Blue in 1978, each reaching gold record sales. Fool for the City was possibly the band's high water mark, as it spawned two hit singles, "Fool for the City" and "Slow Ride" (which reached number 20 on the US charts), but the highest sales figures were for Foghat Live, which sold over 2,000,000 copies. Rod Price left the band in 1980 and was replaced by Erik Cartwright. After 1978, Foghat record sales were far lower, and their last album, Zig-Zag Walk in 1983, only touched at the charts at #193.
Dave Peverett left the band in 1984 and went back to England, but Earl, along with MacGregor, Cartwright and others continued touring as Foghat into the early nineties. In 1990 Peverett formed his own version of Foghat with guitarist Bryan Bassett, formerly with Wild Cherry ("Play That Funky Music"), and both bands were touring simultaneously. In 1993 the original lineup reunited and released a studio album entitled Return of the Boogie Men in 1994 and a live album entitled Road Cases in 1998.
Founding member Dave Peverett died in February of 2000 from cancer. Original Foghat guitarist and founding member Rod Price died March 22, 2005 from a heart attack.
After the death of founder Dave Peverett, the band re-formed with two of the founding members (drummer Roger Earl, and bass player Tony Stevens), plus Bryan Bassett, and Charlie Huhn, (former vocalist from Ted Nugent's band) and released the studio album Family Joules in 2003 – the first without the late "Lonesome Dave" Peverett. Tony Stevens has since been replaced again by Craig MacGregor.
Trivia
The band has said (in Spinal Tap Goes to 20, a film documentary on This is Spinal Tap) that the plot, and many of the incidents, in This Is Spinal Tap were taken from their own career. Foghat had a series of bass players who came in and left the band, much like the drummers for Spinal Tap. However, Judas Priest had actually gone through seven drummers, and may have been the basis for Spinal Tap's plot device.Foghat was a notoriously "anti-disco" band, starting in the late 1970s, when disco was at its peak of popularity. As an antidote, bands like Foghat and disc jockeys including Steve Dahl were adamant in denying income to people like Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band.
The TV show Still Standing has a character that plays in a Foghat tribute band.
Their song "Slow Ride" was featured in the 1993 American movie Dazed and Confused. It has also been used in an episode of Malcolm In The Middle, in a Seinfeld episode and in an episode of Family Guy, where the evil monkey smokes a joint. It pulls station owner Jimmy James out of a coma in an episode of Newsradio. It was featured in the K-DST classic rock radio station of the video game , and an advertisement for the Honda Odyssey, and also an ad for Carls Jr.
Most, if not all tracks from "Foghat Live" are featured as party music in the 1981 action-adventure film "Nighthawks", starring Sylvester Stallone, Rutger Hauer, Billy Dee Williams and Lindsay Wagner, which includes a soundtrack by Keith Emerson, of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Carl Brutananadilewski, a character in the TV series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, expressed in a commercial that he was a fan of Roger Earl, saying "I like the drummer from Foghat. That's my drummer."
In the fox TV series King of the Hill, Bill Dauterive says " I made most of my life decisions at a Foghat concert... I stand by them."
In the music video for Yo La Tengo's "Sugarcube", the members of Yo La Tengo are sent to "The Academy of Rock" by their record company. There, one of the teachers informs them of the "Foghat Rule", which is that fourth album must be double live.
External links
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