Fortunes of Foghat
Road Pros Conquer Pressure in Connecticut
(c) Copyright Circus Magazine By Kathi Stein
In the glow of the street lamp it looked like an ordinary house—white clapboard and a stone sidewalk leading to a mailbox, overhanging maple branches casting shadows along a suburban lane. A Christmas chard picture: "Greetings From Connecticut."
But the still night air was fractured by the sounds of a drum kit flailed into oblivion within. There were other muffled sounds. The windows rattled. It took minutes for someone to answer the bell. When the door was finally flung open, Dan Hartman's muscular frame was silhouetted in the light. "Come on in, Foghat's upstairs laying tracks," he yelled above the dim of what we then deduced was Roger Earl in the troes of bonzomania.
Dan Hartman's Edgar Winter's erstwhile bassman, had moved into the 13-room quarters two months ago, and the only future he brought with him Long Island was a sleek 16-track recording console and miles and miles of wire. Now, every room including the john was wired for recording. The first outside band to try out the electronically haunted house was Foghat. The world's hardest working band was wired in on the Night Shift for their sixth album (on Bearsville).
The fortunes of Foghat have been rising like steam—last year their fifth album, Fool for the City, joined Energized on the gold market, pulling along with it the limeys' debut Foghat. "And Fool is just a hair away from platinum right now," crooned a proud manager Tony Outeda, as he ushered his guest from room to room where mikes, amps and guitars lay around where sofas and coffee tables usually reside. The living room had a big TV with someone's parents in front of it.
Yes, Foghat, with a top 20 single, "Slow Ride" off Fool, and a huge, record-breaking concert attendance (taking the air out of Led Zep's Pittsburgh record date in February by 3,000), was beginning, just beginning to peak. And it's a happy day when a hard working road band starts raking in the dues instead of paying them out.
It may be in the future that Foghat, a band with perpetual road itch, will be too big to tour as much as they want. But right now, they're happy to be motionless. "We thought we'd make the last tour shorter, end it in the spring," manager Tony said as we sat in the kitchen where an evil-looking stew sat on the stove. "But then Fool For the City began rushing, so we just stayed out." And out, pushing to the limit of their endurance, and of their recording schedule.
The final concert of that tour, according to those present (who aren't slingers of hyperbole, either) was white hot, overheated, past the boiling point, with new bassist Craig MacGregor, winding the rhythm section, revving it to the floorboards. The band was moving flat out. They'd been on the road eight months.
"Anyway," Tony gestured, "I thought the band ought to see something resembling a normal home for a change."
Immediately after tour's end Foghat had entered the studio with producer Jimmy Iovine. Three weeks, a few taps, and multiple headaches later, the band three down their collective foghats and quit. By the most polite estimates, the collaboration had been a disaster. "The man walks around with patch on 'is head," growled Roger. The band had no producer and the deadline was approaching like an Amtrak special on the wrong track.
"We can't let ourselves get shaken by pressure," Roger beat his fingers in 4/4 on the table. "Otherwise nothing will come out right."
After the split with Iovine, Tony started making phone calls. One of them, to Steve Paul, resulted in the Dan Hartman connection. It was new, untried and spontaneous. Foghat liked the idea.
"We've always done something different with every album," the drummer explained. "Last time, in Vermont, we played outside, bouncing echoes up a mountain. We'll try anything. We started out that way with Dave Edmunds at Rockfield Studios—we recorded off courtyards, on roofs…"
The tour of Hartman's house continued: "On your left, you see Roger's drum room." The empty elongated space resembled the dimensions of a performance hall and, according to Roger, was far better for recording the intricately acoustic drums than a padded acoustic cell.
"Each room has different sound qualities," explained Roger, "depending on the height of the ceiling, the rugs on the floor."
"Yep," added Tony, "the age of the acoustically tiled studio is definitely over."
Upstairs guitarist Rod Price riffed on a 12-string Rickenbacker in what might have been a maid closet. He appeared to be talking to the walls. But, moving into another room, with a sloping ceiling, we arrived at the control center where Rod's voice was blasting through speakers. Hartman, Lonesome Dave Peverett and engineer Dave Still fiddled with the knobs and talked back to the invisible Price in the other room. Brandy and champagne were flowing, but there was an underlying current of serious concentration. Dan was cutting Rod's 12-string track for "Midnight Oil". "One take, that's all I need," Price's voice quacked through the speakers.
Getting out of the line of fire we asked Roger if recent success had changed his life any. "I'd be a fool to say it hadn't," he punned. "Sure, everything's easier, although none of use ever worried about finances anyway. Right from the word go we were in debt, and we stayed in the red for three years. You just don't make that much on the road. It was nice that Fool For the City sold so many copies. I know that next time we go out it'll be…well, I guess I don't know. Where can we go from here?" he mocks. "We've been headlining for three years."
For Roger, getting his green card—allowing him to live, work, and get out of the USA—has affected him as much as the gold on the wall.
The Americanization of Foghat, "the band that England didn't want," has its roots in 1936 when Sonny Boy Williamson's Down & Out Blues was just a twinkle in a black man's eye. It was born again in the big British blues breakout during a decade when closet R&B fiends like Dave Peverett crawled out into the sunlight and discovered they were a whole country of jive turkeys high on black beat and razor strut. It was a pleasant sort of identify crisis.
But for Foghat the identify crisis was doubletime, almost as soon as Peverett, Earl, and original bassist Tony Stevens split from the venerated blues horse, Savoy Brown, they became a non-group in the U.K. Their recording contract came through the States, and until recently you couldn't event find a Foghat import in England. A reviewer from a British daily made the common mistake of calling them the best new band to come out of America in a long time. All the more reason for Foghat to set stakes in the land of the all-night slop stops, Quality Courts, and Chess Records.
They have more in common with southern U.S. rockers looking to break out, moving full-throttle down the hard top, with loneliness abounding. The roar of the crowds is the only thing that stands between you and trucking, or commercial art. "I wouldn't have anything if I couldn't play," said Roger. " I was a commercial artist in London, and that was soul-destroying. Foghat has put some pressure on my soul, but it certainly isn't destroying it. Haha. Keeps yer on."
"The first thing we do when we hit town is ask 'Is there any place around here that's got a rock band playing'?" Craig MacGregor spoke up. "Any bar, man, any town," he adds, full of that "young guy in his first big band" exhilaration. "We just go out there and jam 'til three a.m. and it relaxes you down."
"It's the way I relate," finished Roger.
Craig MacGregor joined the band only two weeks before he appeared onstage. "They called me Christmas Eve and told me to come to L.A. to rehearse. I learned the songs and went out."
Actually, Craig had been tapped 18 months earlier, when Tony Stevens succumbed to "road fever" (the band uses the term to mean both insatiable hunger or fear of flying) and quit. Having played in a New Haven band for 10 years, Craig knew the local FM program director who knew Outeda. MacGregor tried out, even though he had never heard Foghat live or on vinyl.
"Craig was the best player who'd come down through the auditions," revealed Roger. But Foghat had only a week to prepare for a Madison Square Garden date, so they called producer and old hand Nick Jameson into service instead. He knew the songs, and he stayed for a year until road fever got him too. "Nick knew it was an interim thing, anyway," Roger went on. "Craig's the best bass player around and that's what we wanted."
How does Craig shift the balance on Night Shift? I don't know, I haven't heard the album yet," Roger parried, mischievously. But I can say it's a new phase for Foghat, yessir. Can't always hear what's happening since it's been so crazy before. Mainly we had to get a musician to produce us.
Dan Hartman was the right one. "He's got great musical sense," said Craig, "playing bass, guitar, piano, drums, he can communicate." "At first Tony was calling up all these hot-shot producers," Roger remembered. They were asking for too much money or points, and it was ridiculous, we're not giving away more than we can do ourselves. I was really impressed with the production of Dan's Images and the various musical approaches he's got on it."
"Now I know what real professionals are about," offered Craig.
"Generally, gettin' into it and not fuckin' around dreaming about lying on a beach," elaborated Roger.
At this point, Lonesome Dave, finished with a vocal track, wandered into the kitchen to fix some spinach, his favorite veg. "We're going to keep Night Shift at a live place," he added. "We don't get fancy in the studio because we like to play our songs live. We work too much on the road."
Night Shift could become Foghat's most powerful recorded effort. The tapes have the density and the feel of an authoritative quartet used to getting its rock recorded straight up.
Back in the control room the band had gathered around to witness Rod "Take One" Price cut that 12-string track. There had been some delays, but Dan ferreted out the problem—the guitar (loaned by Rick Derringer) had been tuned to the wrong key. "Christ, this would happen when the press is here!" Rod cried.
At last it was down. Dan wound it up and mashed the Forward button and a current of molten energy exploded. "I shoulda listened to someone/now I have nowhere to run/burnin' the midnight oil." It's an obsessive song and Dave's vocals, soaring over Price's wail and the beat, send you into a sweat. Like the good lyricist he is, Peverett keeps the images tight and specific, so you can really identify: "I've drunk so many cups of coffee/my nerves are driving me wild."
"Don't Run Me Down" wasn't finished yet, but Dave said that it was inspired by an earlier Foghat piece, "Wild Cherry," which he was thinking about when he wrote this one. " ' Night Shift,' though, is a departure from our other stuff," Dave said. "It's a bit of a shuffle—not really recognizable as a shuffle—but it's got a bluesy part in the middle. And it's not a drug song," he continued, strangling himself into censorship. "It's autobiographical, a sundown to sunrise song, working on down the line and something's gotta give." A grinding assembly line song, the piece winds relentlessly around the rhythm lines.
Peverett sings a righteous interpretation of Al Green's "Take Me To the River," a song that brings out the soul touch that's embedded in the best of Foghat, the true move of the groove. And the other ballad, "I'll Be Standing By," the only one with strings (by Ken Asher), Dave said, remains close to its blues base.
"Driving Wheel," though, is the album's launch pad. It blazed through the room touching everyone. It impressively demonstrates Craig's strength in the bass department as he augments Roger's drum bottom and urges on Rod's lead to torturous edges. "This is a sex song," Peverett commented, the one remaining calm person in fevered storm of mounting chord tension. Everyone was rocking out, dancing and grinning and after it was all over, someone panted, "If I can make an intellectual comment…that is hot fuckin' shit."
Later Rod admitted, "this album's been a long hard process. But last week, as soon as we were getting overdubs over the backing tracks, it started to happen and that's when we got a second wind, and well, you saw the way we were in there. Sometimes I really can't believe it after all the crap we went through.
"Whether I write, or Dave writes, or the whole band, a song becomes a Foghat song very quickly—extremely quickly, especially on 'Don't Run Me Down.' That came together in a matter of 15 or 20 minutes after Dave got the basic idea. Originally it was up-tempo, but then we got into these other places and it all fit into place. Unreal.
"Yeah, I guess there aren't too many lead slide guitarists," he muses, mentioning Duane Allman, Ry Cooder, Lowell George and Johnny Winter as among the few. "As far as expression, though, Duane had it down. He moved me. Incredible. But you know, slide guitar is a limited instrument, and it depends a lot on emotion. Take 'Slow Ride,' for example, that song is hideous on the album. Now it's horrendous." Laughter. "Craig and I have started working things into it. Now we just wait every night for that song and when it get going, just before the solo, Craig and me, we just smile. Here we go again! Now it just takes off. There's these things we play in unison. We tease each other. I wait for him and he knows and I just keep holding back, and everyone's riding on it. And then it shifts and simply explodes. By the end of that song you don't know if you want to laugh or cry.
At this point, the conversation was interrupted by a crewman who ran in to announce that the Rock Awards were on the tube and that Peter Frampton had accepted an "award" for something or other. "The cameras panned the audience," he said, "and you know who was there with a tux on? Bob Segar!!" The house full of rock & roll outlaws roared. Catcalls.
"The band's never been better," Rod closed. "I've said that before and it's bit a drag, but it's true. The band's had incredible luck, progression, whatever you call it. It's kept going. And we nail it this time with Craig. I'm happy as I could ever be, and that's a fact."
Later, on the way out, the parents were still in front of the TV.
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