Spins: Foghat • Fool for the City Expanded 50th anniversary – 2xLP
Foghat
Fool for the City expanded 50th anniversary 2xLP
(Bearsville/Rhino)
With an evolving lineup around founding drummer Roger Earl, English rock band Foghat has endured for more than 50 years. The group still stretches its creative muscles, and the band’s audience helped Foghat earn a #1 album on the Blues chart with Sonic Mojo in 2023. The band’s untoppable peak, however, arrived in 1975. Foghat’s fifth effort, Fool for the City, is now reissued as a vinyl LP in honor of the album’s 50th anniversary.
The album includes the title track and the band’s signature song, the classic rock evergreen “Slow Ride” with its modified boogie adapted from John Lee Hooker. The song glides atop Earl’s thundering, cowbell-infused percussion, elevated by Dave Peverett’s bristling vocal and Rod Price’s memorable slide guitar licks. Bassist Nick Jameson locks into Earl’s heavy blues beat as the band covers Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” again featuring Price’s slide work. “Save Your Loving (For Me)” nods to the band’s contemporary heroes Bad Company. For piano-infused, full-tilt rocker “Drive Me Home,” the band placed microphones down the mountain road near Suntreader recording studio in Vermont, and had Earl crash the band’s car into garbage cans along the street. While recording the title track, Price’s amplifier was placed in the woods to capture natural echo from the surrounding hills.
This reissue is expanded beyond the original seven-song album to include a second disc of particular interest to regional Illinois Entertainer readers. A six-song live set is drawn from the band’s four-night stand at the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown over Thanksgiving weekend 1975. In addition to the band’s ode to its adopted hometown in the Big Apple, “Fool for the City” and indelible rocker “Slow Ride,” the set draws from two other Foghat catalog entries. “Home in My Hand” and a chugging version of blues shouter Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush” are performed from the third album Energized. The band’s hit version of Chicago blues legend Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” is taken from Foghat’s self-titled 1972 debut, and the song brings down the house as an expansive set-closer. Peverett jokes with the Aragon audience before launching the celebrated album’s version of the Righteous Brothers’ “My Babe” and introduces “Slow Ride” as “a dirty song – a bit,” eliciting wolf whistles from the crowd.
The reissue of the main Fool for the City album is pressed from original analog stereo tapes onto colored vinyl. Bassist and producer Jameson provides new liner notes to accompany Earl’s track-by-track remarks. With the Chicago concert recorded just two months after the album’s release and finding the band in top form, this set makes a significant upgrade to the scratchy dollar-bin copies found in many rock fans’ collections. (rhino.com)
8 of 10
– Jeff Elbel
