Foghat
Boogie Motel

Foghat is a boogie rock powerhouse full of grit and sweat that dominated the United States for almost thirty years, releasing a ton of albums and holding thousands of concerts, until a bad illness took their leader Dave Peverett nine years ago, and everything since then started to take on indistinct contours. For their sound and their rough, direct, and gritty approach, they could be lumped into the cauldron of American Southern Rock, that of the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Blackfoot, if it weren't for the fact that... they are English, although they settled permanently in the USA after their initial record releases and tours clearly showed that this was their audience.

The singer, guitarist, and songwriter Peverett left the Savoy Brown in 1970, one of those London bands that competed in the late sixties with Free, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck Group, and the like in the realm of British Blues, bringing with him the bassist and drummer and completing the lineup with what would prove to be a true slide guitar virtuoso, known as Rod Price, an authentic English reincarnation of Duane Allman both in appearance (with his hippie mustache and sideburns) and gear (Gibson "Devil" and Coricidin bottle on the middle finger), and most importantly in his performance skill and sensitivity, which were astounding.

Of the mountain of music put together by Foghat over all these years, there are few and precise things to say: first of all, they were a band that largely gave their best live, a dimension in which they fully unleashed their simple and genuine spirit as well as their phenomenal rhythmic drive. In the studio, the situation was more "restrained," attempting to add variety and compositional depth to everything, with results sometimes good, sometimes less so. Live, however, there were no problems: Foghat was synonymous with raw (but not crude), infectious rock, both in their three-minute sharp performances and in those stretched to the limit by long instrumental digressions.

The group already sounded "old" in the seventies at the time of their greatest success, let alone today: a retrograde rockblues, spit out without shame but rather with pride, occasionally softened (in the studio) by pop influences, or perhaps country, but at its best when unleashed in long and wild rides, listening to which one cannot help but grow fond of the late Peverett (certainly not endowed with particular vocal talent but as candid and generous as a musician can be) and get excited by the contagious "drive" of this tightly-knit quartet.

An excellent example of what has just been said is in the song that titles this album: a simple and straightforward riff, thrown in your face with (positive) ferocity, around which a vortex of guitars, solo exchanges, and instrumental variations create, making it impossible to resist: your foot starts tapping and won't stop for all of the over seven minutes of this exhilarating tour de force.

I don't believe this 1979 work is among their best; in this regard, I first recommend "Foghat Live" (1977), which, logically, remains their biggest commercial success, while the best things done in the studio are titled "Stone Blue" (1978) and "Fool For The City" (1975). I nevertheless chose to review "Boogie Motel" for that awesome cover art it boasts, which deserved a bit of visibility.