Foghat - Slow Ride
Young, Dumb, and Full of...
For Pop Squatch
Rock and roll taught me there’s no point in looking for deeper meaning when there just ain’t any. Slow Ride is not interesting from a musical theory standpoint. It’s not complicated or profound. It does NOT provide a compelling exploration of the existential complexities of human existence. Slow Ride is about fucking - greasy, 1970s, full-bush fucking. Don’t look for sophistication when there just ain’t none. The album cover shows drummer Roger Earl sitting on a box fishing in the middle of a street with his line down a manhole cover, bellbottoms and all, with a full-on Cossack mustache like he’s preparing to invade Eastern Europe and not New York’s Lower East Side. Expectations should be LOW.
Anyway, we lift up the manhole cover and I'm sitting on a box. Almost immediately a couple of New York's Finest come by in their patrol car. They're looking at us and they wind the window down. We're like, "Oh shit." They yell out, "Hey! You got a fishing license?" and then start laughing. So they come over and say, "What the fuck are you doing?" They took some pictures with them handcuffing me. I love New York's Finest.
— Roger Earl
Foghat built their brand the antiquated, old-fashioned way which saw them play shows like the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival in 1972 and the Satellite Lounge in the unincorporated community of Cookstown, New Jersey in ‘73. No shit. Those shows happened.
Their first album was eponymously titled Foghat. Their second was technically self-titled but is known as Rock and Roll because… well…
That is the band Foghat and that is a rock and a roll. Get it? This is music for the neck down. Remove the brain. Insert power chords and hard substances. Carry on.
Foghat released Slow Ride as the lead single on their fifth album, Fool for the City in 1975. The track lasts 8 minutes and fourteen seconds, like a lot of 20-something men. The track peaked at number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 which is perfect, because you have to be 20 to fully appreciate the profoundly stupid glory of the song. There are five versions of the damn thing. The single version was truncated to 3:56 with a fade-out. The ‘77 live version is 8:21, the King Biscuit Flower Hour version is 10:37 and the 2007 live version is 9:44. All of these versions exist to allow the new bassist and producer Nick Jameson (and later Craig MacGregor) to GET FUCKING DOWN. Jameson is not to be confused with Motown guru James Jamerson. He’s the poor Missouri white boy equivalent filling in for a London band trying their damndest to be American idiots (and succeeding). MacGregor, the touring bassist until he died in 2018, was not from Scotland but Sioux City, Iowa. That’s how this works… you join a working band and work in it until you die. These arena rock bands from the late ‘60s and ‘70s are coal mines and the musicians that play in them have Black Lung. You grind at the start playing any place with a stage, then you maybe, MAYBE catch a break, and once you got it, you have to double down and increase your work ethic. Foghat released an album a year from ‘72 to ‘80, two albums in 1974, and a live album in ‘77. They would move away from the soda pop festivals and shitty lounges into halls, arenas, and stadiums. But that fades too. Eventually, these bands find themselves back in the coal mines of small venues and theaters, touring relentlessly because they can still draw 3,000 fans on a Tuesday night. You do what you love, yeah?
I
wantneed my greasy, foot-stomping rock and roll, and Slow Ride is an all-you-can-eat boogie buffet. The mighty kick drum and the greasiest fucking slide guitar lick of the 1970s combine to force your foot down on the accelerator. You are a hostage now to Lonesome Dave Peverett’s voice compelling you to take it easy. You are stuck inside this meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy ballad. This is highway music. If you haven’t smoked a joint in a muscle car on a long stretch of freeway after the sun’s gone down with an ear-drum-busting soundtrack on the sound system then you just haven’t experienced the American Dream. There are 48,756 miles of U.S. Interstate available and about two million miles of road in this country. You could be going to Houston to pick up Aerosmith tickets with Wooderson. You could be screaming up I-79 with both windows down at 80 MPH (something we call 2-80 air conditioning). You could be making a beer run from Texarkana to Atlanta. Slow Ride will never not be a perfect road song.
As you express eloquently, a hard working, fun rock and roll band. I started doing personal security for bands, athletes, etc in the mid 70s and would run into them at various venues throughout the years. They never disappointed.
This is fucking class. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure as a Brit, listening to dirty old American rock. We don’t have highways or enormous cars but that sense of vastness, possibility and do whatever-you-fucking-want pervades throughout this tune.
Another class piece of writing!