Slow Ride (1976)

Performer: Foghat                                                 Writer: Dave Peverett
Highest US Chart Position: #20                            Label: Bearsville Records
Musicians: Lonesome Dave Peverett, Rod Price, Nick Jameson and Roger Earl

Every week our local radio station had an album giveaway. On Monday night they would play the top fifteen songs for that week--what criteria they used I don’t know, because it certainly wasn’t the Billboard listings--and when they reached number one the person who called in first and could name all fifteen songs won a random LP that they could pick up at the station. My associations with "Slow Ride" by Foghat will be forever connected to that particular contest because one particular Monday in early 1976 I decided to play. Of course I had heard the song before, but I had no idea who the artist was, and since I missed the introduction I called the radio station to find out. The song itself took a nice slow ride up the charts, sometimes a more impressive feat that shooting to the top and then falling off like a rock. It entered the charts strong in December of 1975 at number seventy seven, making its way into the top forty a month later and staying there for the next two months, peaking at number twenty in late March. It was a radio staple that winter and an indelible memory of my eighth grade year.

The song begins with the heavy beat of Roger Earl’s floor toms on two and four, until the distinctive distorted blues riff comes in on one, two upward bends before it begins again, ending this time down the neck with a sustained chord. The second time through has a cymbal roll and a high feedback sustained note on the guitar that both crescendo into the chant-like chorus, harmonized the second time through. The instrumentation behind Peverett’s vocals on the verse is wonderfully unique. The most distinctive thing is Nick Jameson’s octaves on the bass, something that would quickly become a fad in the disco era. There is also some unique percussion, not quite a vibraslap, but something similar. This leads into some sustained chords at the end of the verse phrase that flow back into the chorus. After this comes a sort of stop-time bridge, with slide guitar fills by Rod Price in the gaps. Then the bass drops out and Peverett and Price play one of their patented twin solo guitar lines with the drums, which is followed by another verse. A chorus and bridge leads to just the drums and more feedback guitar going into Price’s solo slide guitar and the fade out on Peverett’s vocals.

The single version of the song is significantly shorter than the version from the album Fool For the City, which was released a month after the single. Instead of the fadeout, the song continues for another four minutes with some vocal effects and other variations on the sections of the song, ending finally when the tempo gradually speeds up and the guitars cut loose. It’s this original album version that also closes the band’s best selling album, Foghat Live from the following year. The B-side of the single is "Save Your Loving (For Me)" from the LP, an interesting shuffle-boogie that seems as if it had real pretensions of being a pop hit rather than the more hard-edged blues songs the band was known for. When I was playing in a cover band in the early eighties and we were having trouble coming up with enough songs to play at gigs, we suddenly hit upon the idea of adding a bunch of classic rock to our repertoire and "Slow Ride" was the first song I thought of. It remained our set list for the rest of the time we were together. Foghat didn’t have a lot of hits, but the ones they did have are memorable and the group is an example of one of the few British blues bands that actually had genuine chart hits.