Energized
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Album Summary
Energized came roaring out of the Bearsville Records stable in 1974, and baby, it was exactly what the name promised. Foghat — that hard-driving British import that had made itself right at home on American airwaves — stepped back into the studio with the mercurial Todd Rundgren behind the boards, and together they cooked up something that crackled with raw electricity. The album delivered a potent mix of blues covers and original material, harnessing the band's locomotive rhythm section and Lonesome Dave Peverett's gritty vocals into a record that felt like it was built for the open road and the FM dial simultaneously. Bearsville, the bohemian little label that called Woodstock, New York home, gave Foghat the space to do what they did best — and what they did best was make the blues feel like the most dangerous music on the planet.
Reception
- Energized reached #31 on the Billboard 200 chart, cementing Foghat's standing as one of the most dependable commercial forces in mid-1970s hard rock.
- The album reinforced Foghat's reputation among FM rock programmers as a band whose records could be dropped on the turntable and trusted to hold an audience from the first note to the last.
Significance
- Energized stands as a prime artifact of the boogie rock and blues-rock movement that had a stranglehold on American FM radio in the early-to-mid 1970s, representing the form at its most honest and unadorned.
- The album's tracklist — drawing on blues tradition with tracks like 'Honey Hush' and 'That'll Be The Day' alongside original material — reflects Foghat's deep roots in British blues and their reverence for the American source material that inspired them.
- At a moment when progressive rock and glam were pulling the genre in ornate new directions, Energized planted its flag firmly in the soil of groove-based, no-nonsense rock and roll, and that unpretentious commitment gave the album a timeless, lived-in quality.
Tracklist
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A1 Honey Hush 99
4:19
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A2 Step Outside 111
6:18
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A3 Golden Arrow 135
4:03
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A4 Home In My Hand 133
5:09
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B1 Wild Cherry 184
5:27
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B2 That'll Be The Day 120
2:33
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B3 Fly By Night 123
4:47
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B4 Nothin' I Won't Do —
6:54
Artist Details
Foghat, baby, is one of those hard-driving, blues-soaked rock and roll machines that crawled out of London, England in 1971, born from the ashes of Savoy Brown and built on a foundation of sweaty, electric boogie that could shake the walls of any arena in America. These cats — led by the late, great Lonesome Dave Peverett — took that raw British blues sound and turbo-charged it into something that became the very heartbeat of 1970s American rock radio, giving the world that immortal anthem "Slow Ride" in 1975, a track so thick and groovy it practically became the official soundtrack of a generation cruising the highways with the windows down. Foghat may not have always gotten the critical respect they deserved, but their influence on hard rock, Southern rock, and even early heavy metal is undeniable, and their legacy lives on in every band that ever tried to capture that perfect, locomotive blues-rock groove.
