Drivin Wheel Terraplane Blues Foghat

Drivin' Wheel Album: Night Shift (1976)
Terraplane Blues Album: Fool for the City (1975)
by Foghat

Night Shift is the sixth studio album. It was the first Foghat album to include bassist Craig MacGregor, who had toured with the band in support of Fool for the City. The album was produced by Dan Hartman. Drivin' Wheel is the first track.

"Terraplane Blues" is a blues song recorded in 1936 in San Antonio, Texas, by bluesman Robert Johnson. Vocalion issued it as Johnson's first 78 rpm record, backed with "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", in March 1937. The song became a moderate regional hit, selling up to 10,000 copies.

Johnson used the car model Terraplane as a metaphor for sex. In the lyrical narrative, the car will not start and Johnson suspects that his girlfriend let another man drive it when he was gone. In describing the various mechanical problems with his Terraplane, Johnson creates a setting of thinly veiled sexual innuendo.

Fool for the City is the fifth studio album where Foghat covered Terraplane Blues as the first song of side two.

Fool for the City was the band's first album to go platinum. It was also the first album the band recorded after the departure of original bassist Tony Stevens. Producer Nick Jameson played bass and keyboards on the album, and co-wrote the closing track, "Take It or Leave It", with Dave Peverett. Appearing in the photograph on the back cover of the album, Jameson is not known to have toured with Foghat in support of the album. A new bassist, Craig MacGregor, was recruited shortly after the album's release, but Jameson would continue to produce and record intermittently with the band over the next couple of decades.

The LP was released with two different catalog numbers. The original was released as BR 6959. It was reissued as BRK 6980 in 1978. All issues from 1978–1984 used this catalog number.

The album cover shows drummer Roger Earl sitting alone on a soap box fishing down a manhole near 229 East 11th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue) in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City, near the address of Foghat's American office. The back cover features skeptical bystanders observing Earl's unusual activity and the other members of the band either asking him what he is doing or trying to dissuade him from it. In a 2014 interview, Earl explained how the picture was taken:

It was a Sunday morning and I hadn't slept. [...] It was Nick Jameson's idea [...] since I have this penchant for fishing. 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 is a Blues band based around Peverett's previous blues band, Savoy Brown.

They hosted a 1977 benefit concert at the Palladium for the New York Public Library's Blues collection. Guests included Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

While the original members are all British, Foghat never had a charting song or record in the UK. This could be because most of the touring was in the US.

Boogie Motel, the name of their 1979 album, was also the name of their recording studio.

The name of the band comes from a fake word made up in a Scrabble game.

Lonesome Dave Peverett - lead vocals, guitar, heavy breathing
Rod "The Bottle" Price - guitar, slide guitar, steel guitar, vocals
Roger Earl - drums, percussion
Craig MacGregor - bass guitar, backing vocals