Interview with Foghat’s Rodney O’Quinn
June 25, 2021
Interviewer: Mary Andrews
Title photo Foghat (credit: Elijah Shark)
Foghat is an American based English band that started in 1971 with massive album sells at the beginning of their career. The band was started by Dave Peverett on vocals and guitar, Tony Stevens on bass and Roger Earl on drums after exiting the band, Savoy Brown. They garnered eight gold records, one platinum and one double platinum record early in their career.
There have been several line-up changes over the last 50 years. Drummer, Roger Earl, is the only remaining original member present today. They continue to record and perform their blues-based rock that draws throngs of devoted fans.
Foghat has a new live album to be released in July 2021. 8 Days on the Road was recorded at Daryl’s House in November 2019 and it celebrates their 50th anniversary. Their music has proven to be timeless and their live performance continues to be fabulous.
Rodney O’Quinn permanently joined the band in 2015. Unrated Magazine was able to catch up with the youngest member of the band for a conversation. Here’s what we learned.
Mary Andrews: One of the reasons we are doing this is because the band has a new release coming out in a couple of weeks that was recorded at Daryl’s House.
Rodney O’Quinn: That right. I believe it’s located in Connecticut. It’s where Hall films a lot of those shows for AXS TV and stuff. They also have shows there, a dinner and show type thing. They have a great chief there. The food is amazing. It’s an intimate crowd with maybe 200 maximum people in there. It gives you a chance to be one-on-one with people and you can tell stories and stuff like that.
You’ve been a musician for a long time.
Yes, I’m kind of like the baby in the band. Roger has been the consistent force in the band since day one. It’s quite an honor to play with these guys.
you played with The Pat Travers Band for many years.
Yes, I was with Pat Travers from 2007 technically I got out of Pat’s band in June of 2016. I actually did double duty with Foghat and Pat Travers July of 2015 – June of 16. I went 100% with Foghat after that.
How do you look back at your experience with Pat Travers’ Band?
It was great. It was a real handful for me because I not only played bass for Pat, but I ended up spearheading the whole business, the booking end and everything. I had my hands in merchandising, the website, booking, advancing shows. I was driven by the almighty dollar (Laughing). Instead of paying someone else to do it, I found ways of creating revenue for myself. It was wearing me out and the funny thing was when I first came out playing with Foghat, Roger and Linda both knew it. We had had conversations about it. Linda manages Foghat. I respected her. She is well respected in the business community. When I knew they had been somewhere I was trying to get into, we would communicate with each other. “Hey, how did this go forward?” “Who did you talk to for this?” There were a lot of times I would get together with Linda to put together a tour package, like putting Pat Travers and Foghat together. Every now and then, we would do some big shows together. We would try to team up together. When I first started playing with Foghat, I’ll never forget Roger coming up to me backstage with his English accent, I guess I had this look like I should be doing something. He said, “You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you?” Just stick with me kid. We’ll just play rock and roll. We’ll leave all the other stuff to the other people to worry about.”
Do you consider yourself a blues man or a rock man?
I consider myself a rock man. My guilty pleasure is that I like to go down with some of my friends where I live and do a little bit of honky tonking and I love to go out and sing some country tunes.
Where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Melbourne, Florida.
You’ve been with the band since 2015. How many days a year do your tour?
Before the pandemic, we probably hit about 65 dates a year. We mainly do weekends. We fly out and play and fly back home. There’s only a couple of months that we don’t really do anything. Once Spring hits, every weekend we’d be playing somewhere till the beginning of November. Sometimes it might be one show a weekend or it might be three.
Since you brought it up, how has the band handled the pandemic?
Me, I was kind of like an ostrich with its head in the sand. I kept hearing whispers about a virus going around. I flew into Vegas and finished watching the movie I started the previous weekend, and I clicked on the news. They were talking about everything closed up as of tomorrow. Us and 38 Special were the last two bands to play on the strip in Vegas. The whole strip had pretty much closed down. There were no other shows going on. A lot of people were asking what the heck is going on? We thought it was only going to shut down for a couple of weeks. We had no idea what was going on in to this. We didn’t see that coming.
I’ve heard a rumor that the band has been working on a studio album. Is that a fact?
We’ve been kicking things around. When the pandemic first hit, we thought maybe we should take some time to record. Roger was in New York. Me, Charlie and Bryan live in Florida even though we are scattered around Florida. We had the issues that if you came to Florida, you had to quarantine for two weeks. The same issue was present in New York. You had to quarantine for two weeks going there. At that point. we stayed put.
Looks like we’ll try to do another blues record. It’s hard to tell if it will be original songs or traditional blues. We’re kicking around the idea on some new tunes. Roger has hit me up with his brother, Colin, who is a keyboard player. He’s in England. Along time ago Colin had written a song about Hank Williams that became a big thing that Roger and Colin were talking about. Colin said “I want you to record my song, but I want you to make sure Rodney sings it. He’s a country boy.” It’s my guilty pleasure to get to sing lead every once in a while. Normally it’s all focused on Charlie. Doing a blues record, it’s a bit of a different twist, so it opens up doors.
Who is the writer of the band?
Basically, everybody has been. I’m kind of new being on this because when I first joined the band they were doing the studio album, Under the Influence. The material was pretty much already written that was new. Craig had already played most of the tracks, but I still came in and played on two or three tracks.
What is the most fun album you have ever worked on?
I’ve done a ton of live records. I’ve done a live cd with Pat. I did a live CD/DVD with Pat. With Foghat I played on Live at the Bellyup and of course now we are coming up with a live CD/DVD. I did do some tracks on Under the Influence and I did two full CDs with Pat Travis. One was called Fidelis and the other was called Can Do. It’s all been an enjoyable ride.
Why did you decide to play bass?
It’s so funny. When I was a kid, my best friend got a guitar and he joined with these three brothers. One was a keyboard player, one was a drummer, and the other one was only six years old. He was like a novelty thing and he would hold a guitar and sing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” My friend joined up with them and he said, “You should get a bass. We need a bass player.” So, I went to my parents and said “Hey mom, Hey dad, I want to play bass.”
I guess I must have been pretty good at it because it didn’t take me long and it seemed like I was always in demand. I actually started playing night clubs when I was in high school. The deal I made with mom was that I had to graduate. I literally spent my weekends the last two years of school playing clubs. That’s what I did hard and heavy when I graduated in 1984. I just traveled, did the road and played in a couple of bands. I did that all the way up to 1996-97. I finally said ‘I’ve had enough. I want to go home.’
I became a normal guy for a little bit. But then I slowly went out and started playing a little bit but I didn’t want to go back out on the road. I was doing great in the window and door business doing sales and stuff. I could see the writing on the wall in 2007 with the real estate business crash coming. There was two things: I had an itch I needed to scratch. I’d like to get back and do just one road gig. When the Pat thing came around and I got in on that, I thought ‘I’d do a year, two years on top.’ I’m still doing it today. I kind of found out that it really is what I was meant to be doing. This is what my calling is. It’s really been great.
The big flattering thing to me was I grew up being a huge Craig MacGregor fan. I remember being 11 years old trying to learn how to play songs off of Foghat Live. When I could half way play the songs, I would turn it up in my room with all the crowd noise and I would think, ‘I could play with these guys.”
Fast forward in life, Craig MacGregor came to a Pat Travers show and the next day he talks to me. He picked me up at the hotel and took me to his house to make me breakfast. Before I left, he goes, “Look I’m thinking about getting off the road soon and I want you to be the guy to take my place.” I was like, ‘Wow!’
I’m still a huge Travers fan. To me it was just another piece to the puzzle. I was also a huge ‘Mars’ Cowling fan. Cowling was Travers’ original bass player and played on just about everyone of Pat’s records. He was with Pat for a very long time. I got to be a great friend of Mars. Mars said I was the perfect fit to do the Pat thing. But when he saw me play with Foghat, he said, “Yeah, you are definitely fitting in here.”
The thing was that Craig was planning on retiring since his new passion was training dogs. He wanted to get into training service dogs. With that, he couldn’t go on the road. He was really passionate about it. I got a call from management to see if I was interested, it had turned into a health issue with Craig that was taking him off the road. He passed away after I had been with the band for two years. It was a hard battle.
If you weren’t a musician what would you be?
I’d be a used hubcap salesman. (Laughing) Actually, I still dabble selling windows and doors, replacements in homes and stuff. It’s a big market here in Florida. Thank goodness, I never 100% quit it. I worked with the company especially when I saw the writing on the wall with the real estate bubble collapse in 2007. It was one of those things where I said, ‘I’m going to go play for a while. I’ll come back in when things pick up.’ If I was in town, they would schedule me up and I would sell jobs. If I was gone they would say, “We’ll see you when you get back.” That’s what I’ve been doing every since. It’s worked great for both sides. It got hard because whenever I was in town, I felt obligated to work. I may have gotten off the plane at midnight and tomorrow was a work day at the window business. There was one point that I began to think once we rolled into 2020, and we got busy in Spring and Summer that I would take time off from the window and door business. A month later the pandemic hit and it reminded me why I didn’t keep all of my eggs in one basket. I got very lucky there because all of my business was replacement services. The road just stopped and I thought this would just last a week or two weeks, but the pandemic kept going on and on. I thought sure people would be leery of anyone coming around their house, but actually the sales in 2020 was through the roof. I got lucky there. I know a lot of guys in the business and their thing is just whether they are in the production side or sound engineers people like that who were just dead in the water with nothing.
Entertainment got shut down in the very beginning and it’s one of the last fields to come back. The only ones taking longer to come back than the entertainment business is cruise ships.
If we were riding in your car right now, what music would be hear?
I actually spend most of my time listening to motivational speaking or sermons. I had an awakening about two years ago. I’ve been branching in different directions. It’s been a very eye opening and a great ride. When I do listen to music, I listen to satellite radio’s classic vinyl and Ozzy’s boneyard and B.B. King’s Blues.
Isn’t this the 50th anniversary for Foghat?
It’s the 50th anniversary since the release of their first record. It didn’t take them too long to get a record deal when they first put it together. The first record came out in 1971. That’s the one that has “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” It still gets played today.
The musicianship of the band is superb. Was there two bass players or two guitar players in the live show at Daryl’s House?
There are two guitarists. I’m the one on stage left wearing the dark sunglasses. Charlie is center stage singing and playing guitar. Bryan is on the other side of the stage and he’s the lead player and the slide player. Of course, we’ve got Roger Earl in the background (In his best English accent).
It’s really an honor to play with Roger. There is a lot of history there. Bryan has been playing with the band for at least 25 years and he actually played with Lonesome Dave Peverett. Charlie has been singing with the band since Dave passed away and the only singer since then. He’s twenty years in. I got hand picked by Craig MacGregor to be his successor. It’s not like we’re a bunch of guys just hacking through. We are honored to be able to carry it on. There is going to come a day and time that all this music that we love won’t be there. Things happen. We want to bring it to the people as long as we can. There will be a whole musical era that will disappear. You’ll only be able to hear through your CDs or your vinyl records. We love the fact that the fans still come out and see us. We aim to please.
If I wasn’t able to do this, I’d be standing around asking “Hey would you like fries with that?” (Laughing) I made that joke one time apparently to the wrong person because apparently they worked at a fast food place. They got a little upset. ‘It’s a joke man, it’s a joke.” I’ve definitely been very fortunate, very blessed in my journey in the music business.
Roger says we are good for another 20 years. He had a talk with his hands. They said, ‘How are you feeling Rog? ‘I had a talk with my hands the other day. I said, ”Fellas, how are you doing? How much longer do you think we can do this? They told me we were good for at least another 20 years.“ Roger has an excellent sense of humor and he loves to play. He’s rock royalty.
Check out the band’s itinerary for 2021 below, with more shows to be announced in the coming weeks on Foghat.com:
DATE CITY VENUE
Sat 7/17 St. Charles, IL Arcada Theatre
Fri 7/23 Walker, MN Moondance Jam (with Cheap Trick and Todd Rundgren)
Fri 7/30 The Woodlands, TX Dosey Doe
Sat 8/7 Danbury, WI St. Croix Casino Danbury
Fri 8/13 Eldon, MO Shawnee Bluff Vineyard
Sat 8/14 Granite City, IL Nick’s Bar & Grill (outside)
Sat 8/21 Canyonville, OR Seven Feathers Casino Resort
Fri 8/27 Kennewick, WA Benton Franklin Fair 2020
Sat 9/4 Mulvane, KS Kansas Star Casino (w/ Atlanta Rhythm Section, Firefall and Pat Travers)
Sat 9/11 Huntington, NY The Paramount
Thu 9/16 Ocean City, MD OC Bikefest (with George Thorogood & the Destroyers)
Sat 9/18 Uncasville, CT Mohegan Sun
Sun 9/19 West Springfield, MA The Big E
Thu 9/23 Ashland, KY Paramount Arts Center
Sun 9/26 Roanoke, VA Berglund Performing Arts Theatre
Sat 10/2 Ojai, CA Ojai Nest Fest
Sat 10/9 Port St. Lucie, FL Mid Florida Credit Union Event Center
Sat 10/16 Santa Fe, NM Buffalo Thunder Resort
Sat 11/20 Miami, FL Magic City Casino
Sat 11/27 Hiawassee, GA Anderson Music Hall (with Night Ranger)
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