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Foghat

Foghat are an English rock band formed in London in 1971. The band is known for the use of electric slide guitar in its music. Their best known song is the 1975 hit Slow Ride. The band has achieved eight gold albums, one platinum and one double platinum album, and despite several line-up changes, continue to record and perform.

1970s
The band initially featured Dave Peverett ("Lonesome Dave") on guitar and vocals, Tony Stevens on bass and Roger Earl on drums, after all three musicians left Savoy Brown in 1971. Rod Price, on guitar/slide guitar, joined after he left Black Cat Bones in December 1970. The new line-up was named "Foghat" (a nonsense word from a Scrabble-like game played by Peverett and his brother ) in January 1971. There is a cartoon drawing on the back cover of the group's first album of a head wearing a foghat.

Foghat relocated to the United States after signing a deal with Bearsville Records. Its debut album, Foghat (1972), was produced by Dave Edmunds and featured a cover of Willie Dixon's "I Just Want to Make Love to You", which received considerable airplay, especially on FM stations. The album also included a remake of Savoy Brown's bluesy ode to the road "Leavin' Again (Again!)", and "Sarah Lee", a classic blues burner featuring Price's slide guitar solo. The band's second self-titled album went gold. It was also known as Rock and Roll for its cover photo of a rock and a bread roll. Energized (1974) came out, followed by Rock and Roll Outlaws (1974) and Fool for the City (1975). In 1974, Stevens left the band due to its relentless touring schedule and was temporarily replaced by producer Nick Jameson for the recording of Fool for the City. During the next year, Jameson was replaced by Craig MacGregor, and the group released Night Shift (1976), a live album (1977) and Stone Blue (1978), each attaining gold status in record sales. Fool for the City spawned the hit single "Slow Ride" (which reached No. 20 in the United States and No. 14 in Canada), but the greatest sales figures were reached by Foghat Live, which went double platinum. More hits followed: "Drivin' Wheel", "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (from the live album), "Stone Blue" and "Third Time Lucky (First Time I Was a Fool)". Price left the band in November 1980, unhappy with the group's still constant touring and the shift away from the hard boogie sound toward a more new wave-influenced pop direction. By February 1981, after months of auditions, he was replaced by Erik Cartwright.

1980s
After 1978, Foghat's record sales began to slip, and its last album for the Bearsville label, Zig-Zag Walk (1983), only briefly touched the charts at number 192. MacGregor quit in 1982, and Jameson returned to play on In the Mood for Something Rude and Zig Zag Walk before being replaced by Kenny Aaronson (1983) and then Rob Alter (1983-1984). MacGregor returned in 1984.

The band briefly disbanded in 1984 after Peverett left and returned to England. Earl, along with MacGregor and Cartwright, reformed with a new singer/guitarist, Eric (E.J.) Burgeson, and continued touring as Foghat into the early 1990s. MacGregor (1986-1987, 1991), Cartwright's brother Brett Cartwright (1987, 1988–1989) and Jeff Howell (1987-1988, 1989–1991) alternated on bass during that period, while Phil Nudelman (1989-1990) and Billy Davis (1990-1993) took over for Burgeson. Dave Crigger joined on bass in 1991–1993.

1990s
Peverett had returned to the United States by 1990 and formed his own version of the band, Lonesome Dave's Foghat, which featured Bryan Bassett (ex-Wild Cherry), Stephen Dees (bass) and Eddie Zyne (drums). Dees and Zyne had played with Hall & Oates, among others. Former Molly Hatchet bassist Riff West replaced Dees in 1991, and Price made several guest appearances.

In 1993, the original line-up reunited at the urging of producer Rick Rubin. Although Rubin ultimately proved to be unavailable to produce their comeback project, the group went ahead and released a studio album titled Return of the Boogie Men (1994) and the Road Cases live album (1998). Its final album of the decade, King Biscuit Flower Hour (taken from the syndicated radio show of the same name), was released in May 1999 and consisted of live recordings from 1974 and 1976.

After being back together for six years, the original line-up once again ended after Price decided to retire from touring for good. Bassett (who had been playing with Molly Hatchet), from Lonesome Dave's Foghat, was brought in on guitar.

2000s
The 2000s saw the deaths of founding members Peverett and Price. Peverett died on 7 February 2000, aged 56, from complications from kidney cancer.

Charlie Huhn (formerly of Humble Pie, Ted Nugent, and Victory) was brought in to replace him on lead vocals and guitar. This line-up of Earl, Stevens, Bassett, Huhn and Steve "ih" Farrell on backing vocals and hand percussion recorded the album Family Joules (2003).

Price died on 22 March 2005, aged 57, due to a fall resulting from a heart attack. Later that year, original bassist Stevens left the band and was replaced by former bassist MacGregor.

2010s
The 2010 version of Foghat consisted of Earl, MacGregor, Huhn and Bassett. Former Rainbow and Black Sabbath drummer Bobby Rondinelli had temporarily replaced Earl for a summer 2010 concert, while Earl was recovering from surgery. At another Foghat concert that summer, after Earl had returned to the band, bassist Jeff Howell temporarily replaced an ill MacGregor. Foghat's next album, Last Train Home (released 15 June 2010), was the culmination of a dream shared by Earl and Peverett. It contained some of their favorite blues songs, three originals ("Born for the Road", "Last Train Home" and "495 Boogie"), and two songs by special guest performer and longtime friend Eddie Kirkland, who was 86 years old at the time. He had played with Foghat as a guest in 1977 at Foghat's "Tribute to the Blues" show at New York City's Palladium, and remained a good friend of the band until he was killed in a car accident on 27 February 2011.

Also performing on Last Train Home were Howell (bass), Colin Earl (piano) and Lefty Lefkowitz (harmonica). According to Earl, the album was "a testimony to Lonesome Dave. We always planned to do this. I am so fortunate to have partners in band members Charlie Huhn and Bryan Bassett who share the same passion for the blues. It was not hard work putting this album together; playing this kind of music is joyous. We had a blast!"

The band released a DVD in December 2013 called Live in St. Pete.

On 10 November 2015, Foghat announced that they would start work on a new studio album, completely fan-funded through PledgeMusic. The album, titled Under the Influence, was released on 24 June 2016. The album went on to chart of Billboard and debuted at No. 17 on Billboard's Hard Rock Albums, and peaked at No. 40 on the Independent Album charts.

The band went on to release another live album, Live at the Belly Up in June 2017. On 9 July 2017, Erik Cartwright, who played lead guitar from 1981 to 1984, died at his home in Nashville, Tennessee, from a heart attack. He was 66 years old.

Longtime bassist MacGregor was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2015. The cancer was first detected at an earlier stage in 2012, but MacGregor was not informed until 2015. Following this incident, he became a proponent of a bill that would require physicians to communicate test results with patients promptly. Although still officially a member of Foghat, the effects of chemotherapy made him unable to play music. former Pat Travers bassist Rodney O'Quinn filled in for him on tours. MacGregor died on 9 February 2018.

Matt Barranti substituted on guitar for Bryan Bassett for a gig at Palace Theater in Greensburg, Pennsylvania on 11 February 2017.

2020s
The lineup of Earl, Bassett, Huhn and O'Quinn would go on to record a live record in November 2019 called 8 Days on the Road. The album was released in July 2021.

In January 2022, lead singer Charlie Huhn retired. Scott Holt, formerly a guitarist for Buddy Guy, became the new lead singer and guitarist. Holt had previously lent his vocals for Under the Influence and was lead vocalist in Foghat side project Earl & the Agitators.

In August 2023, Foghat announced plans to release their 17th studio album, Sonic Mojo, with first single being “Drivin’ On,” co-written by Kim Simmonds from Savoy Brown in November 2023.

Members
Current
 * Roger Earl – drums (1971–1984, 1993–present)
 * Bryan Bassett – lead guitar, slide guitar, backing vocals (1999–present)
 * Rodney O'Quinn – bass guitar, backing vocals (2015–present)
 * Scott Holt – lead vocals, guitar (2022–present)

Former
 * Dave Peverett – lead vocals, rhythm guitar (1971–1984, 1993–2000; died 2000)
 * Rod Price – lead guitar, slide guitar, backing vocals (1971–1980, 1993–1999; died 2005)
 * Tony Stevens – bass guitar, backing vocals (1971–1975, 1993–2005)
 * Nick Jameson – bass guitar, keyboards, backing vocals (1975–1976, 1982–1983)
 * Craig MacGregor – bass guitar, backing vocals (1976–1982, 1984, 2005–2015; died 2018)
 * Erik Cartwright – lead guitar, backing vocals (1981–1984; died 2017)
 * Kenny Aaronson – bass guitar (1983)
 * Rob Alter – bass guitar (1983–1984)
 * Charlie Huhn – lead vocals, guitar (2000–2022)

Studio albums
Under the Influence reached #40 on the Billboard Independent Albums Chart, and #17 on the Billboard Top Hard Rock Albums Chart.

Compilations

 * Best of Foghat (1985) US: Gold
 * Best of Foghat Volume 2 (1992)
 * Best of Foghat (Rhino Special Edition) (1992)
 * Slow Ride and Other Hits (1997)
 * Anthology (1999)
 * Hits You Remember Live (2001)
 * Live 2000 (2001)
 * The Essentials (2002)
 * The Definitive Rock Collection Double CD (2006)

Singles
"Slipped, Tripped, Fell in Love" reached #12 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay Chart.

title: Foghat


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Virelai

A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes (the others were the ballade and the rondeau) and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

One of the most famous composers of virelai is Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), who also wrote his own verse; 33 separate compositions in the form survive by him. Other composers of virelai include Jehannot de l'Escurel, one of the earliest (d. 1304), and Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400–1474), one of the latest.

By the mid-15th century, the form had become largely divorced from music, and numerous examples of this form (including the ballade and the rondeau) were written, which were either not intended to be set to music, or for which the music has not survived.

A virelai with only a single stanza is also known as a bergerette.

Musical virelai
The virelai as a song form of the 14th and early 15th century usually has three stanzas, and a refrain that is stated before the first stanza and again after each. Within each stanza, the structure is that of the bar form, with two sections that share the same rhymes and music (Stollen), followed by a third (Abgesang). The third section of each stanza shares its rhymes and music with the refrain. Thus, it can be schematically represented as AbbaA, where "A" represents the repeated refrain, "a" represents the verse set to the same music as the refrain, and "b" represents the remaining verses set to different music.

Within this overall structure, the number of lines and the rhyme scheme is variable. The refrain and Abgesang may be of three, four or five lines each, with rhyme schemes such as ABA, ABAB, AAAB, ABBA, or AABBA. The structure often involves an alternation of longer with shorter lines. Typically, all three stanzas share the same set of rhymes, which means that the entire poem may be built on just two rhymes, if the Stollen sections also share their rhymes with the refrain.

"Douce Dame Jolie" by Guillaume de Machaut is an example of a virelai with rhymes AAAB in the refrain, and AAB (with a shortened second verse) in each of the stollen sections.

 * Douce dame jolie,
 * Pour dieu ne pensés mie
 * Que nulle ait signorie
 * Seur moy fors vous seulement.

 * Qu'adès sans tricherie
 * Chierie
 * Vous ay et humblement

 * Tous les jours de ma vie
 * Servie
 * Sans villain pensement.

 * Helas! et je mendie
 * D'esperance et d'aïe;
 * Dont ma joie est fenie,
 * Se pité ne vous en prent.

 * Douce dame jolie,
 * Pour dieu ne pensés mie
 * Que nulle ait signorie
 * Seur moy fors vous seulement.

Virelai "ancien" and "nouveau"
From the 15th century onwards the virelai was no longer regularly set to music but became a purely literary form, and its structural variety proliferated. The 17th-century prosodist Père Mourgues defined what he called the virelai ancien in a way that has little in common with the musical virelais of the 14th and 15th centuries. His virelai ancien is a structure without a refrain and with an interlocking rhyme scheme between the stanzas: in the first stanza, the rhymes are AAB AAB AAB, with the B lines shorter than the A lines. In the second stanza, the B rhymes are shifted to the longer verses, and a new C rhyme is introduced for the shorter ones (BBC BBC BBC), and so on. Another form described by Père Mourgues is the virelai nouveau, which has a two-line refrain at the beginning, with each stanza ending with a repetition of either the first or the second refrain verse in alternation, and the last stanza ending in both refrain verses in reversed order. These forms have occasionally been reproduced in later English poetry, e.g. by John Payne ("Spring Sadness", a virelai ancien), and Henry Austin Dobson ("July", a virelai nouveau).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Virelai


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Valgius Rufus

Gaius Valgius Rufus, was a Roman senator, and a contemporary of Horace and Maecenas. He succeeded Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus as suffect consul upon the latter's death in 12 BC. Rufus is best known as a writer of elegies and epigrams, and his contemporaries believed him capable of great things in epic writing. The author of the panegyric on Messalla Corvinus compared Rufus as the equal of Homer.

Rufus did not confine himself to poetry. He discussed grammatical questions by correspondence, translated the rhetorical manual of his teacher Apollodorus of Pergamon, and began a treatise on medicinal plants, dedicated to Augustus. Horace addressed to him the ninth ode of the second book of his poems.

title: Valgius Rufus


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Karl Bryullov

Karl Pavlovich Bryullov, also Briullov or Briuloff, born Charles Bruleau (Карл Па́влович Брюлло́в; 23 December 1799 – 23 June 1852) was a Russian painter. He is regarded as a key figure in transition from the Russian neoclassicism to romanticism.

Biography
Karl Bryullov was born on 12 (23) December 1799 in St. Petersburg, in the family of the academician, woodcarver, and engraver Pavel Ivanovich Briullo (Brulleau, 1760—1833) who was of Huguenot descent. He felt drawn to Italy from his early years. Despite his education at the Imperial Academy of Arts (1809–1821), Bryullov never fully embraced the classical style taught by his mentors and promoted by his brother, Alexander Bryullov. After distinguishing himself as a promising and imaginative student and finishing his education, he left Russia for Rome where he worked until 1835 as a portraitist and genre painter, though his fame as an artist came when he began doing historical painting.

His best-known work, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–1833), is a vast composition compared by Pushkin and Gogol to the best works of Rubens and Van Dyck. It created a sensation in Italy and established Bryullov as one of the finest European painters of his day. After completing this work, he triumphantly returned to the Russian capital, where he made many friends among the aristocracy and intellectual elite and obtained a high post in the Imperial Academy of Arts.

An anecdote concerning Bryullov appeared in Leo Tolstoy's essay "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?" and later in the same author's book What Is Art?.

While teaching at the academy (1836–1848) he developed a portrait style which combined a neoclassical simplicity with a romantic tendency that fused well, and his penchant for realism was satisfied with an intriguing level of psychological penetration. While he was working on the plafond of St Isaac's Cathedral, his health suddenly deteriorated. Following advice of his doctors, Bryullov left Russia for Madeira in 1849 and spent the last three years of his life in Italy. He died in the village of Manziana near Rome and is buried at the Cimitero Acattolico there.

Characteristics of art
Bryullov's work is the pinnacle of late Russian Romanticism when the sense of harmonic wholeness and beauty of the world is replaced by a feeling of tragedy and conflict of life. In the forefront of the historical picture, but its main theme - not the struggle of heroes, as in classicism, and the fate of the huge human masses. In his central work "The Last Day of Pompeii" Bryullov combined the drama of action, romantic lighting effects and sculptural plasticity of figures. The painting brought the artist great fame both in Russia and in Europe.

An outstanding master of both ceremonial and chamber portraits, Bryullov evolved in his art from the joyful embrace of life in his early works to the intricate psychologism of his later ones, thus anticipating the achievements of such artists like Ilya Repin in the second half of the 19th century. Bryullov had an enormous influence on Russian artists, among whom he had many followers and imitators.

title: Karl Bryullov


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The American Language

The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, first published in 1919, is a book written by H. L. Mencken about the English language as spoken in the United States.

Origins and concept
Mencken was inspired by "the argot of the colored waiters" in Washington, as well as one of his favorite authors, Mark Twain, and his experiences on the streets of Baltimore. In 1902, Mencken remarked on the "queer words which go into the making of 'United States.'" The book was preceded by several columns in The Evening Sun. Mencken eventually asked "Why doesn't some painstaking pundit attempt a grammar of the American language... English, that is, as spoken by the great masses of the plain people of this fair land?"

In the tradition of Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary, Mencken wanted to defend "Americanisms" against a steady stream of English critics, who usually isolated Americanisms as borderline "perversions" of the "mother tongue". Mencken assaulted the prescriptive grammar of these critics and American "schoolmarms", arguing, like Samuel Johnson in the preface to his dictionary, that language evolves independently of textbooks.

The book discusses the beginnings of "American" variations from "English", the spread of these variations, American names and slang over the course of its 374 pages. According to Mencken, American English was more colourful, vivid, and creative than its British counterpart.

The book sold exceptionally well for a reference book — 1500 books, the entire first printing, in less than 2 years. The book was an early title published by Alfred A. Knopf and was revised three times in the author's lifetime. Reviews of the book praised it lavishly, with the exception of one by Mencken's old nemeses, Stuart Sherman.

Many of the sources and research material associated with the book are in the Mencken collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland.

Editions
The first edition of 1919 was revised in 1921 and 1923; the fourth "corrected, revised, and enlarged" edition was published in 1936. Mencken released two full-sized Supplements to the main volume, in 1945 and 1948, based on the boom in linguistics articles. An abridged single-volume compilation of the original volume and supplements was edited by Raven I. McDavid Jr. and published in 1963.

Audiobooks
An audiobook version was released in 2021 by Spoken Realms, read by Rebecca H. Lee

title: The American Language


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Ritual Carnage

Ritual Carnage is a thrash metal band formed in 1998. All the members are Japanese except for Damian Montgomery, their American frontman and leader.

Current members

 * Damian "Danny Carnage" Montgomery – vocals (Barbatos)
 * Wataru Yamada – guitar (King's-Evil)
 * Kenichi "Eddie Van" Koide – guitar (X Japan, The Wretched)
 * Hiroyuki Ishizawa – bass (King's-Evil)
 * Naoya Hamaii – drums

Former members

 * Shigeyuki Kamazawa – guitar (Grim Force)
 * Bill Jokela – guitar (Bereaved)
 * Ken Kubo – guitar (Bereaved, Miscreant Invocation, Blood Shower)
 * Katsuyuki Nakabayashi – guitar (Grim Force)
 * Hidenori Tanaka – guitar (Tyrant)
 * Masami Yamada – guitar (King's-Evil)
 * Hide Ideno – bass
 * Alex Amedy – drums
 * Shinjiro Sawada – drums (Blood Shower)

title: Ritual Carnage