Foghat – I Just Want to Make Love to You (The Midnight Special – Aug 3, 1978)

The Willie Dixon Standard They Turned Into A Boogie Stampede

When Foghat cut “I Just Want to Make Love to You” for their 1972 debut, it didn’t roar out of the gates like a world-beater. The single made a modest showing, but something curious happened on stage: the tune grew teeth. Night after night it stretched, sped up, and sent crowds into a sweat—the kind of reaction you can’t manufacture in a studio.

Charts tell only half the tale here. On paper, the early-’70s single didn’t bother the top slots while glam, soul, and singer-songwriters traded punches. On the road, though, it out-muscled bigger hits. By the time the band pressed a live version a few years later, FM radio treated it like an old friend who’d finally shown up with cash for the bar tab. The song’s rise wasn’t a spike—it was a slow burn that turned into a bonfire.

The origin story starts decades earlier with Willie Dixon’s pen and Muddy Waters’ voice. Foghat—fresh from Savoy Brown and hungry—heard a way to make that blues standard sprint. Dave Peverett leaned into the swagger, Roger Earl and Tony Stevens locked a locomotive pocket, and Rod Price found a slide line so sinewy it felt like a dare. The “aha” wasn’t a clever twist; it was conviction: amplify the groove, don’t pretty it up, and let the room decide.

They tracked the album with Dave Edmunds at Rockfield Studios, a farmhouse turned laboratory where volume and feel outranked polish. Takes ran hot, the tempo kicked harder than the original, and the arrangement toyed with tension—taunting intros, then a full-tilt release. Band lore says Price’s slide cut through so fiercely that engineers had to tame the edges, not sweeten them. The result sounded like a barroom suddenly twice its legal capacity.

On the album Foghat, the cover of a Chicago blues classic became the group’s calling card. It set up the punchier singles that followed and gave the band a reliable fuse to light any set. When a later live cut landed on a runaway concert LP, the crowd noise practically became a fifth member—proof that the stage, not the spreadsheet, was this song’s real home.

Legacy-wise, it’s the rare cover that feels inseparable from its interpreters. New generations find it via classic-rock radio and discover Muddy and Dixon by reverse-engineering the credits. That’s its quiet magic: a British boogie band turned a mid-century blues into a perpetual door-opener—one that still kicks it wide.

TV sealed the deal. On The Midnight Special—August 3, 1973, with Al Green hosting—Foghat tore into “I Just Want to Make Love to You” like they were racing a freight train. Rod Price’s slide cut bright lines across the mix, Dave Peverett grinned through the swagger, and the cameras caught a band already thinking in arena scale. It wasn’t a tidy promo; it felt like a gig that just happened to be on national TV, and the phones at FM stations lit up after. From that broadcast on, the cover wasn’t just a set opener—it was the moment everyone came to see.