There are things in my iTunes that I don’t entirely recall how they got there. I mean, I have some vague idea that it involved some internet prowling of dubious copyright legality, but I couldn’t begin to track down where or when I first found the material in question. That’s compounded when even attempting to search for the artist in question proves to be a fairly fruitless endeavor, as in, say, when looking for more information about an obscure nineteen-seventies rock band that went by the name Fat. You can go pretty deep into a Google search of that word before ever encountering this particular group.

According to AllMusic (although the write-up could very be cross-posted to or from any number of sites), Fat was a Boston quintet that released one album on RCA Records in 1970. The label apparently had such a dim view on its commercial prospects that they only pressed 400 copies of the self-titled debut and then refused to work with the band further after they got caught up in some sort of drug bust. They toured with several high-impact rock acts of the time–including the Allman Brothers and Grand Funk Railroad–but those support gigs evidently garnered Fat little more than the most meager of cult followings.

There’s nothing earth-shattering about the music on their album, but then there are plenty of artists who’ve been clogging up classic rock radio for decades about whose finest efforts I could type the same thing. And every once in a while, one of these songs will shuffle up, as “The Shape I’m In” did the other day, and I’ll find myself caught up in the lean, satisfying simplicity of it. There’s a pretty cool alternate history out there in which bands like this became FM radio mainstays and dreck such as “Sweet Emotion” and about half the Doors catalog was sampled, nodded along to for a while and then filed away never to be heard from again.

Listen or download –> Fat, “The Shape I’m In”

(Disclaimer: Listen, I had a hard enough time finding any information about Fat. You don’t actually think I was able to make a definitive determination as to whether or not their self-titled album is available for purchase through legitimate means that would compensate both the artist and the proprietor of your favorite local, independently-owned record store, do you? I feel fairly confident that this is out of print, and any attempts made to acquire the self-titled debut by Fat is going to end, at best, with the unintentional acquisition of a 1984 rap album. Even so, if I’m contacted by someone requesting the removal of this track because of genuine copyright concerns, I’ll gladly and promptly comply.)