When we formed Bad Company, I looked around and asked, 'Who is the biggest rock band in the world?' The answer was undoubtedly Led Zeppelin. Peter Grant was their manager, so we got him to work with us. That made the difference for Bad Company.
— Paul Rodgers
I look back on the early days of Free with Paul Kossoff with the most fondness of any of my bands, because I met him at a time when I was in London and very hungry, and we believed in each other.
I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.
The simpler the message, the broader the meaning, in many respects. I think about a song like Free's 'All Right Now,' which I'm often asked about. It's that sort of song.
It's important to me to be able to hit the notes and just be able to fly when I sing.
I come from a working-class family of seven children.
I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.
I got the idea of meditation from The Beatles. It was a fad, but I've found it beneficial in my crazy life.
I still love 'All Right Now,' strangely enough. But then that's probably because I didn't play it for some twenty years.
When Free came together, there was a creative magic around us, something unique and different.
I get a bit quick-tempered sometimes.
There are just so many people making music out there. I've always promoted the idea that everybody needs to make music. I think the more music there is in the world, the better, but it does make it highly competitive.
Free - I miss that band, but when I look back, we were very young.
When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones - everybody was writing their own songs. That's the way that you established your own identity.
A song like 'Shooting Star' - the thought process behind writing that song was that I looked around and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of people dying at that time in the music business.'
Otis Redding, his voice, there was something spiritual and unworldly and at the same time, very deeply connected with the human connection and the way one feels about life in general, love, life, and everything, really.
Life is so mundane, isn't it? It's great to hear a guitarist getting into it and the rhythmic section blasting, even if it's all meaningless.
In Free, we managed ourselves, and it was too tough for us to handle all of what that entailed when we got to touring America.
I saw The Jeff Beck Group at the Marquee Club in 1967, when he was with Rod Stewart, and holy smokes, they were amazing.
Blues is such a dynamic and ever-changing system of music.
I look at John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, guys who had a fantastic longevity, and I learned something from them. They didn't try to sell records. They weren't saying, 'Ok, what can I write, what can I do in the studio that will sell?' They were just doing their thing, and people picked up on it. I like the idea of that.
I was conscious of vocalists from an early age.
The thing about simplicity is it's not easy to achieve. To many, simplicity can mean repetitiveness and maybe even a lack of intelligence, those kind of things, but simple yet unique is the key.
My mother said I used to dance to all this radio music when I was a young kid.
'When I'm Sixty-Four' hasn't worn well, but George Harrison's 'Within You Without You' is awesome.
Free got famous fast, and it was a shock. You're working towards it, and when you suddenly get it with bells on, it is a bit much. I don't know how well I dealt with it.
When I went down to London in '67, I had three things in mind: To survive, to find peace of mind, and to make music doing it.
I was 17, and it was my first summer in London as a professional singer. One hot, humid evening, I heard that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was playing in a blues club above a pub in Finsbury Park. I was flat broke and couldn't afford a ticket, so I went along just to stand outside and listen.
I met Paul Kossoff for the first time when I was playing in the back of a pub room in Finsbury Park in London in 1967. It was kind of a blues thing going on, and he came up and said, 'I'd like to have a jam.' So he came up and jammed with me, and I just loved his playing right from the start.
I honestly have really deep reservations about releasing everything you ever did. Every time somebody farted in the studio, now it's out there.
I got the idea for the song 'Bad Company' when I saw a poster for the Jeff Bridges movie, and it reminded of an old Victorian picture that I'd once seen, and it said, 'Beware of bad company.' So I sat down at the piano and started to write the song.
I don't like lyrics to be overbearing. I like them to say something. But I'm not trying to change the world overnight. Something simple and understandable that people can relate their own everyday experiences to.
I had a band when I was 14, and we would play around in my hometown of Middlesbrough, and we'd go to the club afterwards, which was the Purple Onion then. There would be live bands playing, and in between that, the DJ would be playing records.
Of course I was a fan when I was a kid. That's what made me get into it, the whole rock n' roll fantasy.
I like to be in control of my own destiny.
Music takes me where I go. I'm always open to wherever the journey will take me.
I enjoyed playing with the guys in Free Spirit so much because they really dug into Free material, and I really liked how they expressed it. They have a lot of dynamics.
There are so many challenges and different parts to the job of singing. When you're in the studio, you have to be really, really, precise. You've got to keep everything clean and nice because that's going to be something that's down forever. And then you go onstage, and it's much more in the moment.
My dad worked on the Middlesbrough docks.
With Free, we were teenagers, and, ummm, there was a lot of raging hormones.
Soul and blues were a definite influence on me. It was raw and naked emotion which you didn't get much where I come from.
I didn't 'join' Queen. We played together and found a strong connection, did a TV show, and carried on - then I suddenly realised I'd been with these guys for four years. If I'd been called up and asked to join, I would have said no.
I like following whatever's right for me at any given time. I could have stayed with Free for 40 years, but it becomes a corporate entity after a while, and once I become locked into it and governed by it and am expected to do a certain thing all of the time, I tend to want to move on.
I have a secret weapon. My wife Cynthia is very good at keeping me in shape. She's very good for me. She's the best thing that happened to me.
A lot of those early blues records and soul records were pretty much live. It was what it was, and they had goofs and mistakes, but it still kept its charm. We have to remember to keep the feel. It's so important.
The Skynyrds and I go back to the '70s and the days and nights at the Hyatt House on Sunset in L.A., aka the Riot House.
Once I'd become a songwriter, it just stays with you. You always want to write more songs because it's such a great feeling.
I didn't really like the '80s, to be honest with you. There was some good music that came out, but it went a bit disco for me.
There were personality clashes in Free, really. I think it's as simple as that; I think we felt we weren't leaving each other enough room to develop in our own way, and we were restricting each other. So we said, let's go different ways.
Artists like Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Albert King, Ann Peebles, Isaac Hayes, and so many more gave me hope when I was an angst-filled teenager trying to make sense of it all... They were my teachers. Through their music, I learned how to live, how to be true to myself, and how to tell my story as a songwriter the way that I was feeling it.
