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| Yep, that's presence. |
The Hit
After passing through doo-wop (e.g., Don & Juan), Motown (e.g., The Exciters), surf rock (e.g., The Surfaris or The Chantays), garage rock (e.g., The Standells or ? and the Mysterians), a whiff of folk-rock (e.g., Buffalo Springfield), plus this weird phase of record labels swooping into then-thriving Ohio industrial towns for the next bubblegum pop star (e.g., The Lemon Pipers or Crazy Elephant), this project arrives at its first clear example of what I’d call 70s roots rock. All right, maybe Mountain/”Mississippi Queen” slips under the same bill, but still, it's fun ticking through music history.
Free’s “All Right Now” is a no-frills, all-balls rocker, not a word in mix about revolution or warm feelings from anywhere but the loins. It’s basically a vignette - a guy sees a girl, he chats her up, gets her to “his place,” and the negotiations begin - set to music: a steady rhythm pumping under it and fuzzy guitar licks purring around the narrator’s lyrics. After laying all that out there, the song gets coy about how things ended up…but “all right now” hints at satisfaction with the chase, if nothing else…
…all that’s noted without endorsing one-night stands, or pressuring a woman into one - and the “she” in the song hardly sounds entirely up to calling his bullshit - but the young men of this generation received clear and loud signals that “chasing” women was very much what they were supposed to do (e.g., Elvis Presley’s “Power of My Love”).
To close this section with a funny footnote, Free’s Paul Rodgers claims that a woman named Marsha Hunt inspired the song, and doing nothing more than literally “standing there, in the street.” Hunt was performing in a London production of Hair at the time. And dating Mick Jagger…Rodgers was struck “by her presence.”
The Rest of the Story
“We were essentially a blues band with adventurous leanings.”
“Who knows where we would have gone had we not had that monster hit? The huge irony was that it was the beginning of the end for us – we would disband 18 months later.”
Both of those quotes come from Simon Kirke, drummer and founding member of Free, who speaks eloquently about the band’s personalities and short, sharp brush with fame in a Louder Sound retrospective that, honestly, will give you everything this post does and all of it first-hand. (No, seriously, if you just read that and listen to the sampler, you’ll be covered.)
Free started in London in 1968 when a guy named Alex Korner brought together some young musicians who didn’t feel at home in their current bands. He invited Kirke (then 18) and Paul Kossoff (guitar, 17), then playing with Black Cat Bones, to see Rodgers (18) fronting a band called Brown Sugar at a venue called Tickle Pickle. He then arranged to have all three meet later at the Nag’s Head Pub in Battersea, this time with bassist Andy Fraser (15?!), recently dropped from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, in tow. According to Free’s official site, “it was a great, fertile meeting.” They put together six “blues-based songs” that night; Korner even named the band. There’s a funny story about what happened when they shopped that name around to labels:
“Quite a few wrote back and said the name Free was misleading and patrons were liable to come around expecting free admission. It was too ‘arty’ a name.”
“Arty” wasn’t a good fit for a band like Free, who, in their own words, “never wanted to have a gaudy sound,” and “were never interested in the trappings of psychedelia,” but they stuck with it (taking a pass on Heavy Metal Kids...which would have been dumber, no question). They all had background in the American blues and they all wanted to push it in a rock direction. Free became a famously hard-touring band almost immediately, and it didn’t take them long to find a label - their debut album, Tons of Sobs, came out in 1969. They never lacked for material - though most of the songs came from Fraser and Rodgers (who called them the Lennon/McCartney of the band) - but success took a little longer and one more little-noticed album (1969’s Free). All that changed with “All Right Now.”
The official site seems to credit Fraser for the inspiration at least; Rodgers hints at his contributions to it across multiple interviews, but that doesn’t fit easily with the official line of the song taking no more than 10 minutes to write in a dressing room one night after a show. Whoever wrote it (don’t care, don’t think they do either), the single blew up so quickly that it tossed them to a famous set at 1970’s Isle of Wight Festival (full footage here; looked good too). The single went to No. 1 on the UK charts and No. 2 in the U.S., and carried the album it appeared on, Fire and Water (1970), nearly as high (No. 2 in the UK, No. 17 in the U.S.)
An unrelenting touring, songwriting and recording schedule carried on from there and with all the pressure to follow up both the single and the album…which brings the story to one reason for the band’s break. The label wanted them to push “Ride On A Pony” as the lead single for Highway (1971), but the band committed to “The Stealer,” one of the first songs all four members had a hand in writing; for what it’s worth, I think the label got it right, but that’s academic because Highway didn’t do nearly as well, nor would anything else Free tried thereafter - even the live albums.
While creative conflicts came between Rodgers and Fraser - Free’s more driven members - the bigger, ultimately and literal fatal issue came from Kossoff’s rampant drug abuse; that people who knew both him and Traffic’s Chris Wood placed bets on which of them would die first speaks to the weight of it. Kossoff became unreliable before the band split, missing rehearsals, recordings and shows to the point where no one could be sure whether he’d show at all, but when Fraser finally left, Free’s dissolution sharpened his spiral. The band’s (generally useful) Wikipedia page notes that the band released some of the live albums in an effort to save Kossoff from himself, but the side projects had started by then (Back Street Crawlers for Kossoff) and, during one fateful flight from LA to New York City, Kossoff died of a pulmonary ambulism at age 25.
The idea that Kossoff missed the personal and musical connection to Rodgers comes up several times and the Louder Sound retrospective quotes the guitarist waxing eloquent about it:
“Playing with Paul Rodgers helped me grow; he was my best teacher as to how to enhance a voice, blues-wise. I hate to play just solos; I prefer to hear his voice and back it up or rip it around or push it – without covering it over. My style and his grew up together.”
Anyone wondering where that phrase about guitar licks purring around the lyrics can blame that quote…
For a band that met such a rough and early end - or maybe because of it - the members of Free speak to those years with remarkable affection. Kirke, especially, offered nice little odes to the three of them: Kossoff, “Koss, dear, sweet, vulnerable Koss, a prodigy for Christ’s sake! Cocky, confident, bordering on arrogant, great sense of humour, good driver”; Fraser, “quite simply a musical prodigy,” and “He played great piano and drums. He had an unnerving habit of showing me a particular way of playing a song by jumping on the kit and bashing away. It drove me nuts – but he was usually right”; Rodgers, “Rodgers was the intense one. Yes, he was aggressive and moody but that was only some of the time. On a good day he was charming and had a great sense of humor. He was also very wise – an old head on young shoulders really. And as honest as a long day.”
Fraser continued to play music, later forming the band Sharks. Kirke and Rodgers, meanwhile, moved on to Bad Company, an even bigger 70s roots/blues rock act, so, not bad. Rodgers left quite a legacy, both for the quality of his vocals and the variety of his phrasing. The author of a 2014 interview with Rodgers for HuffPost, Binky Phillips (of The Planets), framed ite by noting that both Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger “are on record declaring Paul Rodgers as their all-time favorite rock singer.” This segment traveled further for me:
“Few ‘civilians’ seem to know this, but, the next time you’re chatting with a guy in a band, maybe one over 30, ask him what he thinks of Free. You’ll see... Rock musicians with any sense of history constantly list Free along side the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin as a major influence, myself included.”
Free burned hot and burned out fast, but they set off a lot of sparks…even if they really did have only the one hit.
About the Sampler
The trouble with writing about a band so well (if quietly) loved, is that they leave…just a massive fucking pile of music to pick through to figure out what happened when, and which songs showed up on which album; that Spotify complicates the process by posting the albums in the order to the date of the reissue, instead of the original release date, hardly helps. It took a while to find my bearings, but, once I did, I stuck with Free’s first four albums - in order, Tons of Sobs, Free, Fire and Water, and Highway. This means I skipped Free’s fifth and final studio album, the Kirke and Kossoff recorded with Tetsu Yamauchi and John “Rabbit” Bundrick as Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu and Rabbit. Why? Too much to take in, man…
“All Right Now” made the cut, of course, but I slipped a little by including just two more tracks from Free’s breakthrough album, “Fire and Water” and “Oh I Wept.” Then again, that album had only seven damn songs on it…
With the rest, I decided to get a little conceptual, organizing the songs chronologically by album (except the hit; which I like dropping at either 4th, 5th or last in these samplers). So, in order, that’s “Worry,” “Walk in My Shadow” (one Rodgers said he brought into the band), and “Sweet Tooth” from Tons of Sobs, “I’ll Be Creepin’,” the appropriately delicate “Lying in the Sunshine,” “Trouble on Double Time,” and (personal favorite), “Broad Daylight” from Free, then - skipping over the stuff from Fire & Water - there’s “The Stealer,” “Sunny Day,” “Only My Soul,” “The Highway Song,” and “On My Way” from Highway. Why five from that one? I don't know how I work...
If you sit through it, you’ll see why they thought they needed something a little up-tempo, hence “All Right Now.” It’s slower, spare stuff in a lot of ways; Free was patient musically and clearly not afraid of leaving spaces, isolating instruments to let them breathe, keeping things simple generally. Whatever I think of their music (this isn’t my favorite genre, but I like it better than Bad Company), four kids made that choice in the early 20s - and with everything going on around them. Serious kids, man...
After passing through doo-wop (e.g., Don & Juan), Motown (e.g., The Exciters), surf rock (e.g., The Surfaris or The Chantays), garage rock (e.g., The Standells or ? and the Mysterians), a whiff of folk-rock (e.g., Buffalo Springfield), plus this weird phase of record labels swooping into then-thriving Ohio industrial towns for the next bubblegum pop star (e.g., The Lemon Pipers or Crazy Elephant), this project arrives at its first clear example of what I’d call 70s roots rock. All right, maybe Mountain/”Mississippi Queen” slips under the same bill, but still, it's fun ticking through music history.
Free’s “All Right Now” is a no-frills, all-balls rocker, not a word in mix about revolution or warm feelings from anywhere but the loins. It’s basically a vignette - a guy sees a girl, he chats her up, gets her to “his place,” and the negotiations begin - set to music: a steady rhythm pumping under it and fuzzy guitar licks purring around the narrator’s lyrics. After laying all that out there, the song gets coy about how things ended up…but “all right now” hints at satisfaction with the chase, if nothing else…
…all that’s noted without endorsing one-night stands, or pressuring a woman into one - and the “she” in the song hardly sounds entirely up to calling his bullshit - but the young men of this generation received clear and loud signals that “chasing” women was very much what they were supposed to do (e.g., Elvis Presley’s “Power of My Love”).
To close this section with a funny footnote, Free’s Paul Rodgers claims that a woman named Marsha Hunt inspired the song, and doing nothing more than literally “standing there, in the street.” Hunt was performing in a London production of Hair at the time. And dating Mick Jagger…Rodgers was struck “by her presence.”
The Rest of the Story
“We were essentially a blues band with adventurous leanings.”
“Who knows where we would have gone had we not had that monster hit? The huge irony was that it was the beginning of the end for us – we would disband 18 months later.”
Both of those quotes come from Simon Kirke, drummer and founding member of Free, who speaks eloquently about the band’s personalities and short, sharp brush with fame in a Louder Sound retrospective that, honestly, will give you everything this post does and all of it first-hand. (No, seriously, if you just read that and listen to the sampler, you’ll be covered.)
Free started in London in 1968 when a guy named Alex Korner brought together some young musicians who didn’t feel at home in their current bands. He invited Kirke (then 18) and Paul Kossoff (guitar, 17), then playing with Black Cat Bones, to see Rodgers (18) fronting a band called Brown Sugar at a venue called Tickle Pickle. He then arranged to have all three meet later at the Nag’s Head Pub in Battersea, this time with bassist Andy Fraser (15?!), recently dropped from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, in tow. According to Free’s official site, “it was a great, fertile meeting.” They put together six “blues-based songs” that night; Korner even named the band. There’s a funny story about what happened when they shopped that name around to labels:
“Quite a few wrote back and said the name Free was misleading and patrons were liable to come around expecting free admission. It was too ‘arty’ a name.”
“Arty” wasn’t a good fit for a band like Free, who, in their own words, “never wanted to have a gaudy sound,” and “were never interested in the trappings of psychedelia,” but they stuck with it (taking a pass on Heavy Metal Kids...which would have been dumber, no question). They all had background in the American blues and they all wanted to push it in a rock direction. Free became a famously hard-touring band almost immediately, and it didn’t take them long to find a label - their debut album, Tons of Sobs, came out in 1969. They never lacked for material - though most of the songs came from Fraser and Rodgers (who called them the Lennon/McCartney of the band) - but success took a little longer and one more little-noticed album (1969’s Free). All that changed with “All Right Now.”
The official site seems to credit Fraser for the inspiration at least; Rodgers hints at his contributions to it across multiple interviews, but that doesn’t fit easily with the official line of the song taking no more than 10 minutes to write in a dressing room one night after a show. Whoever wrote it (don’t care, don’t think they do either), the single blew up so quickly that it tossed them to a famous set at 1970’s Isle of Wight Festival (full footage here; looked good too). The single went to No. 1 on the UK charts and No. 2 in the U.S., and carried the album it appeared on, Fire and Water (1970), nearly as high (No. 2 in the UK, No. 17 in the U.S.)
An unrelenting touring, songwriting and recording schedule carried on from there and with all the pressure to follow up both the single and the album…which brings the story to one reason for the band’s break. The label wanted them to push “Ride On A Pony” as the lead single for Highway (1971), but the band committed to “The Stealer,” one of the first songs all four members had a hand in writing; for what it’s worth, I think the label got it right, but that’s academic because Highway didn’t do nearly as well, nor would anything else Free tried thereafter - even the live albums.
While creative conflicts came between Rodgers and Fraser - Free’s more driven members - the bigger, ultimately and literal fatal issue came from Kossoff’s rampant drug abuse; that people who knew both him and Traffic’s Chris Wood placed bets on which of them would die first speaks to the weight of it. Kossoff became unreliable before the band split, missing rehearsals, recordings and shows to the point where no one could be sure whether he’d show at all, but when Fraser finally left, Free’s dissolution sharpened his spiral. The band’s (generally useful) Wikipedia page notes that the band released some of the live albums in an effort to save Kossoff from himself, but the side projects had started by then (Back Street Crawlers for Kossoff) and, during one fateful flight from LA to New York City, Kossoff died of a pulmonary ambulism at age 25.
The idea that Kossoff missed the personal and musical connection to Rodgers comes up several times and the Louder Sound retrospective quotes the guitarist waxing eloquent about it:
“Playing with Paul Rodgers helped me grow; he was my best teacher as to how to enhance a voice, blues-wise. I hate to play just solos; I prefer to hear his voice and back it up or rip it around or push it – without covering it over. My style and his grew up together.”
Anyone wondering where that phrase about guitar licks purring around the lyrics can blame that quote…
For a band that met such a rough and early end - or maybe because of it - the members of Free speak to those years with remarkable affection. Kirke, especially, offered nice little odes to the three of them: Kossoff, “Koss, dear, sweet, vulnerable Koss, a prodigy for Christ’s sake! Cocky, confident, bordering on arrogant, great sense of humour, good driver”; Fraser, “quite simply a musical prodigy,” and “He played great piano and drums. He had an unnerving habit of showing me a particular way of playing a song by jumping on the kit and bashing away. It drove me nuts – but he was usually right”; Rodgers, “Rodgers was the intense one. Yes, he was aggressive and moody but that was only some of the time. On a good day he was charming and had a great sense of humor. He was also very wise – an old head on young shoulders really. And as honest as a long day.”
Fraser continued to play music, later forming the band Sharks. Kirke and Rodgers, meanwhile, moved on to Bad Company, an even bigger 70s roots/blues rock act, so, not bad. Rodgers left quite a legacy, both for the quality of his vocals and the variety of his phrasing. The author of a 2014 interview with Rodgers for HuffPost, Binky Phillips (of The Planets), framed ite by noting that both Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger “are on record declaring Paul Rodgers as their all-time favorite rock singer.” This segment traveled further for me:
“Few ‘civilians’ seem to know this, but, the next time you’re chatting with a guy in a band, maybe one over 30, ask him what he thinks of Free. You’ll see... Rock musicians with any sense of history constantly list Free along side the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin as a major influence, myself included.”
Free burned hot and burned out fast, but they set off a lot of sparks…even if they really did have only the one hit.
About the Sampler
The trouble with writing about a band so well (if quietly) loved, is that they leave…just a massive fucking pile of music to pick through to figure out what happened when, and which songs showed up on which album; that Spotify complicates the process by posting the albums in the order to the date of the reissue, instead of the original release date, hardly helps. It took a while to find my bearings, but, once I did, I stuck with Free’s first four albums - in order, Tons of Sobs, Free, Fire and Water, and Highway. This means I skipped Free’s fifth and final studio album, the Kirke and Kossoff recorded with Tetsu Yamauchi and John “Rabbit” Bundrick as Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu and Rabbit. Why? Too much to take in, man…
“All Right Now” made the cut, of course, but I slipped a little by including just two more tracks from Free’s breakthrough album, “Fire and Water” and “Oh I Wept.” Then again, that album had only seven damn songs on it…
With the rest, I decided to get a little conceptual, organizing the songs chronologically by album (except the hit; which I like dropping at either 4th, 5th or last in these samplers). So, in order, that’s “Worry,” “Walk in My Shadow” (one Rodgers said he brought into the band), and “Sweet Tooth” from Tons of Sobs, “I’ll Be Creepin’,” the appropriately delicate “Lying in the Sunshine,” “Trouble on Double Time,” and (personal favorite), “Broad Daylight” from Free, then - skipping over the stuff from Fire & Water - there’s “The Stealer,” “Sunny Day,” “Only My Soul,” “The Highway Song,” and “On My Way” from Highway. Why five from that one? I don't know how I work...
If you sit through it, you’ll see why they thought they needed something a little up-tempo, hence “All Right Now.” It’s slower, spare stuff in a lot of ways; Free was patient musically and clearly not afraid of leaving spaces, isolating instruments to let them breathe, keeping things simple generally. Whatever I think of their music (this isn’t my favorite genre, but I like it better than Bad Company), four kids made that choice in the early 20s - and with everything going on around them. Serious kids, man...
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