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25 page the crisis facing rock report the death of how much money 10 ideas the album
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Bad company H bon scott H van halen H rock in crisis H def leppard H mike bloomfield H blackberry smoke H joe strummer
Bad Company rsary e v i n h An
“Zeppelin paved the way. We jumped straight in…”
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is the future of rock female?
def leppard Vs the music biz
Women rule pop – so why does rock have so few female stars?
Joe elliott’s revolution
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March 2014
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classicrockmagazine.com 37
J
uly 1973, and the big beasts of British rock are in trouble. Deep Purple have just seen singer Ian Gillan walk off stage in Japan and into a limo taking him to a solo career. Led Zeppelin have returned home from their latest US tour with John Paul Jones threatening to do the same. Black Sabbath are taking the first steps on their slide to drug-induced oblivion, The Who are struggling to make yet another concept album, and Free have just split after years of painful dissolution. Even David Bowie, currently the most fashionable rock star in the world, has just announced his retirement from the stage in London.
Some sort of salvation for rock’n’roll would come from the most unlikely corner. In a cheap New York hotel room, Mott The Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs is spending all his per diems on transatlantic phone calls to the small cottage in Surrey owned by his friend, former Free vocalist Paul Rodgers. Ralphs has become increasingly disillusioned with his role in Mott, and Rodgers is working out what to do next after Free’s ill-starred demise. United by a desperation to make up for all their past mistakes, the pair are discussing the idea of putting together a brand new band. “We’d already started writing, so I knew we had the songs,” Rodgers says now. “My main concern was that I wanted whatever I did next to be big. The biggest. No
Refugees from Free and Mott, Bad Company were Zeppelin’s only rivals. This is the story of the other great British band of the 70s.
F
ew at the time would have bet on it happening. Rodgers was an iron-willed docker’s son whose grit and determination had taken him from the streets of his native Middlesbrough to the top of the charts with Free. But that band’s success was soured by internal problems, not least personality clashes between the singer and bassist Andy Fraser. The fact that guitarist Paul Kossoff was so strung out that Free were routinely forced to cancel gigs and tours didn’t help either. Rodgers hadn’t left home and battled to get a foothold on success to let it all slip away. A man on a permanent mission, in the spring of 1971 he stormed
“I wanted bad co. to be big. the biggest. No more messing around.”
Paul Rodgers
more messing around. And I knew Mick had that same kind of ego and ambition.” Simple wishes that were, against the odds, about to come spectacularly true. Within weeks, Ralphs had left Mott to join Rodgers at his home, where they set in motion the wheels that would become Bad Company: a band that, less than a year later, would become so famous so quickly that their success in the US threatened to dwarf even that of Led Zeppelin.
Words: Mick Wall Portrait: Barrie Wentzell
“We weren’t about having hit singles,” says Mick Ralphs today, “but we were about having success. And it was unbelievable. A roller coaster. I thought, ‘It’s a fluke! It can’t possibly last.’ But it did! Money, sex, drugs… Every day I’d wake up and there we were. One of the biggest bands in the world.”
Lincs cowboy: Bad Co. bassist Boz Burrell.
The cat in the hat The life and times of Bad Co.’s secret weapon: Boz Burrell.
off to form Peace, where in an artistic fit of pique he took over playing guitar as well as singing. The trio hardly set the world alight during their fleeting lifespan – their only claim to fame was opening for Mott The Hoople for 18 shows that autumn. Little did he know it, but those dates would prove significant. It was there that Rodgers and Mick Ralphs came into each other’s orbit. Bonding over a love of classic soul and R&B records, the pair began hanging out together, jamming and having a laugh. “I was spending more time in Paul’s dressing room than our own,” says Ralphs. For Rodgers, the easy-going Mott guitarist was a breath of fresh air after the perpetually stoned Kossoff. Soon after, Rodgers threw in the towel with Peace and returned to Free – primarily, he says now, because Fraser talked him into it on the basis that it might save Paul Kossoff from spiralling even further into his drug-induced hell. They managed two more albums, 1972’s Free At Last and the following year’s Fraser-less Heartbreaker. The latter had been torture to make, with Kossoff descending even further into his professional coma. In March 38 classicrockmagazine.com
1973, Free played their last gig – minus Kossoff, who could no longer even remember how to play their hit single All Right Now. “It broke my heart to see Koss not getting it together,” says Rodgers. “But eventually I said: ‘I have to move on. I have a family, I have to work.’ Ultimately, you can only spend so long trying to rescue someone that doesn’t want to be rescued.” Ralphs was having problems of his own. Always chaotic, Mott had split up in March 1972, tired of a lack of commercial breakthrough, only for David Bowie to throw them a lifeline in the shape of All The Young Dudes. The success of that single opened up a gulf between Ralphs and singer Ian Hunter over the direction of the band – something the pair had never truly seen eye to eye on since the start. “After All The Young Dudes, Ian Hunter had sort of perfected the formula, and there was no room any more for my more bluesy, rockier style,” Ralphs says. “I didn’t like all the glittery dressing up, either.” When Rodgers and Ralphs met again in April 1973, trading tales of woe, Paul listened intently to a demo Mick had recently made of a song he’d
inset:carl dunn; Barrie Wentzell
Paul Rodgers, postFree/pre-Bad Co, playing guitar in Peace.
Born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire in 1946, Raymond ‘Boz’ Burrell was the enigma of Bad Company. Unlike the other three, he wasn’t an alumnus of a famous previous band. (King Crimson were past their commercial sell-by date by the time Boz recorded his only studio album with them, Islands in 1971.) Yet, as Simon Kirke says: “Everywhere you went, someone knew Boz. You could go to Greenland and there’d be an Eskimo going: ‘Fancy a drink, Boz?’” He didn’t write any of the songs on the two best-known Bad Co. albums, yet, according to Mick Ralphs, “he was a consummate musician. His hero was Charlie Mingus. He could play bass like a lead instrument.” And he was a joker (“a raconteur, hilariously funny”) who took nothing seriously – except his music. As Kirke reflects: “He was a real hotchpotch of characters.” By the time he joined Bad Company in 1973, Boz was a veteran of a decade’s worth of gigs with various short-lived line-ups. Starting as a singer-guitarist in his own Boz & The Boz People – “They must have been up all night thinking of that name,” deadpans Kirke – he’d played in Kenny Lynch’s backing band, for R&B outfit Feel For Soul, and released a solo single, a cover of Dylan’s Down In The Flood featuring Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Paice, all about to morph into Deep Purple. Boz Burrell was a fixture on the London scene. There was a brief reunion of original Bad Co. members in 1998 when they toured the US to promote The Original Bad Company Anthology album, but by then Kirke and Rodgers had been sober for years and Boz was still… Boz. They never toured together again. Instead Boz repaired to his villa in Spain with his new young wife, Cathy, where he would “sit in his bedroom practising for about six hours a day”, as she now recalls. The rest of the time he “would be out sunning himself. Mainly, though, he just loved to play the guitar.” He was doing just that when he died of a heart attack a few weeks after his 60th birthday in 2006.
Peter Grant (second left) plays godfather to Swan Song signings.
written called Can’t Get Enough, that Hunter had rejected on the grounds that it didn’t fit his cockney singing style. Rodgers nearly bit his arm off. “I told him: ‘Give it to me, I’ll sing it!’” The two had worked together on a track with Leslie West in 1972, but now it was time to form a band together. Ralphs had commitments with Mott, but Rodgers told the guitarist he’d wait for him to get back. “Next thing we were rehearsing and writing and the band just came together like that,” says Ralphs, who played his last gig with Mott on August 19, 1973 at the end of their US tour. But it was the arrival of former Free drummer Simon Kirke that solidified the idea of the new band in their minds. Like Rodgers, Kirke had given his all to Free, only to see his dreams sunk in a quagmire of Kossoff-driven fuck-ups and band bust-ups between his singer and bassist. A rangy South Londoner whose merchant seaman father relocated the family to Shropshire when he fell on hard times, Kirke was just as determined as Rodgers. When Free folded for the second time, he was so disillusioned he took off for Brazil with his wife, unsure if he’d ever come back. “I lost touch with Paul. With everybody, really,” Kirke says now. Then when I finally came home in the summer of ’73, I got wind of what Paul was up to and I was like, ‘Hey, what about me?’” Rodgers invited Kirke to come and jam with him and Ralphs, an offer the drummer eagerly took
him up on. “It was like we wanted to live down the pasts of our previous bands,” says Kirke. “And we wanted to be big. There was no confusion about that. Bad Company was like the big brother to Free. We were ready to take off.” As Rodgers puts it: “Once you have a drummer, you need a bass player.” To find one, they cast the net wide, trying out top session man Alan Spenner (“Fantastic – but he turned up three days late,” says Rodgers). Another candidate was “a Welsh guy” whose name they can no longer remember, who was offered the job but turned it down. And then there was the guy they went to pick up at the station. As they approached in the car, they noticed that he was bald. They simply drove on without stopping. The man who got the job was also the last man they tried out. Raymond ‘Boz’ Burrell was an amiable 27-year-old from Lincolnshire who had drifted through the 60s as a singer and guitarist before finding a measure of fame in King Crimson, where he switched to bass (legend has it that Crimson guitarist/leader Robert Fripp taught Boz to play the band’s entire set-list in just two weeks). A handsome, bearded renegade who favoured fringe jackets, ponchos and cowboy hats on stage and off, Burrell was a freewheeling character who took everything in his giant stride. He was also so good he could play no matter how stoned he was. “Mick said: ‘We’re gonna do Little Miss Fortune, it
carl dunn
simon kirke
“Peter grant could be your worst enemy or best friend. He was our friend.”
starts in G…’,” recalls Kirke. “Boz said: ‘Just give me the key, I’ll figure it out.’ And he did. We said: do you want the job? He said: ‘Er… yeah, alright.’” The band – christened Bad Company after a number written by Rodgers and Kirke – had the songs, the rhythm section and the ambition. They were almost ready to go. Almost.
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eter Grant was in the middle of setting up Led Zeppelin’s label, Swan Song, when Paul Rodgers nervously called him to ask if he would consider managing his new band. The hulking Grant was a former wrestler who had learned his craft at the feet of that other notorious gangster-like figure, Don Arden, and had gone on to steer Zeppelin to heights previously uncharted by any rock’n’roll band. Little did Rodgers know, but he would be the final, and arguably the most significant, piece of the Bad Company jigsaw. The suggestion to speak to Grant came from former Free tour manager Clive Coulson, now working for Zeppelin. Such was Grant’s reputation as a hard-man that Rodgers almost didn’t call, afraid of being bawled out for such impudence. “I’d heard the stories, but Peter was Zeppelin’s manager and they were the biggest band in the world. I said: ‘That’s who we should have.’ So I plucked up the courage. And he was great, actually. Said he’d come down to see us rehearse.” “Peter could be the worst enemy you ever had or the best friend,” adds Kirk. “We were lucky, he wanted to be our friend.” They had no idea just how lucky they were. Grant saw Rodgers as the perfect inaugural signing for Swan Song, and made the trip down to the village hall in Guildford where they were rehearsing. Wily as ever, he surreptitiously ➻ classicrockmagazine.com 39
All right now: Bad Co. was the “big brother to Free,” says Simon Kirke.
waited outside, listening on his own first. “I thought, if I don’t like it, I can just walk away,” Grant recalled years later. “But it sounded great so I walked straight in and offered them a deal.” Initially the offer was strictly for Rodgers as a solo artist. But when the singer, more determined than ever to get his own way, insisted they came as a band, Grant relented and offered to manage them all – as long as they agreed to be on Swan Song too. There was one other stipulation. “He said: ‘I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Let’s do the first six months on a handshake,’” says Rodgers. “I thought about it for a quarter of a second and stuck out my hand. I said: ‘That’s good enough for me, Peter.’ It was a gentleman’s agreement. Peter’s whole thing was: ‘You guys make the music you want and I’ll take care of the rest.’” Indeed, signing with ‘G’ – as Zeppelin and now Bad Company knew him – and Swan Song virtually guaranteed all their lives would change forever. Phil Carson was a president at Atlantic Records at the time, and a close confidant of Grant. He knew the clout the manager wielded. “You have to remember who Peter and Led Zeppelin were at that point,” says Carson today. “Zeppelin were by far our biggest-selling act, and Peter had the power to make things happen with one phone call.” Not everything went quite to plan. Rodgers and Kirke were still contracted to Free’s old label, Island. Grant figured he could easily extricate them from their deal. Island boss Chris Blackwell was having none of it. “Chris said: ‘Absolutely not! This is going to be a really big band,’” says Carson. “Apparently Simon Kirke had played him the demo [of Can’t Get Enough], much to the consternation of Peter Grant, as you can imagine.” As a result, Bad Company’s first four albums 40 classicrockmagazine.com
would come out on Swan Song, via Atlantic, in North America, and on Island Records everywhere else. But this minor hiccup wasn’t going to stop Grant. Approval of the gods: “Bear in mind also, the members Jimmy Page turned up of Led Zeppelin were all partners in to jam in Texas. Swan Song,” says Carson. “The where Zeppelin had recorded their last three better Bad Company did, the better albums. What the manager didn’t tell his new Swan Song did, and that was between them all. charges was that he’d booked the studio for Plus, Peter really believed that Bad Company was Zeppelin, only for their recording plans to a terrific band, which they be scuppered by John Paul Jones’s were. When we launched refusal to work with the rest of the Swan Song, they were very band. With Ronnie Lane’s mobile much part of the launch studio and engineer Ron Nevison of the label in America standing by, Grant figured that it too. The two kind of took would make sense to take off together.” advantage of Zeppelin’s absence. They certainly did. With Bad Company took advantage of Grant at the helm, Bad the situation by laying down the Company went from lasteight tracks that would comprise hurrah has-beens to the their self-titled debut album. It was biggest band in America recorded as-live, with Rodgers and within the space of nine Ralphs warming their arses on the mind-blowing months. fire in the living room while Burrell “Zeppelin laid the path for us in set up in the boiler room and Kirke played at the America,” says Ralphs. “G had already led the way foot of the stairwell. “We never did more than four by booking them into these huge football takes,” laughs Ralphs. “Simon wouldn’t let us!” stadiums, hiring private planes. So he had all the Of the eight tracks, three were old Ralphs tunes. right connections, and we were able to just jump Can’t Get Enough was built on the same riff the straight in.” guitarist had used on Mott’s One Of The Boys, but he Zeppelin connection would ramped up several notches by Kirk’s resplendent pay off even before Bad Company shuffle and Rodgers’s honeyed vocals; Ready For set foot in America. In November Love, which Ralphs had actually sung on the All 1973, Grant sent the band down The Young Dudes album, was here given a complete to Headley Grange, the creepy old makeover as Rodgers’s piano and voice lent it mansion house in Hampshire a timeless, trance-like quality; and Movin’ On was
T
Bad Company conquer Austin Memorial Stadium.
originally written for another Island band, Hackensack, who had released it as a single when they opened for Mott in April 1972. Another track, Seagull, had been begun by Rodgers back in the Free days but never completed. Inspired, as the tile suggests, by “sitting on the beach watching the ocean and the seagulls flying”, it wasn’t until the singer played a sketch of the song to Ralphs that it became complete. “Mick threw me a chorus line, and we finished the song together.” The most totemic song, however, was the one that lent both the band and the album its name: Bad Company. It was filched from the 1972 American Civil War movie of the same name, an ‘acid Western’ starring Barry Brown and Jeff Bridges as young men who escape the draft by becoming outlaws – its allegorical likeness to American hippies being drafted to Vietnam fully intended. “At one point we were gonna call the band Fury,” Rodgers reveals. “But it sounded too like Free. Then, when I suggested Bad Company on the
phone to Mick, he went: ‘Yes!’ The record company hated it. But the song Bad Company developed this idea of the music being about the Wild West, the frontier, that gave it a tender side too. More emotional. It became about a sense of freedom.” Again, it was the band chemistry that made it. Rodgers had the song on piano, but it wasn’t until Kirke laid down those thunderous drums on the chorus that Bad Company turned from soulful ballad into fully fledged rock anthem. Rodgers recalls recording the vocals while sitting out on the lawn at night under a new moon. “It was magic, that’s all,” he says. “Like it was out of our hands.” Indeed, it was the atmosphere as much as anything that steered that first Bad Company album. “Headley was definitely strange,” says Rodgers. “There were phantoms walking through walls, white orbs disappearing as you opened your bedroom door. You’d go: ‘Did I just see that?’ And there was an oil painting on the staircase, and one day it had all these sheep and a shepherd, next day there were all wolves. Very strange…”
Mick Ralphs
carl dunn x3
“Zeppelin, purple, us. Everyone was trying TO outdo each other.”
T
here was nothing strange about the public reaction that greeted the release of Bad Company in June 1974. Launched with great media fanfare, in Britain it reached No.3, and the short UK tour that accompanied it was a sell-out. Grant pulled off another masterstroke when, with one phone call, he got them high on the bill of The Who’s gig at Charlton football stadium in May, the summer’s biggest outdoor British festival. “We knew G was good, but now we were starting to see just how good,” says Kirke. But it was in America where things took off in earnest. The first official release on Swan Song, Bad Company might just as easily have come with a sticker that read: ‘APPROVED BY ZEPPELIN’, such was the fanfare that greeted its US release. By 1974, Zeppelin’s career had reached such a peak that it was no longer about making a new album and touring, but world domination – hence their own boutique record label. Grant saw Swan Song as win-win: a way to take money that would otherwise have gone to the taxman, and pour it into a company that would have the knock-on effect of maximising profits from record sales and also bring an end to the disputes over record sleeves, mastering, singles and release dates that had dogged Zeppelin over the years with Atlantic. Yet with Zeppelin stepping out of public view in 1974, it would be Bad Company that would be ➻ classicrockmagazine.com 41
42 classicrockmagazine.com
“I’ve always emulated these guys” Paul Rodgers on his new album of classic soul covers. How did the idea for The Royal Sessions come about? My good friend Perry Margouleff, who is a guitar player, writer and producer, was down in Memphis, and he went to the Stax museum and was looking at the Royal Studios and said aloud: “What a pity they don’t exist any more.” Lisa Allen, who runs the Stax museum and was close by, said: “Oh no, the Royal Studios are still in action. As a matter of fact, the guy who runs the place, Boo Mitchell, has just walked in. I’ll introduce you.” Talk about coincidence, it was really amazing. So, long story short, Boo took Perry for a tour and, as I discovered when I went there, you walk in and it’s like a blanket hugging you. The walls seem to seep all this atmosphere of the music that’s been made there; from Al Green and Buddy Guy to Anne Soul man: Rodgers adds rhythm to Peebles and Ike & Tina his blues. Turner, and so many other greats. So when Perry called me and asked me if I wanted to go in with him and cut some tracks, I said that I’d love to! Did you record in the authentic Royal style, i.e. get in, get some, go…? [laughs] Yes, absolutely! We did it all in three days of sessions. Boo put all the musicians together, guys who’d played with people like Al Green and Booker T. & The MG’s. Were you nervous singing in such illustrious company? I was. I’ve always emulated these guys who Grant had come into the band’s dressing room just as they were about to go on stage. “He puts this meaty arm across the door and says: ‘You’re not going anywhere,’” says Kirke. “I thought, ‘Oh, fuck me, is he gonna shoot us?’” Grant led the four of them into an adjoining room. “There was a big sheet on one of the tables and he pulled it back and there were four gold albums. He had tears in his eyes, we all had tears in our eyes, and he gave a lovely little speech and then he said: ‘Now get the fuck out of here and knock ’em dead!’ We shot out of that dressing room like greyhounds… that was how Peter did things.”
B
y the time they came to record their second album, Straight Shooter, Bad Company were the biggest band in America. They were hauled straight from their four-encore final night in Boston and attendant after-show party to the bowels of Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire, with one intention: “To do it all again, only better!” The band were in their own little bubble by then, working on what Kirke calls “Bad Company time”.
created this music all those years ago. I really felt like I had to be on my toes. And they purposely hadn’t been told who Paul Rodgers was. They just thought, well, he’s something in the rock business. We’ll see how we go… And? The first song we did was Otis Redding’s That’s How Strong My Love Is. They just laid down this track, and it was perfect right from the start. Then as soon as I started to sing I felt everybody breathe a sigh of relief. I certainly did! We just went from there. Any song I called, you’d give them ten minutes, checking for arrangements, and we’d go straight for takes. Stuff like Born Under A Bad Sign. Then Perry found the original machine they’d used to make the rain sound on Anne Peebles’s I Can’t Stand The Rain, got it working, and we did that. Just like the old days? Yes it was! We did it all on analogue, too. We only went to digital at the very last stage when we absolutely had to. But we’re also going to release a vinyl version of the album. Are you going to perform this stuff live at some point? Oh yeah, because I really want to promote this. We’ve had so much interest, which says so much for the power of these songs and this kind of music. What I’d love to do is play in some iconic club in Memphis and make a video of it. That’s going to be my main focus for 2014. Sleeping all day, working all night, with Ron Nevison once again working the mobile studio, it took just three weeks to come up with what Rodgers describes as “an even better album than the first one”. Central to it were two songs that would cement Bad Co.’s reputation as stadium rock’s new standard-bearers: Feel Like Makin’ Love and Shooting Star. The first was another song that dated back to Free, begun during a stopover in San Francisco in 1973 and finished by Rodgers and Ralphs – the former supplying the acoustic intro, the latter the crashing riff that carries the chorus. The second was Rodgers’s cautionary tale of rock’n’roll excess, inspired by what he calls the “epidemic” of drugrelated deaths in recent years: Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones (Paul Kossoff was still alive at that point, though presumably he wasn’t far from Rodgers’s mind either). “I thought, ‘This is not a war zone, why are people dying here? We’re supposed to be having a good time,’” says the singer. The rest of the album was of a similar high standard. Good Lovin’ Gone Bad was this album’s Can’t Get Enough, while epic full-spectrum tracks
Paul Rodgers/Jim McGuire
the immediate beneficiaries. The label – along with its first signing and their first album – were officially launched in May 1974 with lavish parties set a week apart in New York and Los Angeles. At the Four Seasons hotel in New York, where more than 200 guests tucked into swan-shaped cream pastries, the food and drinks bill came to over $10,000. Everything went well until a furious Grant realised the ‘swans’ he’d paid to glide elegantly among the guests were actually geese. At his bidding, Zep drummer John Bonham and tour manager Richard Cole chased the geese out into the street where two of them were killed in rushhour Manhattan traffic. Things went more smoothly at the second party, at the Bel Air hotel in LA, where guests included Groucho Marx, Bill Wyman and Bryan Ferry. After the party, Rodgers and Ralphs joined Page and Plant at Zep’s usual half-moon table at the Rainbow. “The hardest part for any new band is getting people to pay attention,” says Rodgers. “Suddenly we had the attention of everyone in America and the album hadn’t even come out yet.” Bad Company’s first tour had barely begun that summer when Can’t Get Enough and Bad Company album topped the US singles and album charts respectively. “People said we took off in America because we were a supergroup,” says Ralphs. “But most people didn’t know Free or Mott The Hoople. All they knew was what they heard on the radio, and we were everywhere that summer.” The patronage of Led Zeppelin wasn’t the only factor in their success. Phil Carson points to the connections the band had to American soul and R&B as a key factor in why Atlantic threw their weight behind them. Tracks like The Way I Choose, with its swooning horns and Otis Redding swagger, and Don’t Let Me Down, with its gospel chorus and Stax-style warm embrace, owed a debt to black American music. “It was a lot more soul-based than Zeppelin was,” says Carson. “Which was just terrific for the Atlantic label, who had such a heritage in that field. Because of that, guys like [label chief] Ahmet Ertegun and [A&R man] Jerry Wexler just loved Bad Company.” It was out on the road, though, where the difference from Free and Mott was really felt. Within weeks the band had gone from travelling in their own camper van while opening for Peter Frampton, ZZ Top and the Edgar Winter Group, to headlining their own arena shows. “Our first headline was in Cleveland, in a club that held 1,200 people but squeezed hundreds more in,” say Rodgers. “I remember driving to LA and Benji Lefevre cooking us roast dinner in the van. He was another guy who worked for Zeppelin but had come to work for us on that tour.” Carson travelled with Grant to some of those early American shows. “It was exactly like being on tour with Zeppelin,” he says. “Same guys flying the planes, same team running the show, Peter giving orders and having them obeyed instantly or else.” It didn’t hurt either when Jimmy Page turned up in September to jam with them on stage at the giant Memorial Stadium in Austin, Texas. Two months later they were flying to shows in a turbo-prop Vickers Viscount plane and headlining their first arena shows. Kirke pinpoints the final night of the tour, in Boston that September, as the moment it hit the band that they’d made it.
barrie Wentzell x2
Simon Kirke: a supergroup drummer aided by superstar habits.
like Deal With The Preacher and Call On Me extended the Bad Co. musical imprimatur beyond anything on their first album. Even Kirke contributed two songs: the moving ballad Anna (originally recorded for the Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu, Rabbit album of 1972) and the sweetly soulful Weep No More. Released in April 1975, the timing for Straight Shooter could not have been better. Physical Graffiti, Zeppelin’s latest – and arguably greatest – album had just gone to No.1 in America the previous month, dragging everything associated with it in its comet trail. Straight Shooter rocketed straight into the top five, repeating the feat in Britain, and in Feel Like Makin’ Love they had another sure-fire hit. Cue an even more massive US tour. Now flying in their own BAC 1-11 with the Bad Co. logo down the side, they based themselves in Palm Springs, commuting to shows by air. “Zeppelin, Deep Purple, us… everyone was trying to outdo each other in terms of big gigs, having the best transport,” says Ralphs. “We’d arrive at the last possible minute at the airport from our various rented houses in Palm Springs, at 5pm. Then a three-hour flight to Texas, do a gig, back on the plane and be back in Palm Springs a few hours later. I’d say to Boz: ‘Did we actually do that?’ And he’d go: ‘Yep, we did.’” Bad Company and Straight Shooter had combined sales of more than 10 million albums in America alone – Zeppelin-scale numbers. It meant that Peter Grant could ask for, and get, guarantees for the band of $250,000 a show (the equivalent of more than $1 million today). “We were awash with money,” says Ralphs. “From gigs, record sales, merchandise… Playing to 20 or 30,000 people a night, if everyone bought just one $10 T-shirt or tour programme you were looking at another $250,000 a night
All good Company: (l-r) Burrell, Rodgers, Ralphs, Kirke.
from that too! It was all money to burn.” Life was one big party, and Bad Company were making the most of it. Simon Kirke, for one, didn’t shy away from the perks of the job. “Cocaine didn’t have the connotations and the dead weight it has now,” says the drummer. “‘Sigmund Freud used it, It was in Coca-Cola in the 1920s, so what the fuck? It’s not addictive!’ It was such a social drug. You’d chop out some lines and suddenly you’d got five best friends you never knew you had.” By now the band were headlining multiple nights at the biggest arenas – New York’s Madison Square Garden, the LA Forum – and being chauffeured from their private jet in separate gold Lincoln Continentals, equipped with ice-box, drinks cabinet and sun roof, driving through red lights, rolling through whichever lanes of the highway suited them best, backed up by police escorts. Late in the tour, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant both showed up to join the band on stage at the Forum. By then they had another Swan Song artist, Maggie Bell, touring the States with them too. The Zeppelin connection was a two-way street. Grant made sure of it. “Peter was always one on one,” says Phil Carson. “He loved Bad Company and would make sure they always got the best. But he did that for all the artists he got involved with. So Zeppelin help
out Bad Company and Bad Company help out Maggie Bell. It was all one big family to Peter. Woe betide anyone who didn’t belong to it though. Peter had your back.”
B
ad Company’s second album was their apex. Their third, 1976’s Run With The Pack, gatecrashed the Billboard Top 10, but their success began to stymie them. They became tax exiles. They made albums that steadily decreased in listenability as if in direct proportion to their commerciality, before Rodgers quit following 1982’s Rough Diamonds. “That was a later chapter in the story,” says the singer. “Those first two albums was where we were going places.” “Those first few years of Bad Co. were the happiest of my life,” says Kirke. “Not just because of the fame, but because we were still backing it up by delivering the goods.” They certainly were. They helped define the sound of hard rock in 70s America. The bands that followed – Boston, Foreigner, Whitesnake – made some excellent music but owed their fortunes to the maps Bad Company and Zep drew for them, on stage and off. Forty years on, the echoes can still be heard on the classic FM dials and in the hearts and minds of everyone who fancies themselves part of that bad, bad company. As the song says, always on the run…
The new Classic Rock Presents Bad Company fanpack, featuring an exclusive 40th Anniversary Documentary DVD and a deluxe magazine, is out on March 3. Pre-order it now from www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/badcompany
mick ralphs
“We were awash with money. you were looking at $250,000 a night.” classicrockmagazine.com 43