Swan Song 8501
Producer: Bad Company
Track listing: Can’t Get Enough / Rock Steady / Ready for Love / Don’t Let Me Down / Bad Company / The Way I Choose / Movin’ On / Seagull
September 28, 1974
1 week
When former Free vocalist Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke got together with ex-Mott Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs and King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell in summer of 1973, some called it supergroup. “We were very excited and very hot with the new material,” Rodgers says. “All of us had come from very much live playing bands, so there was an instant live feel.”
Bad Company was born out of a series of backstage conversations in the early ’70s between Rodgers and Ralphs. Rodgers’s post-Free group Peace was a support act on a tour with British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople when Ralphs. “We jammed on tuning amps backstage,” Rodgers says. “‘He was a little frustrated with what he was doing, so we started getting into material. Some of the stuff was really good like ‘Can’t Get Enough,’ but they weren’t being played by his band.”
Although the seeds were planted for Bad Company, Rodgers went back and recorded two albums with the reunited Free before that band once again fell apart. When Ralphs left Mott, he, Rodgers, and Kirke formed Bad Company. Burrell rounded out the quartet a few months later.
With the lineup complete, Bad Company became the first act signed to the Swan Song label, owned by Led Zeppelin and its manager Peter Grant, who also took on Bad Company as a client. “There was immediate interest in the band and it was a great door-opener for us,” Rodgers says of the Led Zeppelin connection. “It meant love us or not, everybody would at least give us a listen.”
Bad Company was recorded in November 1973 in Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio at Headley Grange, Hampshire, in a mere 10 days, virtually live, although the band had not performed together onstage at that point. “We did it in this really old haunted house with the mobile studio outside,” Rodgers recalls. “We had the drums set up in the hallway, because it added a lot of nice echo, and the vocal in this big room with a huge log fire, because that was a nice vibe.” On “Bad Company,” the band’s theme song, Rodgers took to the great outdoors. “We set up a microphone in the middle of a field. I did the vocal for that song right out there at midnight with the moon,” he says.
While Ralphs’s power-chord-driven “Can’t Get Enough” was beyond the vocal range of Mott the Hoople singer Ian Hunter, and therefore rejected by that band, it was the perfect vehicle for Rodgers’s husky blues-soaked vocals. “As soon as I heard it, I knew it was a song I could sing and deliver,” Rodgers says.
Soon after the album was released, the band hit the road in America with the Edgar Winter Group. Manager Grant learned with Led Zeppelin that touring drives album sales. “At the start of the tour the album was number 99 [it actually debuted at No. 75 in July 1974],” Rodgers recalls, “and at the end of the tour, the album was Number One.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of September 28, 1974
1. Bad Company, Bad Company
2. Endless Summer, Beach Boys
3. Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Stevie Wonder
4. If You Love Me, Let Me Know, Olivia Newton-John
5. Caribou, Elton John