INTERVIEW: Paul Rodgers is ‘free’ to do what he wants
Photo: Paul Rodgers has fronted many bands in his career, including Free and Bad Company. Photo courtesy of Paul Rodgers PR Team / Provided with permission from Richlynn Group.
Paul Rodgers, the singer behind Free and Bad Company, has a voice that needs no introduction. The musician has so many hits that putting together a set list must be a Herculean effort. Whether it’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” “All Right Now,” “Shooting Star,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy” or “Wishing Well,” Rodgers and his groups over the years have provided more than their fair share of classics.
This summer, the singer is co-headlining the Stars Align tour with Jeff Beck, a legendary guitarist in his own right. They are joined by Ann Wilson of Heart and Deborah Bonham. The rock show pulls into the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey, Sunday, Aug. 12, followed by dates in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and other states.
Rodgers has been recording and gigging for more than 50 years, and his total record sales are nearing 100 million. He has played with many other legendary rockers, including Jimmy Page, Brian May, Buddy Guy, Joe Walsh, Sam Moore and Slash.
The Stars Align tour comes on the heels of last year’s successful Free Spirit tour in the UK and subsequent album. Both last year and this year are a celebration of Free’s 50th anniversary, and audience members should expect some choice selections from the influential band’s back catalog.
Recently, Hollywood Soapbox spoke with Rodgers by phone as he prepared for the summer tour. Here’s what he had to say:
On what audiences can expect on the Stars Align tour …
“The tour is myself with Free Spirit. Jeff Beck will be doing his thing. He’s an amazing guitarist, and he’s completely in a league of his own. And then Ann Wilson is on the bill and Deborah Bonham, too, so it’s going to be a very musical evening. And I’m looking forward to it. When I played in England, I played just purely Free material, but on this tour … about half the set will be songs that I wrote with Bad Company, things like ‘Shooting Star’ and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy’ and ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love.’ So it will be something of a mixture.”
On how he chooses a set list …
“I find that the set list evolves. For instance, in the UK with the Free material, there’s just so much of it. I can’t actually fit it all in to a reasonable set length, so I have to be very selective there. Also, there’s a lot of material that we recorded, and we never played live … things like ‘Magic Ship’ and ‘Catch a Train’ and a song called ‘I Love You So.’ And it’s amazing to rediscover those songs. It’s like playing a new song.”
On Free’s 50th anniversary …
“I can’t believe it. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. You snap your fingers, and 50 years have gone by. It’s amazing how much music has flowed under the bridge. You know, it’s incredible how things changed and yet how they stay the same in many ways. Technology has really, really moved, but still the same thing applies that I think you have to play with your heart and soul. And I think that applies whatever sophisticated level of equipment you have.”
On his early songwriting days …
“I was a fledgling songwriter, and I had been listening to a lot of blues and soul — Otis Redding and John Lee Hooker and Wilson Pickett, the Four Tops, a lot of soul and blues. And it really influenced me, and it influenced my songwriting. And that’s gone on and developed actually. The first song I wrote with the 12-bar blues, ‘Walk in My Shadow,’ and … ‘Sweeth Tooth,’ that’s another one actually we still haven’t played live. We may well take a look at that because it’s amazing that the structure of the songs are what people strive for today in some respects. We never really fully developed them live, and that’s a fascinating thing to do. I’m looking forward to it.”
On Free’s relatively short duration …
“We didn’t really work the entire world, if you like, playing live. We were well known I suppose in England, and it’s fair to say that the music is deeply loved there and in Europe, too, to some extent. We went to Japan, and we only put our toe in the water in America. So we never really broke in America apart from the obvious ones like say ‘All Right Now’ and maybe ‘Wishing Well,’ so we didn’t pursue it. We broke up before we could do that and moved on, and I met Mick [Ralphs]. And the rest is history, but it’s a shame. I think a lot of great music is still loved by and influenced a lot of the bands that are up today. A lot of people come up to me and say, they love the band, and they love that music.”
On keeping his voice strong for more than 50 years …
“That’s the thing that’s over the years I’ve learned that I do have to. It’s a good idea to look after yourself and therefore one’s voice, but also I enjoy doing it very much. It’s what I sort of live for really, so, yes, I do take care of my voice. … One of the things I should mention about looking after your voice, I only do about 20 or 30 shows a year internationally, and I find that that it keeps fresh for me and for the band and for all the fans, too. That’s another way of looking after my voice. I don’t burn myself out too much.
On today’s music scene …
“Yeah, the music scene is always changing. Someone said the other day that rock ‘n’ roll, when it started out, was very underground, and then it became monstrous. Now it’s kind of underground again. I think there’s some truth in that.”
On how he became a singer …
“I was 13 or 14 when we had bands in my hometown in Middlesbrough. I was a bass player first of all. We needed a singer to sing ‘Long Tall Sally,’ I think it was. [He sings] ‘I want to tell aunt Mary…’ And I put the bass down and played that, and everyone said, ‘All right, you’re the singer.’ That’s how things were in those days, and that changed my life I think really.”
On his early musical influences …
“I still have got a vinyl record that I bought by Junior Wells … and I really love that record. Buddy Guy plays on it, and it’s a monstrously great record. Even today, I still get chills when I listen to it. A lot of the music that I did listen to — John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Going Down Slow’ and Muddy Waters — I still can put on now, and I still get the same feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s great.”
On deciding which music from his back catalog to focus on …
“Music leads me. It’s kind of instinctive I think. For instance, with the Free Spirit thing that we’re doing, it evolved from us playing together, myself and the band. … We played a charity show just for fun in Chichester, England, and it was for Willows, which is an animal sanctuary. And we enjoyed it so much, we did it the next year. We did it kind of three years running. We played a lot of the Free material, and the way they played it was so awesome and so authentic sounding for me that I said to the guys, ‘We’ll tour this one day.’ And that day came, and we toured in the UK. … We finished at the Albert Hall, and we recorded that and produced a DVD from it. It was just a natural progression of things really, and the music led that.”
On how music has forever been part of his life …
“I think it is attached to me. My mother once said, when I was very, very young, ‘You should be careful, son. Don’t let it get into your blood.’ And I thought about that for a moment. I thought, well, you know what. I said, ‘Mom, it is in my blood. I think it’s in my DNA.’ But there was a point in which I get very jaded by the business. I wanted to get away from it. That was after Bad Company when I left Bad Company back in … ‘82. Even then, though, I didn’t really get far away from music. I built a studio in my attic and recorded a solo album. It’s never really far away from me.”
On the art of recording versus the art of playing live …
“I think I learned a lot from listening to those early blues records. You’d get somebody sitting in a hotel. Robert Johnson apparently sat facing the wall playing his whole set. There’s something very authentic about that, just playing and then being able to walk out of that room or that studio, wherever you were, and recreate that feeling anywhere you go. That’s a lesson I always took. … That’s why I don’t really like to over-produce the albums because I want to be able to play it on stage without any fuss.”
On playing the hits time after time …
“I think you have to got to take the audience into consideration. They are the energy of the show, and I like to see a happy crowd. There are some songs that I just can’t not do, I really do think. Very recently I saw Robert Plant in concert and his show, his band, and it was really amazing the tapestry of other music than Led Zeppelin that he played. And they got into it. It was so amazing, but still they touched on Led Zeppelin — ‘Whole Lotta Love’ — and I thought it was great because it showed a respect for the audience and what they like and a respect for his own musicality, who he is. He’s always going to be Robert Plant, the singer with Led Zeppelin, but he’s actually more than that. He’s sort of widened the scope of it, and I thought it was brilliant. See, I do take that into consideration. I like it when the crowd sings with us. You can’t get away from that. It’s a beautiful thing.”
On how he has been an influence on other bands …
“It always amazes me who comes up and says something like that. I met the guys from the Doors once. They reformed, and I did a show with them. And Robby Krieger came up to me, and he said to me, ‘When Jim [Morrison] died, the rest of us all got on a plane and flew to England.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Yeah, we were looking for you.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘We wanted you to join us.’ That absolutely floored me. They said, ‘We couldn’t find you, so we flew home.’ So things like that absolutely do amaze me, and it’s a great compliment.”
On whether he will ever say farewell to the fans …
“I don’t know that I know the answer. I think I’ll keep bopping until I drop, as they say, but there may come a time. What is difficult actually about the whole thing is the travel and hotels and stuff like that. You have to get fresh air, quiet. You’ve got to get some sleep now and again, and you’ve got to get some good food, which is all hard to get on the road. It’s very hard on the system, so if anything I would retire for that reason and just play my guitar in the yard. But I wouldn’t be far away from music, I think.”
On the future beyond the Stars Align tour …
“I’ll see where it takes me. … There are so many songs that we recorded at the time and then just walked away, and we never played them live. When you play a song live, if it works in the studio and you want to recreate that on stage, it goes somewhere else. The song develops, and it generates other ideas into it so that it grows in many ways.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Paul Rodgers is currently on the Stars Align tour with Jeff Beck, Ann Wilson of Heart and Deborah Bonham. They stop Sunday, Aug. 12 at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
