Day 286: Free – Free
This is my second album of the day. Earlier I listened to a famously very good and well-liked album while I was driving around and while I did enjoy it, I just had near nothing to say about it – maybe I would on a different day, but today it just wasn’t to be. It was Random Access Memories, if you care. I thought for my second album I’ll plug up a hole in my rock knowledge and listen to a bit of Free.
Album cover courtesy of Island Records
Free was a British rock band, formed in London in 1968 by Singer Paul Rodgers, guitarist Paul Kossoff, bassist Andy Fraser and drummer Simon Kirke. Kossoff and Kirke were originally in an R&B band called Black Cat Bones, but they wanted to move on to do their own thing, so they scouted Rodgers from an R&B club in London. Andy Fraser came in from having played with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a group whose former members include industry legends like Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood and Mick Taylor, among others.
Their self-titled record was released in 1969 as their second studio album, and while it wasn’t much of a commercial success, it helped pave the way for their next album Fire and Water, which featured their breakthrough hit “All Right Now”. The album was primarily written by Paul Rodgers Andy Fraser, who were only 19 and 16 years old at the time.
It’s an incredibly impressive album considering just how young these guys were – it’d still be an impressive album if it was made by adults, but knowing that these guys were all in their mid to late teens doing something that’s very comparable to the big hitters in blues-inspired hard rock is crazy. There’s a maturity to their sound, but there’s also something to it that makes them sound more like some sort of a group of freewheeling old-timers from California rather than a group of teens from London — as an album, it’s breezy and sophisticated, which teenagers famously are not. Their lack of maturity is maybe most at display with the lyrics for “I’ll Be Creepin’” because boy howdy, but otherwise you can’t really tell.
It’s a good album to listen to, definitely good enough to make me wonder what happened for them to never really gain the traction that other similar bands did at the time. You can hear that they have the capacity to release something much better than this, too. Free gets an 8/10, I’ll maybe return to this soon-ish and listen to some of their later stuff. Also, doesn’t the cover photo look similar to Lorde’s cover for Solar Power? Apparently it wasn’t a homage or anything, just a happy little accident.