Paul Rodgers Quotes
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In Free, we managed ourselves, and it was too tough for us to handle all of what that entailed when we got to touring America.
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I come from a working-class family of seven children.
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I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.
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When you can touch the spirit, whatever that is, and when you can feel the love, and you can feel the song is cooking and it's in the pocket, you know, everybody knows that's the one that's grooving.
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A lot of those early blues records and soul records were pretty much live. It was what it was, and they had goofs and mistakes, but it still kept its charm. We have to remember to keep the feel. It's so important.
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I like following whatever's right for me at any given time. I could have stayed with Free for 40 years, but it becomes a corporate entity after a while, and once I become locked into it and governed by it and am expected to do a certain thing all of the time, I tend to want to move on.
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When we formed Bad Company, I looked around and asked, 'Who is the biggest rock band in the world?' The answer was undoubtedly Led Zeppelin. Peter Grant was their manager, so we got him to work with us. That made the difference for Bad Company.
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It's important to me to be able to hit the notes and just be able to fly when I sing.
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I was 17, and it was my first summer in London as a professional singer. One hot, humid evening, I heard that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was playing in a blues club above a pub in Finsbury Park. I was flat broke and couldn't afford a ticket, so I went along just to stand outside and listen.
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I got the idea of what a band should be from listening to Booker T and Otis Redding.
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When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones - everybody was writing their own songs. That's the way that you established your own identity.
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With Free, we were teenagers, and, ummm, there was a lot of raging hormones.
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One overindulges when you're younger, and you pay the price in later years. But I always realized how important it was for me to take care of myself and my voice if I was gonna have a voice when I was older.
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'Shooting Star' started out as the arrangement on the record, and it's developed into a real audience-participation song, just from playing it.
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Of course I was a fan when I was a kid. That's what made me get into it, the whole rock n' roll fantasy.
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I still love 'All Right Now,' strangely enough. But then that's probably because I didn't play it for some twenty years.
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There were personality clashes in Free, really. I think it's as simple as that; I think we felt we weren't leaving each other enough room to develop in our own way, and we were restricting each other. So we said, let's go different ways.
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If not for music in my life as a young person, who knows where I would have focused my energy.
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Horses are such a powerful part of human development and have been since the early ages. We humans owe them so much.
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I met Paul Kossoff for the first time when I was playing in the back of a pub room in Finsbury Park in London in 1967. It was kind of a blues thing going on, and he came up and said, 'I'd like to have a jam.' So he came up and jammed with me, and I just loved his playing right from the start.
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There is magic on earth.
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I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.
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Free got famous fast, and it was a shock. You're working towards it, and when you suddenly get it with bells on, it is a bit much. I don't know how well I dealt with it.
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I like to be in control of my own destiny.