“Walk In My Shadow” by FREE
"All Right Now" got the spotlight. What happened in the shadows of British blues-rock is more illuminating.
I’m going to lay you on the floor
“If you've got to have big amplifiers and wah-wahs and equipment to make your guitar say different things, well, hell, you can't play no blues," Muddy Waters said of his own 1968 blues-rock album, Electric Mud. Chicago blues had been reimported back to the U.S., starting with The Rolling Stones and Yardbirds, which produced an unexpected audience for Waters. The British blues-rock scene grew out of the “Rhythm and Blues” club nights by Blues Incorporated, a band with a loose membership but counted Charlie Watts as its steady drummer until he left to join the Stones and was replaced by Ginger Baker. A succession of bands, like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the original lineup of Fleetwood Mac, followed with purist aspirations. Then the Jimi Hendrix Experience arrived on the scene, making a mockery of pedants everywhere. By the end of the decade, British blues-rock would be rendered into an origin story by the debut from ex-Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page’s new band, the big-amplifier, tight-panted, world-beating Led Zeppelin.
It was at a Bluesbreakers’ gig at the end of 1965 that 15 year-old classical guitar student Paul Kossoff was inspired by Eric Clapton to buy a Gibson Les Paul. Within a year, Kossoff was in Black Cat Bones, a Chicago-style blues band that toured with pianist Champion Jack Dupree and supported Fleetwood Mac. Kossoff and Black Cat Bones drummer Simon Kirke went on to play on Dupree’s April 1968 album When You Feel the Feeling You Was Feeling; that same month, they teamed with ex-Bluesbreakers bassist Andy Fraser and singer Paul Rogers to form a band. Alexis Korner of Blues Incorporated, that founding father of British Blues, suggested the name Free. They were as young as 16 and none were yet 20.
“Walk In My Shadow” comes from Free’s debut, 1969’s Tons of Sobs, and it captures British blues-rock at a rolling boil. The album also marks the inflection point where the banner was taken up by a wave of bands for whom blues was a starting point, not a destination. Compare Kossoff on their cover Albert King’s “The Hunter” (written by Booker T. & the MGs and liberally borrowed in the last third of Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times”) to where Clapton goes on the Bluesbreakers’ version of Freddie King’s “Hideaway” — what feels more, well, free? Free weren’t there to recreate anything; these London kids were playing like how American blues felt to them.
Walk in my shadow
I can't take it anymore
When I get you in the shadows
I gonna show you what it's for
That’s the other remarkable thing about “Walk In My Shadow” — how much it’s a young man’s blues. It’s all emergent talent and undeveloped prefrontal cortex. The groove is a feral lope. The lyrics are all testosterone-addled swagger. Kossoff’s guitar guitar growls and yelps, the snarl of a would-be alpha dog. Rogers’s voice is already powerful and subtle; he wends his way through the song with a bit of menace in that preternatural rasp. Even if you’ve caught more than your fair share of the million-plus radio plays1 of “All Right Now” or the subsequent spate of Bad Company classic rock hits, his soulful vocals are a marvel here. The band stays in the pocket, letting the groove work the body so that Rogers or Kossoff can throw the occasional haymaker.
From the opening squeal of feedback, Kossoff plays “Walk In My Shadow” like he doesn't care who he hurts. His musicianship is exemplary, but it also has that know-it-when-you-hear-it quality of sounding hard. The dots connect easily both to future heavy metal riffs and to what the blues always was — not just a musical form, but a way of exorcising the “blue devil,” trouble in mind, or whatever you want to call rage turned inward.
The band built a reputation as a fierce live act, but Tons of Sobs and its follow up, Free, failed to sell. Fire and Water, the one with “All Right Now,” was released in 1970 and changed all that. The album went to #2 in the UK and #17 in the U.S. “All Right Now” topped the UK charts and reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100; it was a hit in 20 territories. The song has more Memphis soul than Chicago blues. Kossoff had been increasingly sidelined in the band, both by Island Records label boss Chris Blackwell and his own drug addiction. His lyrical solo through the song’s instrumental break, however, deepens a song that could have been a pop-rock trifle. It's sweet and bluesy in a way that’s out of place for a song about picking up a girl, but it’s a reason why that chorus so thoroughly burrows into your brain. Few things highlight the good times like a reminder that the blues is always just around the corner.
Free broke up the next year, then reformed in 1972 in one last attempt to revive the band and get Kossoff sober enough to play, but it didn’t take. Rogers and Kirke formed Bad Company with Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant as their manager. Grant knew the real money was in the States, and focused the band’s sound thusly. Their mid-tempo rockers and power ballads are an apt showcase for Rogers’s vocals, but he sounds neither challenging nor challenged. As Muddy Waters also said of Electric Mud, which was a bigger hit in the UK than at home in the States, “Quite naturally, I like a good-selling record.”2
Kossoff released a solo album, Back Street Crawler in ‘73, then formed a band by that name3. A standout song from their second, self-titled album is “It’s A Long Way Down to the Top.” Kossoff died in 1976 from a pulmonary embolism on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. He was 25.
15 Song Playlist
From “Walk In My Shadow” to “All Right Now” and solo Paul Kossoff
17 Song Playlist
A brief survey of the British blues-rock era
Sharp-eyed readers have noted that the playlists are sometimes longer than advertised, which brings to mind the rhetorical question, is a playlist ever really finished? Which is another way of saying this one, while intended as brief survey, is a prime candidate to make a liar of its newsletter headline.
Writing In Her Shadow
This week’s BSE(TW) was inspired by Cheryl, who sent a long, thoughtful list of suggestions way back in October. She’s really smart and has great style, both of which are on display here.
…And We’re Back
2022 here we go. Thanks for opening up and reading an email in this new year. Let’s see if we can make it a good one.
Certified as over a million radio spins in the US and over two million in the UK.
Among the musicians assembled to back Waters on Electric Mud was Pete Cosey, who was in Miles Davis’s band from 1973-75 and also appeared on the Pangea and Dark Magus albums. It’s said that Jimi Hendrix listened to “Herbert Harper’s Free Press Blues” to psych himself up before going on stage. Electric Mud has been reissued on Third Man records.
Singer Terry Slesser went on to replace Brian Johnson in Geordie after Johnson left to join AC/DC.