Artist:     Paul Rodgers

Album:     Free Spirit

Label:     Quarto Valley Records

Release Date:     06.22.2018

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Everyone knows “All Right Now.” Released in 1970, the song has received more than 3,000,000 airplays in the United States alone, but how many other Free songs can you name? I confess to being unfamiliar with anything that appeared before or after the Fire and Water album that contained “All Right Now,” so Free Spirit, a live recording of Paul Rodgers revisiting his roots as Free’s lead singer, allowed an opportunity to explore unfamiliar territory.

I’ve always found Rodgers to be one of rock’s great voices in search of great material. When the songs clicked—as they did on the first Bad Company album and when he toured with Brian May and Roger Taylor with the entire Queen catalog to explore—Rodgers was one of the top vocalists of classic Britrock. The rest of his career has been more hit and miss, with Bad Company, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, failing to live up to its early billing as the next “supergroup” and his association with Jimmy Page as The Firm never really coming together the way fans hoped.

Recorded at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the 16 songs on Free Spirit sample Free’s six studio albums released between 1968 and 1973. Kicking things off with “Little Bit of Love,” Rodgers’s voice remains strong. The song is an upbeat rocker with “peace and love” lyrics that transport listeners back to Free’s late-’60s/early-’70s heyday. “The Hunter” and “Walk in My Shadow” are from the band’s debut album, Tons of Sobs, and “Woman” is culled from the self-titled second album.

Free hit its stride with their third studio album, Fire and Water. In addition to Rodgers, the band featured the well-regarded Paul Kosoff on guitar, Andy Fraser on bass and drummer Simon Kirke. Rodgers revisits the title track and “Mr. Big” here along with, of course, “All Right Now.” From their followup album, 1970’s Highway, “Ride On A Pony” gets a little funky and “Be My Friend” shows the band’s softer side.
For Free’s final albums, Free At Last and Heartbreaker, personnel differences, augmented by Kosoff’s heavy drug use, led to a series of breakups, and different players were brought in on guitar and bass, along with the use of additional keyboards. Rodgers and Kirk departed soon thereafter to form Bad Company with guitarist Mick Ralphs from Mott the Hoople, and bassist Boz Burrell from King Crimson.

So what does this one-man retrospective do for the Free legacy? The band was clearly more than a one-hit wonder, but lacked consistently solid songwriting. To their credit, Free was known in its day as a great live act. They toured heavily, performing hundreds of shows and appearing at several major festivals. By all reports, they were a hard-working, hard-rocking blues band. Maybe that says more about their legacy than anything else.