Free began as a serious-minded bunch, each member steeped in the spirit of the British Blues Explosion. Most of their 1969 debut Tons Of Sobs and the eponymous follow-up consisted of meaningful blues tracts, and their concerts ticked along to a medium tempo. The story goes that after a particularly lacklustre college gig in Durham, Free headed for the dressing room to the audible indifference of the crowd.
“The applause had died before I had even left the drum riser,” recalled drummer Simon Kirke. “It was obvious that we needed a rocker to close our shows.” A tune that always got the room shaking was their take on The Hunter, a raunchy, upbeat blues recorded by Albert King.
“We couldn’t drop it because it was too popular,” remembered Paul Rodgers. “We knew we had to write a song with all those same qualities and a singalong chorus.”
That night in Durham, Fraser consoled his bandmates, reassuring them things would be okay by riffing on a consolatory line, ‘All right now, it’s all right now’. It stuck, and their biggest song was pieced together from there. Fraser wrote the timeless riff on piano, with Paul Kossoff then arranging it for guitar. If there were similarities with the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women, Fraser claimed he was actually trying to channel the era’s chord-meister, Pete Townshend.
If All Right Now showed Free’s more frivolous side, it was driven home by their unparalleled musical pedigree. Kirke’s cowbell-studded beat is rock solid, Fraser adds flamboyant, high-up-the-neck fills to his low-end bass groove, and Kossoff – besides that crunching riff – plays his heart out through the song’s soaring guitar solo, cut short for the single edit by Island’s Chris Blackwell, who could smell a hit.
Meanwhile, Rodgers takes the of-its-time ‘boy-pulls-girl’ lyric and pours soul all over it. The lyric, the frontman revealed to Free biographer Steven Rosen, was inspired by an unplanned encounter with actress Marsha Hunt (then in a relationship with Mick Jagger) on a London street.
“I used to live near Oxford Street and Hair was playing right there on the corner,” said Rodgers. “And I remember seeing this girl and she may have triggered the idea for that, because there she stood in the street, and she seemed to be smiling from her head to her feet. She obviously had a presence, do you know what I mean? Because there were a lot of people around and she just stood there and I thought, ‘Wow – look at her’.”
First charting in June 1970, All Right Now peaked at No.2 on the UK singles chart and at No.4 in the US. Its parent album Fire And Water also landed at No.2 in the UK, its momentum maintained by Free’s turn at the Isle Of Wight Festival that year, where Free headlined for a crowd estimated to be between 600,000 and 700,000.
In reaching that commercial high-water mark, one of the all-time great British rock bands gave us an enduring anthem. With 380 million Spotify hits and counting, it’s still played on radio daily worldwide, still lovingly murdered by countless pub bands every weekend, still imitated by the legions of groups Free inspired.
“I never bought a yacht on the Riviera off it, but it’s been very handy,” Rodgers told Classic Rock. “A couple of TV ads butchered it like the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum thing, where they just used my voice. Island Records did better than we did. The song broke us in America, but we couldn’t capitalise because we broke up and became an enigma there.”
Indeed, the success of All Right Now was a factor in that breakup, robbing Free of the musical freedom their name implied. “All Right Now really was an albatross,” Kirke told Classic Rock. “What’s that old Chinese saying: be careful what you wish for? And we got it. Suddenly, instead of playing a different town every night, we were playing a different country.”
“The pressure was on to come up with a follow-up to All Right Now, and we just couldn’t,” he continued. “That’s when Andy and Paul thought, well, we’ve reached the end of our musical journey together, let’s split up. I’ll never forget Koss’s reaction. He slumped like he’d been hit in the stomach.”
(LouderSound)
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