Bad Company played meat and potatoes hard rock for the masses—they stripped things down to the fundamentals in a way that few other rock bands ever have, and the kids in the arenas loved them for it.
Austerity was their calling card; they made America’s Lynyrd Skynyrd—whose Ronnie Van Zant cited Rodgers as his biggest influence—sound like progressive rockers. They were a math problem every bit as simple as the Ramones, but without the zip. Bad Company steamrolled their way to the big time. They were every bit as remorseless as Killdozer, who paid them homage with their cover of “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad.”
Bad Company were formed in 1973 by former members of Free (vocalist Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke), Mott the Hoople (guitarist Mick Ralphs), and King Crimson (bassist Boz Burrell), which made them a supergroup I suppose, albeit a low-rent one. Or perhaps I say that simply because Bad Company never scored very high in the charisma department—they weren’t flamboyant, had zero flash, wit or lyrical ideas, and weren’t the types you’d find at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in Los Angeles. They may have called themselves Bad Company—and I could be dead wrong about this—but in my mind’s eye I see them going back to their hotel rooms after a show and brushing their teeth. Vigorously.
Their debut LP, 1974’s Bad Company, was their strongest. It boasted five classic cuts, and only one dead carp. Their next one, 1975’s Straight Shooter, had a killer A Side but a B side that kills the album’s forward momentum stone dead—the steamroller runs out of gas. It’s a primo example of the sophomore album curse, and also, I suspect, of a common guarantor of debut album follow-up failure—rushing into the studio too soon after recording the first one. Rodgers and Ralphs, the band’s primary songwriters, obviously lacked sufficient material to fill out the album, leaving them to serve up a clunker or two. Worse, they handed the ball off to Kirke—nobody’s idea of a songwriter—who contributed two tracks. They’re tepid tap water at best.
Still, there’s no gainsaying side one. Opener “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” is a all power chords, drum pummel and meanness, and a perfect example of Bad Company’s brand of musical brutalist architecture. Rodgers’ tonsils are a force of nature and he can’t stop saying “Yeah” when what he really means is “Fuck you,” while Ralph’s savage guitar solo is too functional to be called window-dressing. There’s no way to stop this song, it’s get out of the way or suffer the consequences—it’s a bullet that weighs a ton.
“Feel Like Makin’ Love” opens in ballad mode, with Rodgers coming off all sensitive and romantic like, until Bad Company hits the chorus and Rodgers says he feels like making love when what he obviously means is he wants to rut, grind, do the nasty. It’s all there in Ralphs’ priapic power chords, which make your fillings hurt—love ain’t got nothing to do with it. Foghat called their get-it-on anthem “Slow Ride”; Bad Company should have called this one “Hard Ride,” or better yet “Knee-Trembler.”
Rodgers doesn’t exactly say, “Get down, get up, get out” like Rod the Mod in the Faces’ “Stay with Me,” but then again he doesn’t have to. It’s implicit in his intonation. This one reminds me of a less intelligent take on Pulp’s mildly stomach-churning sex-as-study-in-the-pneumatics-of-pornography “This Is Hardcore.” Or Killdozer’s “The King of Sex” for that matter. Sans the irony of both songs, of course. Bad Company, god bless ‘em, suffered from a collective irony deficiency.
Kirke’s “Weep No More” does its best to sink the album like a torpedo—it’s the antithesis of everything Bad Company does best. Sweeping strings? Pretty piano? Organ? Shame, lads, shame. It’s a mid-tempo bouncer James Taylor would have known what to do with, but Rodgers is out of his element and the only thing the song has going for it is Ralphs, who plays some really nice guitar, reminiscent of Queen’s Roger May, straight through it.
Fortunately they get back on track with the classic rock staple “Shooting Star,” their tribute to every rocker who has ever rocketed to greatness only to Icarus out at a tragically early age. Like “Feel Like Makin’ Love” it’s a ballad that explodes come the choruses, with Ralphs producing power surges sufficient to black out entire city blocks. Reminds me of a line from his old band Mott the Hoople’s “One of the Boys”: “I don’t say much but I make a big noise.”
Meanwhile Rodgers tells the story of Johnny, who lives out the “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy” Bad Company would sing about later, except in Johnny’s case the fantasy ends badly—he hears Beatles song, check, picks up guitar, check, joins “outfit,” check, puts out song that goes straight to the top of the charts, check—but the final check mark, the one that reads “Johnny died one night, died in his bed/Bottle of whiskey, sleepin’ tablets by his head,” puts him in the 27 Club, and that’s the part of the fantasy that sucks. But it’s a great song, impossibly poignant if you’re seventeen and not so jaded that the lyrics read like a bad cliche. I’m jaded as fuck but I was seventeen once and I still hear it the way my seventeen-year-old self heard it, and I count myself lucky.
Side two opens on a solid note with “Deal with the Preacher,” an above average slice of hard rock that muscles on down the interstate like it’s being pursued by one of BTO’s out-of-control 18-wheelers. The rhythm section’s rock steady, Ralphs plays stinging notes right over his own big, bad riffs, and come the end Rodgers gets all hepped up and Ralphs lets rip until the whole thing comes to a halt in a drum apocalypse.
“Wild Fire Woman” is further proof that there are few things more generic than song titles that end with the word “woman.” (Or “Queen” for that matter.) It’s like a curse or something. No, I take that back. What it is is a doomed-to-failure easy out for songwriters with nothing to say. It’s nice to hear Rodgers sing in a higher register, but the whole affair is lackluster and dumb even for a band whose strong suit most certainly wasn’t a highly functioning collective cerebellum. Ralphs ran as far as far away from smart as he could when he split Mott the Hoople—Ian Hunter’s lyrics gave him brain freeze.
Kirk’s “Anna” is a low-key torch song that doesn’t ignite and for obvious reasons—the melody is pedestrian and the lyrics barely rise to the level of banality. Rodgers strives to infuse the thing with passion, does his emoting damndest in fact, but it’s no can do, a couple of jolts with a set of sizzling defibrillator paddles couldn’t give this one a pulse. I guess you could try a cattle prod.
Closer “Call on Me” is a mid-tempo, piano and organ-fueled softie, and it’s good as a melodic sensitive rocker as Bad Company ever came up with, and Ralphs scrawls cool guitar graffiti all over it, the way it follows “Anna” guarantees that the album goes out not with a bang but in a mini-barrage of marshmallows. One quiet number is cool—Bad Company went out on a fine, low-key note—but two is fatal for a band whose bread and butter was raw meat.
Bad Company produced some of the most nasty, brutish, and short hard rock songs of their time—they weren’t pretty but they got the job done, and when they tried to play nice they generally ended up looking foolish. At their best they played primal, no frills rock without the roll for Teen Neanderthals on Nembutal who understood that “makin’ love” was code for “backseat quickie” and thought about nothing else ever.
Okay, so they also thought about their bongs and harbored rock ‘n’ roll fantasies, and got kinda teary-eyed at the lines “Johnny’s life passed him by like a warm summer day/If you listen to the wind, you can still hear him play.” If it was subtlety you were looking for, or a modicum of wit, you were best off checking out AC/DC or BTO or Ted Nugent. They were Mensa material compared to the boys in Bad Company. But there’s something to be said for a brick to the head, and Bad Company produced some great bricks.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
