John Glover Interview

1982, London.

Glover first met Free as an agent at Island Records in the late 60s.  He went on to manage the band until its demise in 1973.  Later, he managed and produced Paul Kossoff and his band, Back Street Crawler, until Kossoff's death in 1976.

 

DAVE: When did you first get involved with Free?

JOHN: As the agent for Free back in ‘68 or ’69. [Chris] Blackwell took us out to see them rehearse in a little club in Piccadilly, Studio 51. [They were playing] at the Marquee one night. He took meself and a friend who was working at the agency at the time, and Alec Leslie. He took the three of us down there to see what we thought. At the time, Island didn’t have it’s own label, it was just a production company. We saw them in this very tiny room, about half the size of this room. They did their whole show for us, about 20 minutes. Then they went off and had a drink and we sat talking a minute, and Chris asked the three of us what we thought about it. The three of us thought they were crap! [Laughter] We basically didn’t want to know. We said, "No, forget it. Pass". And so he did for a few weeks, then I think he saw them again, or they rang him up at some point and he saw them again and signed them without asking any of us. At that point, he decided they were wonderful and signed them and brought them in. I was then their responsible booking agent at the time. I think it was ‘68, maybe ‘69, around that period of time.

DAVE: When did you first become affectionate for their music or for them? Or did you?

JOHN: I did, yeah, but it wasn’t right at the beginning. As their agent, I put them on a tour with the Who about six months after we took them on, something like that. That was basically the first time I saw them play live. As their agent, I didn’t actually bother to go and see them , as I didn’t like them much to start with. On this Who tour, they were around sixth on the bill. [It was] one of those old-fashioned English tours, with six acts a night…

DAVE: Thousands of people playing…

JOHN: Yeah! We had Joe Cocker on it as well. He was closing the first half, and Free went on before him. That was probably the first time I started to take an interest in what they were doing, not so much liking what they were doing but liking their style of doing things. They were a very insular unit inasmuch as none of us were allowed into their little clique. There were the four of them and the two roadies and that, as far as they were concerned, was their world. Anybody else didn’t really exist. You were an outsider. You might, vaguely, be a friend but you were still an outsider. I quite liked that. They were a very determined team.

They had a conversation with us quite soon after this Cocker tour. They came into our office with Blackwell and meself, and said, "look, we need you to do a decent job on this: We have an album coming out"… We did an album, to start, with. Guy Stevens produced an album with them.

DAVE: Tons of Sobs.

JOHN: Yeah. Two days in the studio and we made an album, a very quick job. In those days, it was the thing to do. If you didn’t have an album out, you weren’t really doing anything. So, we put this album together, and when it was about to come out they came in and said, "look, you may not realize this, but we are the best band in the world, and you guys are wankin’ around. Unless you realize this, we’re going to leave." Chris sort of said very quietly, "well, don’t you realize we’ve got you signed for this other album?" They said, "we don’t give a fuck. Unless you realize we are the best thing since sliced bread, we shouldn’t be working with you." And it was it… y’know, we sort of grinned, but it was true. They really believed they were the best. From the very beginning, they absolutely believed were the best thing in the world, and every gig they treated like that. It didn’t matter what it was, whether it was a little pub in the outskirts of nowhere or the Who tour, they went on as stars and that they played as if they were the people the [audience had] come to see. I’ve never, before or since, met a band like that that had quite the same thing going on for them.

DAVE: Apparently, later on you got to know Kossoff very well.

JOHN: Well, I took on managing the band completely sometime around ’72, just around the time of the first breakup. They, basically, broke up and went on their own separate ways. Rodgers put Peace together, Andy Fraser put Toby together, and Kossoff and Kirke had this KKTR thing going on, which was actually the best of the three outfits. By that time, Koss was doing a lot of dope and was in pretty bad shape. The breakup period went on for about a year, and I was involved with looking after all three bands, which was a real problem, ego-wise. In every way, it was a problem. None of them were actually doing anything. Toby and Peace weren’t really doing anything. They’d done some tracks, but none of them were really great, in honesty.

The KKTR stuff was the best, but Koss was in bad shape. There was no real leader, so that wasn’t going anywhere, either. It was all drifting apart. Each of the three bands were falling apart, and I had a chat with Rodgers about it and we decided we’d do a Free tour. Because we’d broken up at the end of a long world tour, we hadn’t actually played England at all anywhere near the time of the breakup. It was six months before we actually broke up that we’d been in England for the last time, and they were all missing gigging because they hadn’t gigged in a year. Of all these bands, there were about half a dozen shows and that was all. Nothing worthwhile. So we decided we’d put the unit back together again and do one big tour.

There were two ideas about it: One was they all wanted to play again to a big audience, be successful. And the other was that Koss was doing an awful lot of dope, and they could feel that if they didn’t get together he might just fade away, as it were. And that was part of the thinking in doing it. So, we put it all back together again and went out and did an English tour, and it was wildly successful. Apart from missing a few shows when Koss was in no condition to finish the shows. Despite that, it was a great tour, and then we did Japan. We’d done Japan once with Free, which had been staggeringly successful. The best tour we ever did was there, better even than England. We put that [Japanese tour] number one for the resurgence of Free, as it were.

We were thinking, at that time, about adding Rabbit. We’d talked about it. Just before the tour of Japan was due to take place, Fraser left the band. He and Rodgers had had a falling out again. He disappeared, so we were down to a four piece with Rabbit and no bass player at that point. About two weeks before that tour, Koss totally OD’d and [ended up in hospital]. We went to Japan and rang up Tetsu, who we’d met the first time out there. He’d become a friend, and so we said, "how’d you like to play with us on this trip?" So, we went out there a week before the tour. He routined with us out there for a week. We played as Tetsu, Rabbit, Rodgers, and Kirke.

DAVE: Wasn’t Paul [Rodgers] on guitar then?

JOHN: Rodgers was on guitar, yeah. Koss didn’t actually make the tour at all. After that tour, we got him back again. There was a brief period where he came back again, and we did a series of dates with Tetsu, Rabbit, Kossoff, Rodgers and Kirke. That’s also when we did the Heartbreaker album.

DAVE: When did the Free Live! album come out? Was that before the first break or after it?

JOHN: Free Live! was recorded before the first break, and was released after the breakup. In fact, it was released as the band broke up. Free At Last was the first album when the band got back together as a four-piece. And after that was Heartbreaker, which was the last album.

DAVE: What were they like, personally, away from each other as opposed to together as a band?

JOHN: The problem and the great thing about them was that all they actually were involved in was what they were doing in the band. Everything else was like a side issue. It was what made them great, and also what destroyed them. When it was at it’s height, between ‘70 and ‘72, we were working every day of the week. It wasn’t like nowadays, where bands take six months off. We were working every week of the year, and if we took holidays… Sometimes, they’d say, "hey, listen, book us on a holiday. Don’t book us in August for a week." Then, within five days, it’d be, "what can we do on Friday [for a] job?" It was always like that. That’s all they did was play, nothing else. They were basic players and nothing else.

DAVE: Were they all into drugs at the time, or was it just Koss?

JOHN: No. Well, when you say ‘drugs’, it wasn’t like… You know, they smoked a bit of dope or they smoked lots of dope. Koss’ problem was pills. He just took pills in vast quantities. Nothing else. It wasn’t mainline or anything, it was just pills. He took vast, vast quantities of Mandies, Mandrax.

DAVE: What brought that on?

JOHN: I don’t know. That’s a difficult one. What certainly brought it on and made it serious was the breakup of Free the first time, because he and Kirke didn’t want the band to break up. It was Rodgers and Fraser that broke the band up because they fell out with each other, and they’d been a team together, they wrote everything together. Andy was the businessman, Rodgers was the heavy, driving force in it. When they split up, the band fell apart. That year, when the band was apart, was when Koss really got into a lot of dope, and it really screwed him up from then onwards, basically. He never really got out of that to any great extent. What really started him on it, I think, is childhood problems, from what I can understand from his father. From what his father said, he was doing dope from the age of ten or twelve.

There’s three songs that they wrote that tells you the whole story. One song is on the Straight Shooter album by Bad Company, Shooting Star. If you clock that one, it’s a lot to do with Paul. The young Paul and leaving home, etc. And then Wishing Well, from the Heartbreaker album, was Paul as he became totally [involved in drugs]… that song was written about him, totally. And then the last one is Leaves in the Wind, which is on the Back Street Crawler second album, Second Street. That was written by Terry Wilson, if I remember rightly, and John Bundrick, Rabbit. I think those two. I can’t remember. But, that song is the latter-day Kossoff. Those three, in a way, sum it all up. They do for me, anyway. They may not for anyone else, but they do for me.

DAVE: What effect did the first commercial success have on them?

JOHN: Yeah, ego-wise it blew them up. As I said to you, when they first started they thought they were the best thing since sliced bread, and when they had All Right Now as a big hit, the press was hailing them as the new Rolling Stones. They were hailed that way here [in England]. It was front-page stuff in every paper, and they were regarded as being the follow-up to the Stones.

Yeah, ego-wise, they believed they were the best thing. I think they were. I’ve never met another band like them in the same way. On the stage, for me, they were better than the Stones any day of the week. The Stones , in their heyday, were fantastic, man! I’m not talking about now. In the days of Satisfaction, they were a magic band. But, for me, Free were better.

It certainly affected their ego, but just to the point that they then realized that everybody else thought they were the best thing, too! They were a very tight unit, and they never stopped being that way until the day they broke up. I knew nothing about the breakup. Even though I was looking after their day-to-day affairs, I knew nothing about it until I was sitting on a plane with Andy Fraser, flying to Japan for the last leg of the world tour. Andy said, "hey, you know we’re breaking up in six weeks time, after this tour finishes?" And I said, "what are you talking about, Andy? You’re crazy!" And he said, "no, man, I’m not. We told Chris (Blackwell) yesterday." I said, "You’re crazy!" He said, "Yeah, we decided to split up."

We were really hitting the right time. We were on the fourth album and everything we released in England was a hit. In Europe, we were building up to be a big band. In Japan we were breaking out. We were just on our way to Australia. Australia was fantastic!

DAVE: Wasn’t it big in the States?

JOHN: No! Not at all. Probably the worst of all. We never really made it that big in the States. Britain first, without any question, followed by Japan and then, maybe, America alongside Australia. America… we never, ever made it that big in America.

DAVE: Except All Right Now.

JOHN: Yeah, that was a hit. That was a single hit. But, playing-wise, we always suffered from Paul (Kossoff) having problems. Every American tour. We never finished a whole American tour, we never actually did a whole tour. There was always a week off for rehabilitation [laugh] or something. A great shame. Americans never saw their best, which is tragic.

DAVE: What were the arguments that caused the break?

JOHN: As I understand it, which I think is pretty near the truth, the first break was purely… Andy Fraser is a tremendously strong personality, and was very much the business driving force in the band. Paul Rodgers was very much the musical driving force, as Andy was, too. But, I mean, Andy was distinctly very business-oriented. Andy made all the decisions for the band. If I really wanted to know if they felt like playing a certain date, or something like that, I’d ring Andy, never the others. Andy would say, "yeah. we’ll play it," simple as that, and the others would go along with it. That was the way they ran their life, right? They accepted that.

All that happened, I think, is one day Rodgers realized that he was quite capable of making those decisions, too, and the two clashed at that point. Andy had always made the decisions, and all of a sudden it was being questioned. I might be oversimplifying, I don’t know. I’ve never said to them, "why did it break up?" But, I am sure that that is basically it. I know it’s those two that broke up, and the others were just thrown asunder. It was those two that split up.

When we got back together again, it was Andy and PR that couldn’t actually hold it together. Andy is not… Paul sings from the soul. Andy plays because he’s a great musician. That’s not being rude to him. Fraser’s a brilliant musician, right? But, Rodgers is a soul singer, and there’s a certain element of friction. They were so intense. You can’t be that intense forever. That’s probably why they were unique, because they were so intense. When you’ve got something that intense going, that there’s so much adrenaline being pumped into it every day and every night… I mean, every show was that intense. There wasn’t a single show I ever saw—and I saw hundreds of shows—where they weren’t as intense. I could never go in the dressing room afterwards for half an hour, 45 minutes. It was just unsafe, cuz they’d come off and they’d go in there and they’d all be knotted up to an extraordinary degree with something, the smallest detail. It was quite unreal. I’ve never met a band like it, ever. It was real, sheer adrenaline tension. Amazing days.

I haven’t seen Rodgers for eighteen months, two years, which is a shame. Bad Company, being what it is, and Peter Grant, being "what" he is… (Laughter)

I didn’t say that! (Laughter) That wasn’t me! I like Peter! He’s much bigger than me!

DAVE: He’ll send somebody after you!

JOHN: He doesn’t tend to let the lads make friends too easily with ex-managers. That’s life.

I’ve seen Simon a few times. I mean, Simon’s a great lad and a good mate. I’ve got Simon to play for me on a couple of records. I used to manage Jim Capaldi. Simon came in and played on some of the albums.

DAVE: When Free broke up for the second time, were they ‘apart’ apart? I’m under the impression that Fraser just quit and they…

JOHN: He just split. That was that.

DAVE: …but they were still together, in the sense that all they did was get Tetsu in.

DAVE: Yes that’s right. The second phase of Free is in two parts. It was the original tour as the four-man unit, and then it was with Tetsu and Rabbit. And that lasted for a period of time. That went through a sort of pretty hectic American tour with Traffic. Traffic, Free, and John Martyn went on tour together, and that was pretty heavy because Rabbit likes to do a certain amount of… drinking, and Rodgers enjoys a loon himself. I mean, you’ve got Rabbit— Rabbit is a brilliant musician, but also totally over-the-top as a character. They clashed in the same way, if you like. Rabbit—I haven’t seen him recently, but at the time he really believed he was a star—because he is a great player—and he wanted to be as big as Free at the time. He didn’t realize quite what he was coming into, quite how big they were.

I think he was a great influence on them. I do think the Heartbreaker album has some magic things on it, and Rabbit’s an important part of that album. His keyboard influence helped broaden the whole musical sphere, for me. But, as a character, he and PR just didn’t hit it off. And that’s when the whole thing just terminated, forever. That one American tour was a long, hard tour.

DAVE: Weren’t there a couple of other musicians that helped out, right towards the end?

JOHN: Who are you thinking of? Snuffy Walden played a little bit on something, yeah. That was only when Paul wasn’t in great shape. He came in and did it, helped us out on a couple of things, because he was a friend of Rabbit’s. I think that’s all.

Oh, no! There was… I know, there was a guy… what was his name? There was a guitarist we toured with. I can’t remember his name. That was on the last tour, which Kossoff didn’t do, the last American tour. That’s right, I’d forgotten that. The night before we left, Paul flipped out, totally flipped out. He couldn't go, he was in [such] a terrible state, and we literally grabbed this guy and left with him. Literally just like that. The following morning he came with us on the tour. The last tour, Paul didn’t do.

DAVE: How difficult was Paul to work around when he was in that state?

JOHN: Impossible. But when he was straight he was the loveliest guy you could wish to meet. Tragic. I mean, he was a schizophrenic.

DAVE: I hear it was the same with Keith Moon, also.

JOHN: No, Keith was also… Paul was an introvert. Keith [wasn’t]. Keith was always pretty outgoing [laughter]. Paul was very quiet. I mean, Paul was very quiet. That probably sounds silly, but he was a very quiet, shy guy.

DAVE: With Rabbit, how much of a problem was he… other than with Paul Rodgers?

JOHN: Rabbit was going more the way that Kossoff played. He was more sort of Kossoff-orientated than Paul Rodgers-oriented. I think that probably is the way to describe it. It’s a bit oversimplifying it, but Kossoff liked to be a bit looser with his music. The format of the Free songs was a little restricting for him. He wanted to be more like the Back Street Crawler album, his solo album: a bit looser. Rabbit was slightly more into that, too. He sort of leaned towards that way. You must remember, the time from the second Free onward was terribly difficult for the others because Paul still wasn’t straight and would ruin shows by just getting completely out of it… and it’s terribly difficult for people that love him, which they did. Those guys, including Rabbit, were really fond of him. But their whole show was destroyed when, all of a sudden, [Koss] would collapse. It was terribly difficult for [these] guys. They loved him, and when he played there was nobody like him. But, when he was out of it…

It’s so difficult to play with somebody like that, or to live with him, if you like, because you’re living with him for a period of time. And when you blow out… for instance, with the second Free, the four-man Free, we did five shows in Newcastle City Hall. We were booked to do two and we ended up doing five. We did two for nothing, because Paul couldn’t complete the first two. And then we did a third because one of the other ones—power had been cut of because of some strike. We ended up going there five times in one week, to this one hall! And basically directly because Paul couldn’t finish the shows to start with. Which, for the other guys…

DAVE: …tough to work around.

JOHN: Sure. But the man was a monster when he was on. He was a monster player. It was worth all the hassles. At the time I had nightmares about it but, looking back, I wouldn’t have missed it. He was a monster player. The man.

DAVE: Is that why you stayed in contact with him after Free broke up and on into Back Street Crawler?

JOHN: Well, I didn’t for a while, you see. When Free broke up, I actually stayed in contact with Paul Rodgers and, with Paul, I put together Bad Company. Bad Company originally was, in fact, Rodgers, Kirke, Mick Ralphs and Paul Kossoff and no bass player. It was basically those four, and I found Boz Burrell on a tour somewhere and brought him back. Then it was a five-piece, but Koss was still in the state he was in and Rodgers said, "I’m determined to get it right this time. I don’t want hassles." So Koss went. He wasn’t in any state to stay in the band.

Koss was originally in Bad Company, but Rodgers had had two years of gigs going wrong and things like that, and was determined to get into something solid that wasn’t like that. So Koss drifted out of Bad Company, and it became a four-piece. Through various contractual problems that were occurring at that time, Rodgers and myself sort of talked through the problem and Rodgers felt very strongly that he wanted to leave a particular set of contracts and then move onto another set. It was a difficult situation that I didn’t want to be involved in, inasmuch as Rodgers and I are friends and the people whose contracts he wanted to get out of were also friends. I just didn’t feel that I could be a part of that, so I got hold of Peter Grant for Paul. That’s how Peter got hold of Bad Company. It was a situation where Paul wanted somebody of a particular style to destroy a few contracts that he was in, if you like. [Laughter] He said, "who’s the man to go to?" And that’s how Peter got into it.

I, by then, dropped out of that side of things, and also wasn’t in contact with Kossoff for about six months. Then his father rang me one day and said, "look, Paul is now really straight, and wants to get something together. Would you consider working with him again?" So I did. I’ve always liked him a lot, and he’s been a good friend. When he’s straight, he’s been a great friend. And I said, "yeah! If he’s straight, I’d love to." And he was straight. He was straight for about three months while we put a band together. We put a band together with Mike Kellie, from Spooky Tooth, on drums, with Mickey Feat on bass, and I can’t remember the keyboard player in those days. I’m not sure we had a keyboard player.

I think we were looking for one but we didn’t actually get one. So the three of them did a couple of tracks, one of which appears on The Hunter solo album. It’s a compilation album of Paul’s stuff.

DAVE: Don’t you mean Koss?

JOHN: It was on Koss as well. That was one track they did in that period of time. We also had Peter Green in the band for a day. That was a wonderful thing. You know Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac? That Peter Green, the one that flipped out for a period of time. Peter was a sort of friend of Koss’ and he came down and was all set to join and then just freaked out again! [Laugh] He went back to grave-digging, which was a real shame because that was a bit magical for the couple of days it was going.

Anyway, that little unit, two guys and Koss, were offered a record deal by Island Records. I had left Island Records and was now working on my own as a manager. I’d worked at Island for ten years and left when Free broke up. Island offered us a record deal, which we accepted and which we signed. We signed it, and I actually picked up a check for the advance on a Friday night and was having lunch with Blackwell on a Sunday.

DAVE: Chris.

JOHN: Yeah. On Saturday, Paul OD’d totally. Totally and utterly OD’d, hospitalized. It was a terrible scene. When it came to the lunch on Sunday, I gave Blackwell back the check. I said, "Chris, when I signed the deal with you he was straight, and now he’s not. I’m not going to be involved anymore, and I’m sure you don’t want to be." So I just gave him back the money and we called it a day and forgot about it.

I didn’t see Paul again for another four months or so, in which time he got himself back together again. That’s when Back Street Crawler came into being, first of all with Montgomery, Terry Wilson, Tony Braunigal, and Terry Slesser. Later, when Montgomery left, Rabbit came. And that’s the Back Street Crawler period that went on for, I suppose, about a year. Paul died at the end of that.

DAVE: When did he actually do the Back Street Crawler album?

JOHN: The solo album? Oh, he did that during the last days of the first Free line-up and during the year when there was no Free at all. It wasn’t set out as an album, it was done in pieces over a period of time. The Back Street Crawler solo album was done over a period of about 18 months to two years, through the latter stages of the first Free line-up and the Free breakup period and when Free got back together again. It was done in bits, a series of sessions, through that period of time. It was put together as an album after he’d left Free altogether. It was put together, really, to help him on. He was in a bit of a terrible state at the time. We were trying to concentrate his efforts on doing something worthwhile.

DAVE: What shape was he in before he died?

JOHN: He wasn’t. The American tour, the one he died on, was a three-month tour, and he wasn’t in bad shape at all. He had a couple of benders where he downed a lot of pills, but he wasn’t in bad shape. We’d had a real bender at the beginning of the tour, and he’d broken his finger at one nasty period so we couldn’t work for three weeks. He broke his little finger, so we didn’t do any work. We just sat in LA festering for three weeks or a month. Then we carried on. It was great. We had a really good, solid six weeks touring and we finished up playing at the Starwood in LA for four nights at the end of the tour. The last two nights, Bad Company came down and played with them. It was great! Paul loved it. It was a real buzz and a great show, and it was the last two gigs he ever played. The following night we caught a night-flight back to New York to get a connecting flight back to London. There were a couple of chicks around who were a bit of a drag throughout that period in LA. They were giving dope on odd occasions, pills and things. One of them obviously gave him some dope that night, or that day before he got on the plane, and he obviously did a load on the plane, and died on the plane.

DAVE: So it was just an OD?

JOHN: Basically, yeah. It was never actually put out as such, but it was basically an OD.  He’d had a heart attack nine months before.

DAVE: That’s when he was just living by machine for a time?

JOHN: Yeah. So he’d obviously screwed his system up badly. I don’t think it was a genuine OD, as Paul could take a lot of dope and it wouldn’t make a lot of difference. It was just one of those things. He’d abused his system badly.

DAVE: And it just finally put him over the top.

JOHN: It might have been some dodgy dope, I don’t know. You know what those American autopsies are like! It took them nine months to send the report through! Nine months. Unbelievable.

DAVE: When they were in the last stages of Free did you get the impression that Rabbit was angry that he was not regarded as a star?

JOHN: I think he was frustrated more than angry. He was a frustrated musician at the time. He was very talented, and wasn’t being recognized as such. He wasn’t having the recognition that Rodgers or Kirke or Kossoff had, despite the fact that he may not have regarded them as being as talented as him. I don’t know whether he did or not. But he was frustrated, yeah, that he wasn’t getting the recognition that they were.

DAVE: Was there much drug use?

JOHN: Oh, he did as much coke as anybody else but, oh! he used to get pissed! I used to use him on sessions when I was producing stuff with different people. For me, he always has been the magic keyboard player! I love him! He was amazing on a session. If you didn’t get what he played the first time, he’d play it again differently. He’s one of those players that can never play the same thing twice. I mean, the second one would be magical, too. You’d say, "hey, Rabbit, that was brilliant but I’d like it a little more like that first one was." And the third one would be different, again. He’d go through a whole series of things. And, of course, he’d drink as well. And after about two hours, he was legless and really… ugh! So that was it: You’d run the tape machine from the top, grab as much as you could, keep as many empty tracks as you could for Rabbit! [Laughing] When he finally OD’d, you’d kick him out and mix down what you could! Magic player, great player. I don’t know how he is with the Who nowadays. I haven’t seen him.

DAVE: What are you doing now?

JOHN: I run a small record label. I put out the Koss album that you mentioned on my label. You probably got it on the DJM label because I originally released it through DJM, but it’s now available on my label, as is The Hunter album, which is a Kossoff compilation.

DAVE: Is that Street Tunes?

JOHN: Street Tunes, yeah. It’s music publishing and a small label as well. I’ve just finished a new compilation of stuff. I’ve managed to get some of the tracks back from Atlantic that they deleted from the Back Street Crawler albums, because they deleted both those albums and I’ve managed to get the five tracks that I think are the five best tracks from that period back from them. I’ve licensed them from [Atlantic], so I’ve just finished putting together an album that I’ve entitled, Leaves In The Wind. That’s one of the tracks I like best, as well. I’m going to put it out in about a month’s time. Island are about to put out a box set of Paul’s stuff, a three-album box set, in September, of all his work.

DAVE: Is it mostly previously unreleased?

JOHN: The Leaves In The Wind stuff, there’s some unreleased stuff on there. On the Island album, yeah, I think they’ve managed to dig out a live track from the Back Street Crawler days which is unreleased. They’ve also got hold of a track from the John Martyn tour that Paul was on, which we recorded. I don’t know which track. I tried to get to release those a long time ago. There are three tracks that are great. I think they’ve got one of those, and I think they’ve some stuff from Black Cat Bones, which is the band Paul was in before. It’ll be very different. They’ve got some Martha Velez stuff on there, and Champion Jack Dupree, because he played with both of them.

DAVE: Wasn’t Kirke on that?

JOHN: Yeah. So, it’ll be interesting. It’ll be kind of a nice combination. There will be a nice set of stuff out at that point.

DAVE: Didn’t you compile the Koss thing?

JOHN: Yeah.

DAVE: How much session work did he do with Jim Capaldi?

JOHN: Oh, he played on all three of the first Capaldi albums, on various tracks. And a Robert Palmer album, too. One of the Robert Palmer albums. I couldn’t get any of those tracks, but he did play on one of the Palmer albums.

DAVE: Do you keep in touch with any of them now?

JOHN: I saw Kirkie about a year ago. Fraser, yeah. I bumped into Andy in London about twelve months back. He was over on a holiday. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times, but he now lives in America. Rodgers I haven’t seen for a long time, probably a couple of years. Which is a drag, but that’s part of Bad Company’s whole thing. Kirkie’s a bit looser than anybody else. As I say, he’s played on a couple of [my] things. I managed Capaldi a couple of years back for a couple of albums, and Kirkie came and played on both of those, which was nice. Good stuff. He’s a great drummer.

DAVE: That "You And Me" is a classic track!

JOHN: Oh that’s great, yeah! That’s not on a Capaldi album. It’s a good track. There’s some good players on that. That’s the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and Koss playing. That was recorded in Muscle Shoals. We went over there to do that.  Jim was quite a good friend to Paul. They were quite good buddies.

 

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