SIMON KIRKE INTERVIEW Pt. Two
SI: Where were we?
DAVE: Your eyes were…
SI: …bigger than our stomachs. Yeah, we certainly wanted to be in the Big Time. Me and Andy really loved it, loved the adulation. The two Pauls were not quite… They liked it but, for their own reasons, they didn’t like it too much. We found that now, instead of doing towns, we were doing countries. We did a couple of world tours. We went to the States, I think. You know more than I, but I think we went three times.
DAVE: (Laughing) I’m not sure.
SI: You’re not sure. You may have to look that up, then. We did a major tour with Delaney and Bonnie and Blind Faith, and that was in the year of 1970 and "All Right Now". We were on A&M there, and I guess they wanted to back us so we could branch out into the States. I must say, we had a great time in the States. That’s what we’d really wanted to do cuz we’d already played all around England. Now we wanted to go to the States, because all of our influences were from America: the black guys and Elvis and all the old rockers. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis… America was a big thing for us inasmuch as British bands were influencing American kids. It was a nice crossover- a swap. When we got to America, it blew us! I’d never known a place could be so big! And even now, having done a good dozen tours as well as several by myself, it never ceases to amaze me, the complexity and size of the place.
So, before any of us had turned twenty, we were seasoned players. We started to experiment with drugs. I know this is going to be broadcast in a quite squeaky-clean area…
DAVE: Go for it. Say whatever you want.
SI: Cuz, from the death of Paul, there’s a good message. They were smoking hash in the early days of Free. I abstained because, being a country boy, I wasn't too sure what this heady-smelling stuff was. I wasn’t too cool on it. I was happy with my pint of beer, and that was it. Y’know, inevitably I got caught up in it and, hell, I don’t mind a joint. That’s cool. That’s, y’know… you got any? (Laugh)
DAVE: Not on me.
SI: But, you must remember, in those days—we’re talking twelve, thirteen years ago. If you got caught with a roach you were in serious trouble, boy! And that’s in England! In America, they just shot you! (Laugh) It’s amazing what’s happened in ten years in drug legislation.
DAVE: It’s still pretty sticky but, like, in California if you’re busted with less than an ounce you’re safe…
SI: You’re all right. They give you a $100.00 fine. Ten years ago, you went down for from five to ten years! Which is the most… unbelievable thing! There are parts of America where, still, you have statutory sentences, even though with a bit of money you can get it reduced. But it’s nailed up on the wall: two to twenty years, or whatever, for possession of marijuana! Really, that’s scary!
Anyway, we’re getting a little bit off-track here. Let me think… You want, really, to stick with the career…
DAVE: No. Wander as far as you like.
SI: Okay.
Let’s do the first American tour with Free. We completed it, which was a thing in itself. We did the Blind Faith / Delaney & Bonnie / Free package tour. Unfortunately, they don’t do package tours anymore. The first gig we did was Madison Square Gardens, and I was terrified! Absolutely fucking terrified! This huge place… I’d heard about it because I’m quite a boxing fan, and I’d heard of people (in mock-Yank accent) "playing the Garden". And it was in the old days when the stage revolved. Old-timers will tell you. A lot of the big theatres and auditoriums had revolving stages, but I think they cut that out now. We opened up the show with, I think, a forty-minute spot. Did we do "All Right Now"? We must have! Maybe it was before…
What am I talking about? 1970 was the year of Woodstock, wasn’t it?
DAVE: 1969.
SI: ’69. Then, I’ve jumped about six months. You must excuse me. My memory is… It’s going back fifteen years. It does tend to falter. Right! We did an American Tour! It was the time of Woodstock and the landing on the moon! And they asked us if we wanted to play this place called Woodstock. They were running out of groups! It’s all coming back to me now, but you may have to backtrack a bit. And we said, "no!" We were quite happy staying in New York. We’d never heard of this Woodstock. It was something that was on a Peanuts cartoon strip, wasn’t he? We didn’t want to be involved with that. Like, "Festival?!" We’d never heard festivals. We just wanted to do our little club called Ungano’s, which was on 48th street in New York. They said, "well, we’ll give you a helicopter and fly you up there! We won’t give you any money, but…" We said, "No. Forget it." If only!
DAVE: Oh, yeah!
SI: Yeah! What had happened between doing the east coast and the west coast of the States, Blind Faith had decided to take a couple of weeks off, so we were left high and dry.
DAVE: In New York City?
SI: In New York City on $70 a week! So, we were a bit desperate! And someone came up with this gig for us at Ungano’s, which was a real seedy club. We played there with Dr. John, the Night Tripper.
DAVE: Oh, God!
SI: We did a residency with him. And, my God, he was a funny bloke! Fuckin’ ‘ell! And, blow me down, who should walk in but Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker! They came in one night to see Koss… mainly Koss, because he was getting quite… Between him and Rodgers, they were drawing in quite a few musicians. Paul had an excellent voice, and Paul played excellent guitar.
They were sitting like that (gesturing that Clapton and Baker were sitting as far away from the band as I was from him—about five feet) because the stage was here and they were in the front row. That’s Eric Clapton and… Ginger Baker didn’t really—I had quite an admiration for him, but I wasn’t "Wow! Ginger Baker!" I was a bit bigheaded. I though, "well! He can watch me!"
Poor old Koss was really… I said, "say, man, it’s all right!" And, at the end of the gig, we got a nice round of applause and we went back to our little bolthole. There was a knock on the door, and it was Eric Clapton. He says (in a good Clapton impersonation) "Uh, can I come in?" "Cor! Can he come in?! Yeah! Of course you can come in!" And, you must remember, at the time there was a great camaraderie between British musicians out in America, y’know, because we were a long way from home. It was like a spearhead of an English invasion so, even though you had your levels, your hierarchy—like your Big Boys and then your sort of tweeters at the bottom—they were all English and they stuck together. I just thought I’d mention that.
Anyway, he came in and he said, "Look: I want you to show me one thing…" Koss said, "You want me to show you?!" He said, "Yeah! How do you do that tremolo?" Now, any budding guitarist knows you have to have intense pressure on that third, ring finger to do that. Koss had a very controlled tremolo. It wasn’t (Si warbles a sloppy, uneven tremolo). It was [very smooth], and he got a beautiful sound. You know, yourself! And this is what Clapton wanted to know how to do. Koss was on Cloud Nine for about a week after!
That was a nice little tale.
Then, the rest of the tour… We picked up. I guess we did all over. I know all over! I can’t remember the towns, but I remember a 28-hour bus ride with Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney and Bonnie…
DAVE: That must have been interesting!
SI: …and she gave me my first… No, it wasn’t blowjob! (Laughter) She gave me my first what we call Black Bombers. They’re very heavy speed. It was purely to keep awake, because we were absolutely knackered. And, any drug that goes into someone who’s never had it before, it acts about eight-strength. She was quite used to them and took three or four. But, we were up the whole 24, 28 hours. We drove from LA to Houston, about 2200 miles. And we talked the whole way! That was that. We finished the first American tour. Then, on the second English tour, that was when… We had to do the second album… It’s around about this period that I’m a little shaky on… 70 and ’71 we worked really, really hard. We did a world tour, I think.
DAVE: Japan, I think.
SI: Japan. Japan was included.
DAVE: Japan seemed to be a good audience for the band, one of the highest per capita…
SI: Yeah! Yes! Yes, for record sales.
They were very strange people to play for initially, because they sit so quietly. We were used to the rowdiness of the English and American audiences, so we thought, "My God, we’re going down dreadfully!" Then, at the end of the concert, they went absolutely nuts! Apparently, it’s impolite to do yell, "yeah!" or whatever they do out there. We were treated like royalty. It was one of the many high spots in the career of Free, that first Japanese tour.
Then we got to Australia. Now, by this time, we’d recorded Highway.
Somewhere in that year we did two albums, Fire and Water and Highway.
We’d done Fire and Water, and Island decided they wanted another
album straightaway. Which is fair enough, not a bad thing at all.
DAVE: Particularly considering they turned out so well.
SI: Yeah! You want to strike while the iron is hot. The thing was, everyone wanted us to come out with more things like "All Right Now", you know? Poppy-type stuff.
DAVE: "All Right Now, Part Two". "Son of All Right Now".
SI: Exactly! And we weren’t really… We were very much a blues-based band, and we had every intention of staying like that. The writing forces in the band, that is Fraser and Rodgers, had pretty strict ideas as to how they wanted it to go. We got friction there within the band. Paul Kossoff started to get very upset. Andy was not the bass player that we hoped… He was, and still is, the most incredible bass player, but his playing is very unorthodox. It leaves lots of gaps. Paul Kossoff, Koss—I’ll call them PR and PK. That’s how I always did it--PK, wanted keyboards, which meant getting another member in.
DAVE: Rabbit.
SI: But, the general consensus was that Free should remain a four-piece. So, as a result, we had one pissed-off guitarist.
Basically, Andy and PR wanted to split the band up. This was after the non-reception, the poor reception, of Highway. We’d pulled off "Stealer" as the single, and it really didn’t do anything on either side of the Atlantic. So, within the space of eighteen months, we’d gone from nothing to being a very big group and then back to being, on a scale of ten, about a number six.
DAVE: As far as sales, you mean.
SI: Oh, we didn’t sell. Free never got a gold album!
DAVE: Yet!
SI: Yeah! I know! (Laughing) If you take accumulative sales, I guess so. I know I’ve got a little gold 45 for "All Right Now", but we hardly sold a thing as Free.
DAVE: Pity.
SI: It would be very interesting to know what the final sales were, but I’ve never yet, from the RIAA, received anything… I tell you now, it would be lovely, because it meant an awful lot to me.
Anyway, that happened… I’m not going to give you any dates, because they’ll probably be wrong… We had another world tour planned, and we decided to do it. There would be no money in it for us. But we did it, purely out of honor. We were going to go ahead and do it.
DAVE: Was this just after the Highway split?
SI: Just after. We’d gone into the studios during the final mixes of Highway. We’d planned to split. Even though the album had been…we knew it was going to get poor results, because the people upstairs didn’t like it. We knew it was going to be a bummer, so we said, "we’re going to do this tour, then we want to go our separate ways." That was Andy and PR. PK and myself felt kind of miserable about it. We thought, "well, shit! We’ve only had one good year…"
Anyway, during that tour everything went great. We played great and we got great responses. We thought, "if only they knew we weren’t going to be coming back!" (Laughter) It was a crazy situation! I don’t think we even told our managers until the end. And they were going, "What?!"
DAVE: That’s right. John (Glover) said Andy cornered him on a plane and said, "you know we’re breaking up at the end of this tour, don’t you?"
SI: That’s right. Really, it was the worst thing that we could have done. Looking back, and that happened over ten years ago, I regret that decision to this day. Even though I went on to ‘bigger and better things’ in Bad Company, it cost Koss his health and, ultimately, his life. And it cost everyone a lot of heartache. A lot of silly bickering went on. It was the wrong decision to make, and it was made by four guys that didn’t really know. We didn’t really have a good manager to say, "take a year off!" See, in those days the band was all. It was like that thing, "All for one and one for all!" You didn’t have splinter groups, whereby you could take a few months off and play with some other guys. Free and it’s big brother, Bad Company, were very much protected from outside forces. We never jammed with anyone. We never got to see any other musicians. We were very much a guarded asset.
DAVE: Commodity.
SI: Yeah! And we were kept under wraps. When Free finally did break up and I got out into the real world and found out that everyone was having a great time by still playing with their old buddies but, every now and again, going around to somebody's house or making a solo album or helping out on this album or whatever, I thought, "Jesus! What have I been missing?"
Anyway, the last gig that Free did—the original Free—was at Randwick Racecourse in Sydney, Australia. From that point, we flew back. Paul Rodgers went back to Tokyo and married his Japanese wife, and they’re still together now. Andy went home, and I went with Paul Kossoff to LA, where we spent a few weeks. And I spent a period of time in jail.
DAVE: Oh, really?
SI: Possession of marijuana. I was lucky to get away with my balls intact!
It gets a bit murky here. We got back, and Paul got really heavy into drugs, Paul Kossoff. He started getting heavily into drugs. Now, what was the next album again, after?
DAVE: Free Live! had been in the can and was
released after the breakup.
SI: Wasn’t there a Free At Last?
DAVE: Well, Free At Last was recorded after you reformed. Kossoff / Kirke / Tetsu / Rabbit was recorded before that.
SI: Oh, yeah! So you’re really coming to the break. That’s right! That’s right! It’s coming back to me now. Paul Koss and myself decided to stick together and get Tetsu, who we’d met in Tokyo the last trip to Japan. We’d met John Bundrick, Rabbit, through Johnny Nash, who was a big singer…
DAVE: "I Can See Clearly Now," the whole pseudo-reggae thing…
SI: Right. And he (Rabbit) was a brilliant guy, and he was from Texas. Fort Worth.
DAVE: Houston.
SI: Houston? Oops, sorry. Houston. He was in England. We flew Tetsu over. Everyone was so happy, I tell you. I was really happy to make that album. For a start, I got a chance to write a couple of songs. I got a chance to sing, and do everything that I hadn’t been able to do with Free.
DAVE: Who did sing lead on that album?
SI: Well, I sang a couple of tracks, but the majority of the tracks were sung by Rabbit. He had a good country voice, a strong voice.
DAVE: Who sang the last track, "Colours"?
SI: I think Paul. Everyone had the chance to do everything they wanted to do. Yeah, it was great. Koss got all the keyboards that he wanted, we had chances to experiment, and blah blah blah. And, all of a sudden, I noticed Paul was getting slower in his speech and… wasn’t actually Koss. I wrote somewhere-- There’ a biography coming out, called "Koss", on which I helped—that one of the things that nobody really knew about [Koss] was his driving. (I begin laughing at this) I swear to God! He drove us everywhere in the car! When Free was a big band, we had a car. We didn’t have a chauffeur. We weren’t that big. But he did all the driving. Brilliant. He could have been a top-class racing driver.
So, from a guy that was really very sharp, he wouldn’t be getting up until very late in the afternoon. He would be shaking, his hands would be shaking. And the, one day, he just fell asleep! While playing! I thought, "Hell, man! That’s really clever!"
DAVE: Like a narcoleptic, he just went out?
SI: Yeah! He was waiting to do an overdub, waiting for his cue. And (snaps his fingers) he was asleep! This was a drug called Mandrax, which is the English equivalent of Quaaludes. I asked if he was all right, and he said, "yeah, I’m okay. I’m okay." He’d had a drug problem in his early teens. He’d been into speed, and apparently gone to a drug councilor. All sorts of things. He’d kicked the habit, which sounds silly now, by the time he was sixteen. So, he’d already had a drug crisis.
I didn’t really pay too much mind to it. We all have our little quirks. We all have our little poisons that we like to put into our bodies. Some like booze, some like smoke, whatever. I draw the line at heroin. That’s it for me, but that’s where I draw the line. Anything else, okay, providing it doesn’t get the better of you. Anyway, within two weeks he was a mess. Within a two week span, he’d gone from the most normal guy, beautiful guy to talk to, great player… Everything went, collapsed. I wasn’t aware of people that had ‘drug problems’. Why would you take downers when everything was going okay for you? I’d never figured it out. I was pretty new to all of this.
I knew that he needed help. Everyone in the band—well, even though Paul and Andy had gone on to different things, they were as concerned as I was about him. So, we kidnapped him. We kidnapped the bugger. I didn’t, but Andy did. They broke into his flat. Well, they knocked on the door and when he answered they pushed there way in.
DAVE: Was this his back street flat?
SI: Golborne Mews. That’s where he was living [just east of Wormwood Scrubs prison, in the North Kensington / Notting Hill area of London, W10—DM]. They bundled him into a car and took him down to the country, where he ranted and raved for about eight days, and swore he’d never do anything again. But he was too far-gone. You can’t keep someone like that unless it’s under proper medical supervision. To cut a long story short, he got back into his old ways and got pretty bad. I think he told me once that he’d fixed a couple times. I know he fixed a couple times. So, he was doing H as well, but not on a big thing.
DAVE: Scale.
SI: No, not on a big thing. It was mainly pills, mainly downers. So, I moved in with him to look after him. He had a girlfriend, and she was great. She did her best, but…
He finished the album (Kossoff / Kirke / Tetsu / Rabbit).
End of that. By this time, he was so bad. And I was worried about him-- that he would
die-- that I spoke to Paul (Rodgers). I said, "look, we’ve got to get back
together again." We’d only been broken up for a few months, so it was no big
deal even though it had been publicized. I said, "look, for Koss’ sake,
we’ve got to get back together. Because the guy is…" Besides, none of our
individual projects were doing
that well.
DAVE: Toby and…
SI: Toby didn’t do anything.
DAVE: Peace.
SI: Peace was Paul’s thing. And that’s where he met Mick Ralphs.
So, we reformed. "Ah, it’s great to see everyone again…" But, Paul (Kossoff) was… It was weird. It was horrible, actually. We got Free At Last done, pretty straightforward. Then we did a tour of the States, which was (in a whisper) a fucking disaster.
DAVE: Is that the one where the roadie died?
SI: The one where the roadie died, in Aspen. In New
Orleans, we were on the same bill as Leslie West, Mountain, and we couldn’t make it.
We were late for the show, and I was banging on [Koss’] door. I thought, "Fuck!
I’m going to break it down! He might be in there, dead!" So I got a couple of
guys and we shoulder-charged it. He was just sitting there on the balcony, looking out
over New Orleans. I said, "no way we’re going on tonight, lads!" So, the
three of us had to go down to the club in New Orleans. We did a couple of numbers. That
happened a couple of times.
I said to our manager, "Look! This guy’s got to go to hospital! We can’t keep going to the next town hoping he’s going to be okay! The guy’s ill!" So, we took a sabbatical and got out of there. I’m amazed that we got as many fans as we did on our side, because we let an awful lot of American fans down. We never appeared at concerts, we had to cancel… it was a bummer. It was a dreadful record that we had.
I’m trying to think now. He was hospitalized. Then, Heartbreaker seemed to… Heartbreaker was done.
DAVE: Andy left, though.
SI: (Laughs) Yeah! I would have forgotten about that! Andy left! He said, "that’s it! I’m off!" And when he says something he does it. That was at the end of that disastrous second tour. It may have been the third disastrous tour... We did the Blind Faith one, I think we did one on our own, and then we did this one that we’re talking about. After that, he said, "That’s it! I’m off!" Our second roadie was deported. He didn’t have a green card. Koss was in a dreadful way. And that was that. And, we had this album to finish, this fucking album. I’d put this time limit of a month on it, cuz you don’t need more than a month once you’ve got all the songs done. We were hoping against hope that he would pull through to finish the album. As it happened, he didn’t. He couldn’t make it. That’s why Snuffy, a guy called Snuffy [Walden, a friend of Rabbit’s from Texas. Snuffy played with a variety of big names in the Seventies and, since the mid-Eighties, has made quite a name for himself writing music for Hollywood. His credits include the music for Thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, Ellen, and Roseanne—DM]…
Then, Free Mach III was put into operation (laughter) to support Heartbreaker,
which I think is one of the finest albums ever put out.
Not only by Free, but as an album. Especially with…
"Wishing Well" was such a great song! It was a classic Rodgers
song, written about Paul if you listen to the words. So was "Come Together in
the Morning". That was about him. That was the album where he was
really on his last legs. We had to get Snuffy in on "Easy On My Soul".
We did a tour with Traffic. It was quite a good tour. Before that, we had a Japanese concert to do. Paul Rodgers played guitar. Just me, Rabbit, Tetsu and Paul Rodgers. We went over and did three gigs. Pretty good, too, I must admit.
DAVE: When did Wendell come in, then?
SI: Wendell! Wendell Richardson! There was an American tour being lined up to back up Heartbreaker. Paul (Rodgers) wanted to play a little bit of guitar, but he said he couldn’t do a whole tour playing guitar and singing. It’s very hard to do. So this guy, the guy that eventually managed the Average White Band, he came up with this bloke. He said, "Look. He’s good, but he’s not quite what you’re thinking. He’s from Osibisa…" I went, "What? Osibisa?!" As it turned out, he was a nice guy. But he was from Ghana and didn’t play the blues at all! It’s just that it was on such short notice. He was a guitarist that played pretty good, so…
DAVE: Make do with what you’ve got at the time…
SI: That’s right. It was a pretty sorry state. We did that tour with Traffic. John Martyn, Traffic, and Free. That was a struggle! My God! When that was finished, that was it. Even I had had enough. Koss was in hospital, pretty whacked out of his brains. This would be ’73…
DAVE: About April.
SI: April. That was the end of Free. Free, to me, ended after the first breakup. Cuz when we got back together it…
DAVE: …wasn’t the same…
SI: …wasn’t really the same. Koss had his drug problem. We only got back together for him. We didn’t reform out of an intense desire to play music again. It was just…
DAVE: Koss.
SI: Exactly.
©1983, 2002 D.C. McNarie. May not be reproduced in any manner without prior written consent of author.