The original, founding members of Bad Company, Paul Rodgers, Mick Ralphs and Simon Kirke have announced that they will reunite for a series of North American concerts this summer. Tentatively set to begin July 16th the band will perform dates coast-to-coast in the US and Canada throughout the summer, with more dates to be added. Bad Company will also partner exclusively with Abbey Road Live to record and sell live concert CDs onsite at each venue throughout the tour.

Recently returning from their first UK tour in over three decades, with a sold-out run this spring culminating with a sold-out show at Wembley, Bad Company’s concerts across the pond were star-studded affairs attracting the likes of Sting, Robert Plant, Tony Iommi and former bandmate from The Firm Jimmy Page who proclaimed, “Paul Rodgers has been, and still is by far, one of the finest talents of our musical genre…absolutely brilliant.”

“Our last show, at Wembley, was unreal, truly amazing. I can’t remember a Bad Company gig when everything from sound, lights, fans, music to musicians all peaked at the same show. That has left us all naturally high and primed to play more shows. The upcoming set list will be hit heavy with a few surprises. We have hit our stride,” said Rodgers.

In March, Warner Music UK released “The Very Best of FREE and Bad Company featuring Paul Rodgers.” The set debuted on the charts at #10 and became Bad Company’s first top 10 UK chart appearance in over 30 years, and Free’s first since a “Best of” set released in 1991, remaining on the charts for several weeks.

After the break up of Free (known internationally for their smash hit “All Right Now” co-written by Rodgers) Paul connected with ex-Mott the Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs. Free drummer Simon Kirke would later join that year and the trio would begin rehearsing. Ex-King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell came aboard a few months later and the supergroup Bad Company was solidified. In 1974 they signed to Swan Song Records (owned by Led Zeppelin and distributed via Atlantic Records) to release their highly anticipated debut album, titled Bad Co. Rodgers’ concept to write a song titled the same as the band’s name was a first. Propelled by the hit single “Can’t Get Enough”, the album would quickly hit #1 on the charts and remain in the Top 40 for four straight months. Bad Company were at the forefront of the 70’s arena rock movement. To this day, the multi-platinum Bad Co. album arguably remains one of the most accomplished debuts in rock history, reading as a virtual greatest hits set in itself.

Straight Shooter, Run with the Pack, Burnin’ Sky and Desolation Angels would all follow within a five year run throughout the ‘70s with the writing team of Rodgers and Ralphs yielding more multi-platinum awards with hit after hit, “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” “Seagull,” “Run with the Pack,” “Burnin’ Sky,” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy,” making Bad Company one of the biggest concert attractions of the decade. In 1982, the band released their final recording Rough Diamonds and the single “Electricland” would be their last before disbanding. The group’s multi-platinum award-winning greatest hits set 10 from 6 has become a music collectors staple.

Rodgers, celebrating over four decades as a writing and recording artist (Free, Bad Company, The Firm, Queen + Paul Rodgers, Solo), was recently presented with the “Classic Songwriter” award by Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck at the annual Classic Rock Magazine Roll of Honour 2009. Rolling Stone recently named Rodgers one of the “Top 100 Singers of All Time,” Classic Rock UK placed him at #2 on their “50 Greatest Singers in Rock” list and England’s Planet Rock Radio fan poll placed him at #3 on their “Greatest Voices of Rock” list. His debut solo DVD “Live in Glasgow” is certified Gold and charted at #1 in Canada, #2 in Japan, #3 in the US and #4 in the UK .

BAD COMPANY CONFIRMED US TOUR DATES:

DATE VENUE CITY/STATE
July 16 Fantasy Springs Casino Indio, CA
July 17 Orange County Fair Costa Mesa, CA
July 22 The Lakeland Center Jenkins Arena Lakeland, FL
July 23 St. Augustine Amphitheatre St. Augustine, FL
July 25 Chastain Park Amphitheatre Atlanta, GA
July 27 Bank of America Pavilion Boston, MA
July 30 Choctaw Resort Casino Event Center Durant, OK
August 1 Outlaw Jam/Frederick Co. Fairgrounds Frederick, MD
August 4 Casino Rama Entertainment Center Rama, Ontario
August 14 Bike Rally Port Dover, Ontario
October 4 Potawatomi Casino Milwaukee, WI
October 5 Potawatomi Casino Milwaukee, WI
October 7 The Joint/Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Catoosa, OK (Tulsa)

Free was a learning experience for the young Rodgers. Now in his mid-20s, he was already a veteran in the music business.

Rodgers put a band together called Peace and toured the U.K. with Mott The Hoople. He struck up a friendship with Mick Ralphs, and they began writing together.

In order to take it to the next level, Rodgers knew talent was not enough; he had to have solid management. Rodgers recalls how he met Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant.

“Mick and I were putting Bad Company together, and I said to him, ‘We have to have the greatest manager in the world. Who manages Led Zeppelin?’ Coincidently, Zeppelin had formed the record label Swan Song and was scouting for talent. I called Peter and told him who I was and what I was looking for. Peter said, ‘I am interested in managing you.’ I told him that I came with a band.”

Rodgers invited Grant to come to the band’s rehearsal, and Grant accepted. The band waited for hours for Grant to arrive but finally gave up and began jamming. Much to Rodgers’ surprise, Grant presented himself at the end of Bad Company’s rehearsal.

He had been outside listening to the group play without letting them know he was there. He claimed he wanted to see what the band was really about without the pressure of his presence. At the end of the day, he liked what he heard and agreed to take them on.

Grant was a man of huge stature who was very intimidating. He was schooled on the streets, equal parts manager and gangster. By the time he signed Bad Company, Led Zeppelin was the biggest band in the world and had all of the machinery in place to launch a band.

“It was a little bit daunting to be signed by the great Led Zeppelin, at the time,” Rodgers admits.
Soon enough, however, the members of each band would become great friends.

“They would come to see us play and come on for a jam,” recalls Rodgers. “We had a lot in common musically, a lot of the same influences.”

The last piece in the Bad Company puzzle was placed when the band found ex-King Crimson bass player Boz Burrell. Now, all they needed was a place to record. As fate would have it, Led Zeppelin was to begin recording a new album and had a mobile unit set up at the Headley Grange manor in England. Zeppelin got delayed 10 days, and instead of having the mobile unit sit idle, Grant instructed the boys to go in and lay down a couple of tracks.
The band enthusiastically went in and recorded the entire first album.

“It was very much a communal spirit. We’d get up, and someone would light fires, someone would cook.” Rodgers remembers. “We had the equipment set up in different parts of the house. The vocals were in one room, and we had a room for the echo. Another room was for drums and another for guitar. It was very organic.”

The song “Bad Company” was a centerpiece for the record, and it came straight from Rodgers’ vast imagination.
“I sat at the piano one day, and I started thinking of a Wild West scene,” explains Rodgers. “In England, you are shoulder-to-shoulder with everybody because it is such a small country. I would imagine these vast plains. In the early days of the Wild West, people were coming from all over the world. People were fleeing from Europe like rats out of a sewer. America was a huge vast canvas that was yet to be painted. All of the above came into my mind, and I had a picture of these guys who were thrown in amongst that. They didn’t really want to be bad company, but they lived in a lawless world, and they had to live with frontier justice. All of that triggered the mood to th

Come on, come on! It’s rare that this column gets to celebrate a glam rock shot, but a couple of new releases send us spinning all the way back to those halcyon days when boys could be girls and girls could be girlier, and even short people towered over you on eight-inch stack heels.

Classic Hits: A Celebration of Marc and Mickey (Angel Air) is the current lineup of T. Rex’s tribute to the two men without whom none of what they perform would matter one jot. It was more than 10 years ago, back in 1997, that former percussionist Mickey Finn first put together the band, initially to play one of the Marc Bolan tribute concerts being staged that year (the 30th anniversary of Bolan’s death).

Moving onto the concert circuit, and with vocalist Rob Benson doing his best to sound like the original Bopping Elf, this new version of the group marched on until Finn, too, passed away, and that might have been the end of the story. But no! They continued on, and this album celebrates their determination with 15 classic T. Rex songs, performed with all the pizzazz that the music deserves. True, it isn’t the “real” T. Rex — how could it be? But it’s a more than passable imitation, and if you should come across this on your travels, give it a listen. You may be surprised.

There’s more revisited glam on the Glitter Band’s Glitteresque (Angel Air), a jam-packed hits collection that marks the return of John Rossall, a mainstay in the original band, still pounding out that old stomping beat after all these years. All of the Glitter Band’s classic material is revisited, alongside Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll,” and though, once again, they’re not the original records as you remember them, it’s a close-run thing.

Angel Air also is responsible for one of the year’s most intelligent box sets, a four-disc Mott the Hoople package, In Performance 1970-1974. True, the four discs are nothing more than a straightforward repackaging of shows that the label has already taken around the block once, rounding up gigs from Croydon in 1970, Stockholm in 1971, Philadelphia in 1972 and Santa Monica in 1974, together with a collection of live cuts and demos taped between 1971-1973. So you may already have them. But if not, the bookshelf-style box is beautifully designed, while the 48-page booklet is also an exhilarating read. The music, of course, speaks for itself.

Mott fans also may want to check out the same label’s repackaging of a Mott collection, The Doc Thomas Group’s The Italian Job. Mick Ralphs, Overend Watts and Dale Griffin, plus future Mott roadie Stan Tippens, power through a blistering set of mid-’60s R&B, while the bonus tracks revisit Watts’ and Griffin’s return to those same pastures when they reconvened another pre-Mott band, The Silence, for a new album in 1990. It’s biting blues through and through and a living history lesson for everyone.

Glam changed a lot of things in the U.K., especially among those artists whose priorities were built around regular appearances in the Top 40. A lot of acts who, just months before, were chart regulars found themselves gasping for air once the tinsel started falling. One who didn’t, one who has weathered every shift in the British market’s taste in pop for 50 years, is Cliff Richard, who does indeed celebrate a half-century at the top this year with a lavish box set designed to count off every single one of them.

They Said It Wouldn’t Last: My 50 Years in Music (EMI) is titled from a line in his first ever hit, the proto Britbeat smash “Move It.” Since then, Richard has established a track record that nobody is likely to truly disturb; other acts might, in the years to come, stay at the top for 50 years or more. But even the various ex-Beatl