In 1993, Paul Rodgers released two albums that paid tribute to his influences. The first was his Grammy-nominated Muddy Waters Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters. The album featured a Who’s Who of guitarists appearing as Rodgers’ guests. Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, David Gilmour, Brian May, Gary Moore, Brian Setzer, Richie Sambora, Slash, Steve Miller and Trevor Rabin all contributed to the album while Rodgers wrote the title track “Muddy Water Blues.”

Rodgers also recorded a live album titled The Hendrix Set that paid homage to the world’s most innovative guitarist.

“I still put some Hendrix in my solo set,” Rodgers admits. “Hendrix was fantastic. Doing his songs really showed me just how special they were. I can step right into songs like ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Little Wing.’ I tag ‘Angel’ onto the end of ‘Little Wing,’ and it is almost like it is supposed to be there.”
Rodgers confesses there is one more artist that he would like to pay homage to.

“One day, I would like to do the same thing for Otis Redding, but I don’t find myself worthy. I hold Otis in such high esteem. He got me through my early teenage years of emotional angst. I believe that I am following in a lot of great people’s footsteps. Otis is number one, but there is also Aretha, Sam Moore, the Four Tops, James Brown, Albert King, BB King, John Lee Hooker and Elmore James. I absorbed what they did when I was young, and now their influences come out in what I do.”

Rodgers actually shared the stage with one of his heroes at the Led Zeppelin reunion show in London. After performing two songs on the main stage, Rodgers played “We Shall Be Free” on a B stage with Sam Moore from Sam & Dave, making Rodgers the only artist to perform twice that historic evening. Rodgers proudly professes, “Sam is a hero of mine, and I’m still learning from him.”

In 2004, Rodgers was invited to close the first Annual U.K. Music Hall of Fame Awards show with “All Right Now.” Having just played the song on “The Strat Pack” DVD, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster, with Brian May, Rodgers called May to see about performing the song again at the awards show.

Rodgers found out that Queen was among the inductees that night, and that if Rodgers would return the favor, then Queen could perform live, too. They performed “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions” and followed with a hair-raising rendition of “All Right Now.” The creative sparks were palpable; the next logical step was to do more.

Queen + Paul Rodgers have, to date, completed two massive tours and released a live CD/DVD, Return of the Champions in 2005 and a studio CD of new songs titled The Cosmos Rocks in 2008.

On working with Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor, Rodgers says, “They are fabulous musicians. That little spark has taken us around the world twice and into doing a brand new album. Doing a new album is something that Queen have not attempted since Freddie [Mercury] passed. I think that, in itself, is a fantastic achievement. I am really proud of what we did together.”

Rodgers and May shared bass duties on the album.

While The Cosmos Rocks has charted across the world, there has been no major push by the record company in America.

“A lot of this business is marketing,” says Rodgers. “There is a lot of fantastic talent out there that some will never know

The story of The Firm begins with Paul Rodgers happy to be off the road and away from the chaos of the music industry.

“I think music changed about that point,” he says. “Music shifted into New Wave and hair metal in the early- to mid-’80s. I try to follow my instincts, and, at that time, my instincts were telling me that it was good to leave Bad Company and come off the road. I built a studio in my house. I didn’t intend to make a solo album when I set up the studio, but I ended up writing the songs, playing all of the instruments and producing the album. Rather than imagining what the drums would do, I decided to just play them. I then played the bass and built the songs up from there.”

The album, titled Cut Loose, re-released last year as a limited-edition 25th anniversary edition, charted but did not make much of an impact. It would not be long, however, before Rodgers would be back in the spotlight.

“I planned to be off the road a lot longer than I was. I had given up touring at that point,” Rodgers laughs. “One day, Jimmy Page popped around to the studio with a wonderful piece of music and asked me to write lyrics for it. It was very dark and atmospheric; the chorus was in a very unique timing that seemed to have an extra beat that was quite challenging to work with. That song became ‘Midnight Moonlight Lady,’ which was the first song we wrote and recorded together.”

It didn’t take long for word to spread that two rock icons were writing songs together. Eric Clapton’s management contacted Rodgers and Page about playing on the ARMS Tour, a benefit for The Faces bass player Ronnie Lane and multiple sclerosis that happened to be the world’s first rock benefit concert or tour.

“They said they heard we were in the studio working together, and they wanted to know if we could come and play for the charity,” recalls Rodgers. “We told them that we didn’t have a band or anything because we were just noodling around. Jimmy was very keen to play live, and I was very less keen. We ended up putting a set together and supporting the cause. It was a great experience. It sort of formalized in our mind that we could form a band if we chose to.”

Rodgers, strange at it may seem, actually had second thoughts about putting the band together. Finally, Page convinced Rodgers to commit to recording two albums and supporting each album with a tour. The biggest hit from the debut album was “Radioactive.”

Rodgers had written the tune for his solo album but left it off; he thought there was something missing. The song needed a signature hook, a grand musical statement. When Rodgers revisited the song, everything fell into place.
“When I was reworking the song for The Firm, I knew I wanted something robotic and weird,” says Rodgers. “I came up with a finger exercise that is like nothing you have ever heard before. It was taught to me by Alexis Corner, a jazz musician in England. You go all the way up the neck and all the way across the neck. I put the solo on forwards, and then I recorded it backwards; I recorded them across each other. It was certainly a unique effect.”
One of the bravest songs on the album was a remake of the classic Righteous Brothers tune “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Rodgers tells how it came to be included on the record.

“Jimmy asked me, ‘What song have you always wanted to do that you have never had the opportunity to do?’ I said, ‘You wouldn’t like it. It is not your cup of tea.’ He said, ‘Try me.’ I told him the song, and he said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.&rsqu

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

In the mid-1960’s, a teenage lad from the industrial town of Middlesborough, England, headed to London to make music. His band got a gig, and a gig meant money, food and freedom. On the way to the group’s breakthrough concert, however, the unthinkable happened: The van broke down.

Paul Rodgers recalls how this event changed his life.

“When our van broke down, I walked down the street and noticed a van parked in front of a house. I knocked on the door and offered them the show money just to take us to Norwich. I got no takers. Two of the guys headed back home while the drummer and I stayed with the van full of gear. We were hungry. I borrowed a loaf of bread from a local bread factory, and we survived on that until we could get the van towed away to a friend of the drummer’s father. He then hitched back home. I was actually going with him but crossed the road and headed, hitching, to London. That was my crossroads.”

Once settled in London, Rodgers began pursuing his dream.

“I got a flat, downscaled my equipment, formed the band Brown Sugar and was playing at the Fickle Pickle when I met Paul Kossoff, who asked if he could come up for a jam,” Rodgers explains. “When Koss and I played together, Free was born.”

And, in a sense, so was Paul Rodgers.

Free was formed in 1968 by teenagers Paul Rodgers, Paul Kossoff, Simon Kirke and Andy Fraser.

Singing professionally since the age of 13, Rodgers found his true voice in Free when he began writing songs for the band. The first song ever recorded by Free was Rodgers’ “Walk in My Shadow.” The band released Tons of Sobs and found success with “I’m a Mover” and “The Hunter.”

The simple fact that four teenage white boys were playing the blues with such expertise and maturity made people sit up and take notice.

In 1970, Free released the pivotal album Fire and Water. It was obvious that Free had changed and was no longer just a blues/rock band. Free found success on the charts with the song “All Right Now.”

“I knew we needed a song that we could play after ‘The Hunter,’” says Rodgers. “I wanted to write a song that the audience could sing along to, so I asked myself, ‘What is the simplest line that I can think of that the audience can grab a hold of and sing?’ I went, ‘All right now, baby it’s all right now.’ The song was simply born from that.”

Rodgers continues, “I remember walking to our offices on Oxford Street, which is a busy street in the center of London. There was a lady standing on the corner with the sun shining down upon her; she looked incredible. She was the inspiration for the line, ‘There she stood in the street smiling, from her head to her feet.’ It turned out that she was a very famous actress who was working at a theater company down the road.”

The success of “All Right Now” saw the band’s management place Free as the opening act for supergroup Blind Faith’s tour of America. The band was not ready, psychologically or logistically, to move from clubs to stadiums.
“We were still using the same equipment that we had been using in small clubs, even though we were now playing big venues,” says Rodgers. “If we felt that we needed more volume, we simply would walk over and turn up our amps. We didn’t have the hands-on management needed to guide us and educate us about upgrading our gear and other relevant issues. We were kids thrown to the lions when we came to America to tour with Blind Faith.”

Internal squabbles began to strain the relationship between Rodgers a