“Paul was a lovely person,” says Taylor now. He’d spend days and nights slumped on the sofa in Golborne Mews, Hendrix playing, as dealers and hangers-on drifted in and out. Paul struggled academically, but his strong, squat fingers made light work of forming shapes and chords. She was good,” says Glover – but it was no use.Even now, though, he still had moments of great clarity. The lifeless body of ex-Free, now Back Street Crawler guitarist Paul Kossoff had been discovered slumped in the bathroom. I said, ‘Look, Koss has gone off the rails. The guitarist stayed with Fraser for 10 days in Sussex. But backstage there was a modesty about him.
“And I said, ‘You must be joking!’” Pepper era they found themselves in.
“But they weren’t Free. Like their creator, those slow sustained notes, measured solos and moments of perfect silence never had the chance to grow old.“Backstage afterwards there was champagne flying everywhere, like the Grand Prix,” remembers John Taylor. “He saw the empty seats and said, ‘I’ll have that row there…’ That was the last thing he ever said to me.” The next thing Taylor remembers is being prodded awake by a stewardess as they approached JFK. He didn’t like what he saw yesterday, but he is going to be the guy looking after you.’ It was not the best start.”John Taylor was hired as Back Street Crawler’s tour manager and Kossoff’s occasional minder. I thought, ‘I’m onto a winner here’.”Once again, though, Kossoff cleaned up, and slowly assembled a new band: vocalist Terry Slesser and three Americans, keyboard player Mike Montgomery, bassist Terry Wilson and drummer Tony Braunagel. Within a year, Bad Company’s debut album was a US No.1 hit.The phrase ‘the lost years’ is frequently used when discussing the careers of troubled rock stars. At the end of this tour, I’m gone.’ And that was it. His speech was slurred as he declared his fellow guest, singer Leo Sayer, “better than Paul Rodgers.”Taylor sat with Kossoff after take-off. “I recorded every show and gave him a cassette afterwards,” says Taylor. “I didn’t know who he was or what had gone down, but here’s all these people yelling, ‘God!
“But the flight was only 30 per cent sold out, we’d all moved around, so I didn’t think anything of it.”The band now calling themselves Back Street Crawler played several shows that made up for in energy what they lacked in finesse.
Other times, ‘Hey, Koss, listen to that, you cunt!’”Although he’d just turned 16, Andy Fraser had appointed himself Free’s leader at their first meeting. You will receive a verification email shortly.Soon after the Nag’s Head jam session, the new band were backing Alexis Korner in blues clubs around London and the Home Counties. Earlier in the decade, Korner’s ensemble Blues Incorporated had beena valuable training ground for several future Rolling Stones.
By then, everybody knew the awful truth.
So I started having conversations with Paul and Andy individually, because I couldn’t get them in a room together. When Geoff intervened, he threw a telephone at him, narrowly missing his face. He also cleaned up, sometimes for weeks at a time. Docherty, a former doorman, was not to be trifled with: “I warned him, ‘If you ever do that again…’”In the meantime, though, his ex-bandmates were moving on. Sadly, all the praise in the world couldn’t keep Paul Kossoff alive.Chris Blackwell had produced the finished album. In March, Back Street Crawler were due to play Los Angeles’ Starwood Club, on the same nights as Bad Company played The Forum. “Then there was this dreadful doctor in Harley Street, who’d write him a prescription for whatever he wanted.” Before long, Koss was swallowing as many as 20 Mandrax a day.“I remember walking down this long corridor at the airport and looking over at him and he was… sort of… I dunno, radiating,” he says, struggling to find the right words.
Instead, he played like the old Paul Kossoff.On the drive to Heathrow the next day, Kossoff was barely coherent. “Koss was great, really together, really on it,” says Paul Rodgers, “and that was the last time I saw him.”Taylor, Glover and the band, except for Rabbit and Terry Slesser, were due to fly to New York that night with the master tapes for 2nd Street.