Remember, this isn't about technique, it's about feel. But he was scoring again as soon as he was back in London.Chris Blackwell had produced the finished album. As the only one with a licence, Kossoff drove the band’s Transit, clocking up hundreds of miles week after week. Roused from a collective torpor, they blinked and stared as the stewardess ran down the aisle. This is mind-blowing in retrospect (if you'll forgive the lapse back into '70s speak!). “He went to a teacher in Golders Green, in North London, who taught him to read music, but he was partially dyslexic and wasn’t actually reading the music—he was mirroring her and remembering everything.
Taylor didn’t see Kossoff again until the evening.Within a year, Kossoff had joined the north London blues group Black Cat Bones and impressed them with a confidence and stagecraft that belied his 5ft 3in stature.
John Glover is certain Kossoff played in an early five-man line-up of Bad Company, and has the tape to prove it (“Rodgers won’t let me put it out.”). He was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma, after which his heart stopped and he was ‘dead’ for 35 minutes, until doctors resuscitated him.But it wasn’t to be.
I remember getting into Koss’ car and his dad had stuck these typed-out instructions on the dashboard: ‘Are you fit to drive?’, ‘Turn on headlights’…”In 1968, every musician in Britain knew Alexis Korner. This remains one element of my playing with which I still struggle. Fraser formed a new group, Sharks, and Rodgers and Kirke paired up in Bad Company. In March, Back Street Crawler were due to play Los Angeles’ Starwood Club, on the same nights as Bad Company played The Forum. This was the golden age of the guitar player, when people like Clapton, Beck, and Page became recognized names the world over.
In July, Free joined Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood’s new group Blind Faith on a US tour. With the wonderful gift of 20/20 hindsight I should have spent longer and tried to get more material but I'd been asked to produce a very short article and who was to know that within a few months he would be dead, having suffered a heart attack while flying across the USA with his new band.There is another consideration too, while we are discussing amplifiers - and it points to a lesson every young guitarist needs to learn. Until a few minutes ago, the blues-rock group Back Street Crawler and their crew had been asleep, scattered throughout the half-empty plane.
KKTR’s rootsy blues and funk rock lacked Free’s bite and, most importantly, Paul Rodgers’s voice. “Then I had this obsession about getting a ‘real’ Les Paul after seeing Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton play them.” The real Les Paul he eventually acquired was a black 1954 Custom equipped with dual P-90 pickups, an instrument allegedly owned and played by Clapton himself. But his addiction meant he resented their help. Koss was one of that generation like Peter Green and Rory Gallagher - they just plugged in and got just about everything from their fingers, tone and volume controls.Kossoff, born in September 1950, was a few years younger than that first wave of British Blues players (and in your teens and early twenties a few years can be a big gap) and Free, the band he made his name with, missed being in the first wave of homegrown Blues superstars - indeed it was seeing Eric Clapton play that made Koss, as he was known, decide to take up the guitar once again - though this time with a different sound in mind than he'd had when he'd taken classical guitar lessons as a child.Talk about Paul Kossoff's playing inevitably turns to his extraordinarily effective vibrato technique. It's a cliché, but a well deserved one: Koss could make his guitar cry. As a guitar nut, it was something that had really frustrated me about the band's albums. The way I string the guitar you've got to fight for your sound and it comes out with a straining feel. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.John Taylor visited him in north London’s Northwick Park Hospital 10 days after his ‘death’, and was shocked by the transformation. Instead, the light of Free and Back Street Crawler’s Paul Kossoff shone briefly – and burned out quicklyIn January 1969, two months before its release, promoter Geoff Docherty booked Free to play Sunderland’s Bay Hotel.