Buying the albums sampled on “You Can All Join In”.
We continue today with Phil Sutcliffe’s notes from the insert from the expanded CD.
“Free did include two R&B classics, Go’in Down Slow (written by St Louis piano man James Burke Oden and made famous by Howlin’ Wolf) and The Hunter (written by Booker T. and The M.G.’s for Albert King). But even these salutes to their heroes were marked by their distinctive, relentless ferocity – on Goin’ Down Slow, Rodgers’s singing and Kossoff’s long solo expressed a rage against death, the song’s tragic theme, which is still hard to imagine in four teenagers.
“Their own songs are all sex and angst in varying proportions. Walk In My Shadow, I’m A Mover and Sweet Tooth introduce the grunting, sensual rock-steady feel which was to make a legend of Free, perhaps more so than any other characteristic – a downanddurtiness excelled in British rock only by The Rolling Stones.”
More of this incredible stuff next time.
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