Bad Company feat. Slash & Neil Schon – Wishing Well (In Concert: Merchants Of Cool, 2002)

The song isn’t even a Bad Company original — it’s a Free track about a friend dying of addiction — and on this 2002 stage two of rock’s most famous guitarists walked on to send it somewhere ferocious.

There’s a small irony at the heart of this performance: Wishing Well isn’t a Bad Company song at all. It belongs to Free, the band Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke led before they ever formed Bad Company — and by the time the two of them tore through it on a 2002 stage with Slash and Neal Schon at their sides, the song was nearly thirty years old and carried a weight most of the cheering crowd probably never knew was there. What looks like a feel-good supergroup jam is, underneath, a song about watching a friend destroy himself.

Keep watching: Bad Company – Can’t Get Enough · Free – Ride on a Pony

Free released Wishing Well in December 1972 as the lead single from their sixth and final album, Heartbreaker, and it reached No. 7 on the UK chart in early 1973 — their last hit before the band fell apart. It was credited to the whole band as a symbolic gesture, but its subject was painfully specific: guitarist Paul Kossoff, whose addiction was tearing the group apart even as they recorded. The lyric — “the only time that you’re satisfied is with your feet in the wishing well” — reads as a direct, anguished plea to a friend with one foot in the grave. Kossoff died in 1976 at just 25. The song he played on became his epitaph.

A song about a friend they couldn’t save

When Free dissolved, Rodgers and Kirke went on to form Bad Company in 1973, one of the defining hard-rock bands of the decade, and Wishing Well stayed in their live repertoire as a link back to where they’d come from. By 2002 the band was touring a lineup built around Rodgers and Kirke — the two surviving threads from Free — and filming the shows that became the live album and DVD In Concert: Merchants of Cool, recorded that January at the Paramount Theatre in Denver and the Grove of Anaheim in California. Rodgers’s voice, by every account, had only deepened and strengthened with age.

The DVD held a bonus the CD didn’t: a guest-loaded version of Wishing Well that doesn’t appear on the audio album. For it, two of rock’s most recognizable guitarists climbed onto the stage — Slash, of Guns N’ Roses, and Neal Schon, the founding guitarist of Journey. Three guitars locked into the song’s churning, hypnotic riff, and the result was exactly the kind of high-voltage summit that live records exist to capture.

Three guitars, thirty years later

What makes the performance land is the gap between its surface and its source. To the audience it’s a celebration — a roomful of rock fans watching legends trade solos on a beloved classic. But the song they’re playing was written in grief, by a band coming apart, about a guitarist they would lose four years later. That Rodgers and Kirke were still playing it three decades on, with new hands joining in on the riff, gives it a strange poignancy: the wishing well is still there, and the people who first sang about it are still standing.

For Bad Company, Wishing Well has always been more than a cover of their own past — it’s a thread connecting Free’s brilliant, doomed final chapter to everything Rodgers and Kirke built afterward. This 2002 version, with Slash and Schon throwing their weight behind a thirty-year-old riff, is one of the more memorable documents of that thread: a hard-rock standard given new muscle, by the men who lived its history and the guitarists who grew up worshipping it. Long absent from easy viewing, the performance arrived freshly on Bad Company’s official channel in June 2026, where it drew tens of thousands of views within its first day — part of a wider wave of vintage concert footage being restored and re-released by the artists and labels that own it.