FREE – Fire And Water

Free never released it as a single; Wilson Pickett took it to No.2 on the R&B chart a year later

There was no audience in the Beat-Club studio in Bremen, only color cameras and four young men from London playing as if a crowd were there. Free had come to West German television in 1970 with the title song of their third album, Fire and Water: a slow, heavy riff, Paul Rodgers singing in the style of the American soul records he loved, and Paul Kossoff’s guitar circling him. That same year All Right Now made Free famous. Fire and Water never became a Free single at all, and the record that did the most with it was made by somebody else.

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The song came out of an enforced pause. Free had formed in London in 1968, with Rodgers on vocals, Kossoff on guitar, Andy Fraser on bass and Simon Kirke on drums, and their first two albums had failed to chart in Britain. When an illness kept Rodgers off the road for several weeks, he and Fraser used the time to write together properly for the first time. Fire and Water was among the first songs that came out of it. Rodgers has described the division of labor simply: he wrote it, and Fraser arranged it.

The arrangement is what makes it. Rather than speed up, the song holds back. Kirke’s drums leave space, Fraser’s bass moves under the riff instead of doubling it, and Rodgers sings over the gaps in the style of the Atlantic soul singers he idolized, Wilson Pickett above all. Free recorded the album between January and June 1970 at Trident Studios in Soho and Island’s own studios in Notting Hill, fitting sessions in between gigs. The band produced it with John Kelly. The engineer, credited as Roy Baker, was the Roy Thomas Baker who later produced Queen. Kossoff multi-tracked his guitar on the title track, and the album opened with it.

The song behind the hit

Island released Fire and Water on June 26, 1970. The album climbed to No.2 in Britain and spent 18 weeks on the chart, and it reached No.17 on the Billboard 200. Most of that came from All Right Now, the single Island had issued in May, which reached No.2 in Britain and No.4 in America. That August, Free played the Isle of Wight Festival to a crowd estimated at 600,000 to 700,000. Kirke later called the album the high point of the band’s career. “There’s no doubt in my mind, Fire and Water was the pinnacle of Free,” he said.

The Beat-Club footage catches the band at that peak. ARD broadcast it on September 5, 1970, in the show’s 58th episode, directed by Michael Leckebusch, within weeks of the Isle of Wight. Free played two songs in that episode, Fire and Water and the hit, All Right Now. Beat-Club had switched to color at the end of 1969 and brought back live performances without a studio audience, which suited a band built on dynamics. The clip shows what a single could not: four players leaving space for one another, and a singer who could carry a slow tempo without hurrying it.

Taken back to its source

Wilson Pickett heard what Rodgers had been reaching for. In 1971 the singer Rodgers had modeled himself on recorded Fire and Water, turning it into a horn-and-clavinet soul record and taking it to No.2 on the Billboard R&B chart. A British blues band’s song, written in tribute to American soul, had gone back across the Atlantic to the kind of singer who inspired it. Others followed over the decades, from Great White to Ace Frehley with Paul Stanley. Rodgers kept singing it himself: with Queen on their 2005 tour, and with Joe Bonamassa at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2011.

Free did not last long enough to enjoy it. The follow-up to All Right Now flopped, tensions inside the band deepened, and Free split in early 1971. They re-formed, then broke up again for good in 1973, when Rodgers and Kirke started Bad Company. Kossoff died in 1976. Fraser died on March 16, 2015.

All Right Now is the song people know, but Fire and Water is the better portrait of the band. The hit was Free speeding up to meet the radio. The title track was Free at their own pace, slow and confident about the space between the notes, and it was strong enough that the singer who inspired it took it back and made it a hit of his own. This footage is the band playing it before that happened, in an empty studio in Bremen, sounding like a group that knew exactly what it was.