That was the end.”Kossoff was soon hooked on Clapton, Peter Green and ‘the three Kings’ – Albert, Freddie and BB – and working in Selmer’s music shop on London’s Charing Cross Road. KKTR’s rootsy blues and funk rock lacked Free’s bite and, most importantly, Paul Rodgers’s voice. Chris said, ‘This is John. But the flight was undersold. 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. Soon afterwards, he’d joined Kirke, Kossoff and Japanese bassist Tetsu Yamauchi in the studio, and the Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu & Rabbit album was underway. Please try again later.Musician. “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. I’d never seen him look like that good before. “He came out on stage and talked to the audience for an hour,” recalls Taylor. And what happened? Instead, the light of Free and Back Street Crawler’s Paul Kossoff shone briefly – and burned out quicklyKorner recommended Free to Island Records’ boss Chris Blackwell. “And then he dumped his car and walked home,” recalls Glover, who witnessed the carnage.Chris Blackwell was desperate for Free to have a hit, but he’d have to wait a little longer. “And I said, ‘You must be joking!’” “But looking into his eyes is like looking into Paul’s.“Friends gave him pills, thinking they were doing him a favour,” adds John Glover. But the fact is nobody but Kossy could play that guitar through that amp.”Andy Fraser was the first to walk, quitting on the eve of a Japanese tour: “I couldn’t bear to see what Koss was doing to himself.” But when Kossoff went for a course of neuroelectric therapy – the ‘black box’ treatment that helped cure Clapton’s addictions – Free went to Japan without him. 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. It was what he wanted, but not enough for him to curb his drug use. Footage from the show captured them at the height of their powers; Kossoff wincing and gurning as if every note played was having a physical effect on his being. Those two pretty much ran the band.” In contrast, Simon Kirke “didn’t say a lot unless he was upset about something”, and Paul Kossoff was “very, very gentle”.“I flew down to see them somewhere on that tour,” sighs John Glover, who remembers Rabbit smashing up a dressing room and various band members sporting black eyes and split lips. “We jammed and I liked his style – both in his playing, his look and his humour.”In January ’75, to test Kossoff’s reliability, Glover put him on the road with John Martyn: “He played a few songs a night with John, and it was great – for a couple of weeks. “Paul Rodgers said, ‘That’s it.
“Paul was a lovely person,” says Taylor now. “The thing that kept messing up Koss was the outside world getting to him,” says Rabbit. “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. And in the meantime, 17-year-old Simon Kirke was a drummer in search of a gig. The guitarist stayed with Fraser for 10 days in Sussex. Simon Kirke was informed just before a Bad Company show in New Orleans, but decided not to tell Paul Rodgers until some days later, so as not to jeopardise the tour.In the meantime Kossoff’s legacy endures. But within that was the rapport between Kossoff and Rodgers. By then, everybody knew the awful truth.