STANDING FIRM, Kinda

STANDING FIRM, Kinda

FEATURES

Harold DeMuir

Paul Rodgers, 36, and Jimmy Page, 42, have each spent a couple of decades, i.e. their entire adult lives, as professional musicians. As frontman with Free and Bad Company, Rodgers virtually defined the sound of hard-rock vocals in the 1970s and influenced a generation of singers. Page’s innovative axework with the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin helped to permanently alter the guitar’s place in rock, not to mention making the world safe for all of those wonderful heavy metal bands you hear so much about.

In addition to their musical contributions, Bad Company and Led Zeppelin (and their much-feared manager, Peter Grant) played pivotal roles in rock’s ’70s metamorphosis from underground phenomenon to legitimate megabucks industry, and rock stars’ rise from social rebels to respectable businessmen.

Both bands abdicated their arenastuffing reigns after the decade petered out, and Rodgers and Page kept out of the public eye for a spell, while various supergroup rumors circulated. Page did a movie soundtrack, Rodgers made a playit-all-yourself solo disc entitled Cut Loose and both participated in 1983’s multi-star ARMS benefit shows (as well as the subsequent spinoff album Willie And The Poor Boys).

“Doing the old stuff wouldn’t be fair to anybody. ” —Paul Rodgers

After working up new material and recording demos together, Rodgers and Page formed the Firm in late 1984 with bassist Tony Franklin (whom Page had met while working with English cult-folkie Roy Harper) and veteran session drummer Chris Slade. The band’s eponymous debut LP and U.S. tour both met with lukewarm critical reaction—but the Firm kept at it, with a second album, Mean Business, and another bigshot tour, which is just getting off to a lucrative start as I write this.

Neither Rodgers nor Page will ever be known as avid press hounds. But once I finally managed to get him cornered, Rodgers was friendly, cooperative, and actually seemed to be enjoying our chat. He politely avoids discussing politics (his own views seem a bit on the conservative side, though he does give a hardy nod to worldly tranquility on “Live In Peace,” which appears on both Mean Business and Cut Loose).

So, uh Paul, you and Jimmy certainly don’t have to work for a living at this point. Yet you’ve both invested considerable time and energy in the Firm, ignoring the barbs of us dinosaurophobic critics. Why oh why then, Paul, are you still doing this? Surely you don’t need to...

“Yes, I need to do it, because I’m a musician and it’s what I enjoy doing,” answers the singer. “I didn’t do it for three or four years, and I didn’t like that at all. It’s considered a sin to be successful. But all these kids that are in bands now, they want to be successful and nobody questions their right to do it. Of course we want to be successful. We have a right to perform, same as anybody else.”

Nonetheless, both the Firm and Mean Business, as well as the band’s live shows, have met with harsh words from us pressbrats, who carp that the combo lacks Led Zeppelin’s invention and Bad Company’s grit, that Rodgers and Page haven’t kept pace with the band’s they inspired.

“I’m a great believer in free speech,” says Rodgers, “and if people are critical in a constructive sense, I’m all for that. If they think I’ve sung badly and that it was detrimental to the show, all well and good. Constructive criticism is A-OK. But sometimes with us boring old fogeys, we get slaughtered merely because we’ve already been successful.

“I don’t know what they actually expect. You can only give your best, you know? And if I hadn’t given my best, I would certainly let people know—I usually get very annoyed at myself, and that comes across to the audience.”

Whatever other charges you want to throw at them, the Firm certainly can’t be accused of coasting on its members past accomplishments. On record, the band bears little stylistic resemblance to their previous bands—and in concert they decline to trot out the old hits.

“From the start, we said, ‘Look, if we’re gonna have a go at this, let’s do it on a contemporary basis. Let’s see if we can write stuff together that people will enjoy, and we won’t have to rely on the old standards.’ Doing the old stuff wouldn’t be fair to anybody. I think it would be cheating the kids to bring them in and let them think they’re gonna hear Led Zeppelin or Bad Company or Free or whatever.”

In fact, much of the Firm’s audience was in diapers when Rodgers and Page first stalked America’s hockey arenas. “That’s a really encouraging sign, the fact that they are a new audience,” says Rodgers. “They obviously haven’t seen Led Zeppelin or Bad Company, and I don’t think they expect to hear ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘All Right Now’ or ‘Mr. Big’

“We get slaughtered merely because we’ve already been successful.” —Paul Rodgers

or anything like that. I’m surprised, because I had thought that people might just come along to see how these two relatively well-known personalities have weathered the past four or five years. But it’s a new audience, and that’s very interesting for us.”

But doesn’t he ever miss performing the old tunes? “Oh yeah, of course. It was good stuff. And there may come time when it’s correct for the Firm to play that stuff. But at this moment in time, we’d just like to make the point that these songs stand well enough on their own two feet, and they don’t need propping up. Maybe next year someone will go, ‘Why don’t we stick this one in?,’ and that’s fine. But, for the time being, for the sake of everybody in the band, let’s get this thing working properly. We have our own musical statement to make within the confines of this band.

“I think another thing that would happen if we did the older stuff is that some critics—and I wouldn’t dare say you— would come along and say, ‘Yeah, but they needed to play X, Y and Z.’ We don’t need to play it, and we get along fine without it. But you can bet your bottom dollar that if we did play it, somebody would mention it. You can’t win either way, really.”

Rodgers sees Mean Business as a more collaborative work than its predecessor, which was recorded before the Firm had done any live gigs. “The first time around, I think we made a conscious effort not to sound like anything we had done previously, and that made it less natural. This time, we were under no pressure at all. We were under no pressure to even go into the situdio, except for the fact that we had good songs and we felt like doing it. We all could have said, ‘Hey, it’s a bit too Soon. We worked last year, let’s have a year off.’ That seems to be what everybody wants to do in this business, make a lot of money and have time off. But we’ve still got the music in us, and we enjoy working.”

According to Rodgers, the popular conception of the Firm as a pair of superstars augmented by anonymous sidemen is a load of hooey. ‘‘It really is a partnership, in all respects. It’s a democracy, and everybody has their say, even with things like deciding when we’re gonna rehearse and what studio we’re gonna use.

‘‘We’re all on the same level, because when we go out on that stage tonight, we ain’t as good as Page, and we ain’t as good as me—we’re as good as the four of us. We’re a unit, and therefore it has to be a wholehearted, 100 percent effort on everybody’s part. We work well off one another, and we generally don’t have any hassle at all. If there’s a problem in recording or in soundcheck or on stage, we sort it out very easily.

‘‘Chris Slade is an absolutely excellent drummer, a perfect timekeeper. And Tony Franklin, I think, for his age, is perhaps the best bass player around. He’s real young, absolutely brimming with confidence, and nothing fazes him. It’s quite frightening, really. When we started playing live, I was absolutely petrified, and Jim and Chris were a bit the same, but Tony would sit down in the dressing room and eat. He’s got no fear at all, and he takes everything in stride—he hadn’t even been to America before we came here.”

As for Page—whose public mystique is as thick as that of any living rock idol— Rodgers paints a far different picture than the shadowy, troubled recluse of Zep legend.

‘‘Jim’s a very, very normal person. We were sitting downstairs the other night at about 12 o’clock, having a drink and talking to a couple of friends, and a person comes up and says, ‘Excuse me, is that really Jimmy Page?,’ and I said, ‘Afraid so,’ and they said ‘Gosh, he looks so ordinary.’ And that about sums it up with Jim. People have a preconceived idea of Jimmy Page, but he’s really a sweetheart.

‘‘He’s very approachable, he really is. I’ve been at his house in Windsor when people come to the gate, and Jim walks out and says hello and signs autographs. He’ll stand and sign autographs all day— in fact, he’s infuriating when it comes to that.”

Perhaps, but the journalistic world has never found Page to be overly approachable as an interview subject. You’ll notice, for instance, that he didn’t talk to me. ‘‘I don’t know that he’s particularly comfortable with it,” says Rodgers of his bandmate’s reluctance to submit to this merciless grilling, ‘‘and I don’t personally think the press has been particularly fair with him sometimes. You give the guy a chance, and he’s more forthcoming than you know. But generally, the press haven’t given him a fair crack of the whip. Most people want to talk about all the sort of mumbo-jumbo shit, and all these mystical meanings to everything. Like years ago some people came out with this thing, that if you played a certain track backwards at three times the speed there was a message. And Jim said ‘Well, I have enough trouble getting it to go right forwards.’ People ask him about things like that. How many -are asking how his wife and kids are?”

With rumors of a Led Zeppelin reunion flying around like pie tins in Plan 9 From Outer Space, questions about the Firm’s permanence are bound to arise. Rodgers brushes off suggestions that a reinflated Zeppelin would put him out of work. “I don’t think it will affect the Firm at all, to be perfectly honest. Obviously, you’d have to ask Jim, but I’m pretty sure. They have been friends for an awful long time, and I don’t think the fact that those guys get together and have a play would affect this band at all. Robert Plant plays with quite a variety of people, and the fact that one of them happens to be Jim is quite acceptable.”

The Firm, maintains Rodgers is ‘‘a permanent thing at the moment. I can only speak for myself, but nobody’s said ‘Enough’s enough.’ It’s more like, ‘Cor, this is good.’ It’s an ongoing situation, as long as everyone’s happy. We’ve sort of planned out the next six months, and then if at the end of that time we feel that we can do more in this particular context, then next year we’ll go back in the studio and see what happens. We’ll do that for as long as it’s good. We would not flog a dead horse, because there’s no need for us to do that.”