Bad Company

iTunes Review

Featuring original Mott the Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs, ex-King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell, and singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke from Free, Bad Company emerged in 1974 as a solid, no-nonsense, pedigreed hard rock band with a few eventual “classic rock” staples already in their repertoire. The band helped define hard rock for the 1970s, even if their own fortunes never matched the impact of this debut album. “Can’t Get Enough,” “Movin’ On,” “Rock Steady,” “Bad Company,” and Ralphs’ “Ready for Love” (which he’d previewed on Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes album) were all immediate crowd-pleasers and FM radio standards, centered on Rodgers’ tough, everyman vocals and a band bent on economy, shifting chords with the elasticity of the Rolling Stones but the distorted charms of the hard rock sect. “Don’t Let Me Down” expands the band’s terrain ever so slightly with an extra moodiness underpinning the band’s usual expertise. Their influence would be immediate on a future generation of rockers that included everyone from Judas Priest and Foreigner to Boston.