Fact #101279

Paul Rodgers (vocalist, Free) : Paul Kossoff and I, when we formed Free, we were a flat-out blues band. Even the songs that I had written up to that point were blues songs, you know. I looked around at that point and I saw, once we had formed, I saw everybody, the bands that had real credibility and meaning, somebody like Jimi Hendrix and Cream. What they were doing was taking the blues to a different place. They were making it their own. I suppose Hendrix was almost like a psychedelic blues and Cream, well, that’s what it was in a way, psychedelic blues. And they took it off in a different direction. And I said to Paul, “That’s what we have to do: Take what we have now and write our own songs and find our own identity, basically.” So it grew right out of the blues.
(Source : interview in Glide magazine, July 2013, by Leslie Michele Derrough)