Paul Rodgers of Bad Company celebrates his 71st birthday today (December 17th). He was also in the Firm and started in Free. In 1975 on the album Straight Shooter is a song called Shooting Star. In 1975, former Free guitarist Paul Kossoff‘s heart stopped beating for 30 minutes while he was in rehab for drug addiction. His former Free bandmate Paul Rodgers, who’d become the frontman of Bad Company, wrote “Shooting Star” at about the same time, so it was often assumed to be inspired by Kossoff — who died in March 1976. Rodgers says the song is really about more than just Kossoff.
“That song just came into my head and, actually, after the first couple of lines I thought I was singing someone else’s song. It’s strange, it happens like that some times. It wasn’t specifically about Paul Kossoff. I think it was about all of those great people that never made it, like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix even — the casualties of rock and roll. I think that’s what it was about, all of them.”
