Wills rock steady
Touring guitarist Rick Wills has played with Roxy Music, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Peter Frampton and the Small Faces and he’s still going strong, writes Alistair Armstrong.
As music trivia questions go, this could stump the best: Name the English guitarist who played with Roxy Music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and who helped write the 70s mega-anthem, Do You Feel Like We
Do, for Peter Frampton? Tough call. For starters, it’s hard to imagine two bands with less in common than Roxy Music, the eccentric art rockers led by Bryan Ferry, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the swaggering Southern band who sang the virtues of Sweet
Home Alabama.
The man who provides the common link to these groups, and who co-wrote the song, is none other than Rick Wills, the longserving bassist of multimillionselling hard rockers Foreigner.
For Wills, Roxy Music and Lynyrd Skynyrd are only a minor part in a fascinating web of rock’n’roll entanglements. The Englishman is also a veteran of Bad Company and the reformed Small Faces, not to mention a former bandmate of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.
Quite the pedigree, as the
70-year-old, touring New Zealand this month with mix-and-match combo Rock Steady, admits. ‘‘I’ve just been blessed, really, with the things that have come my way,’’ he says.
Rock Steady, including former Bad Company guitarist Dave ‘‘Bucket’’ Colwell, Irish frontman Ronan Kavanagh, and New Zealand drumming supremo Gordon Joll, are playing the hits of Foreigner, Bad Company and Free in a summer tour that is taking in cities and smaller towns.
The big songs, such as I Want
To Know What Love Is, and Feel Like Makin’ Love, are plentiful in the Foreigner/Bad Company canon and helped define their era, just as Do You Feel Like We Do did.
Frampton’s singalong classic was one of the staples of Frampton
Comes Alive! (1976), among the biggest-selling live albums of all time. The tune was originally written for Frampton’s Camel, a studio album released by the guitarist in 1973.
Wills was part of Frampton’s backing group, and he recalls that the song was the first the combo really wrote together. ‘‘He just came up with that riff, Do do do do do do, and I went dun dun dun, and we just got into the feel of it and just co-wrote the whole song more or less in a day.’’
Royalties from the track have been a nice payoff, says Wills. ‘‘It’s not too shabby, put it that way.’’
After recording several albums with Frampton, the pair parted ways. Wills says he was ‘‘between gigs, as it were’’ when he bumped into Roxy Music’s publicist after a Paul McCartney and Wings concert in London. ‘‘She said, would you like to audition for Roxy Music? I kind of looked at her and smiled and said, ‘I don’t really think that’s my cup of tea’. She said, ‘It won’t involve make-up and clothes and all that stuff. Your part, you’ll be the rhythm section with Paul Thompson’. And I said, ‘OK, I’ll give it a shot’.’’
Wills found himself in a queue listening to a raft of top bassists going through their paces and thinking, ‘‘Blimey, there’s no chance of me getting this gig’’. When the band confirmed they had chosen him, his response was, ‘‘Are you kidding?’’
Wills spent the next 18 months touring with Roxy Music and participating in Bryan Ferry’s solo work, including the video for Let’s
Stick Together, with Jerry Hall as the siren. The connection with Lynyrd Skynyrd occurred in the late 90s as a result of the close kinship between the Southern stars and Bad Company on the touring trail. ‘‘They were a crazy bunch but we just had this real family link between us.’’
When alcohol and drugs started to get the better of Skynyrd’s bassist, Leon Wilkeson, the band’s manager phoned Wills as a precaution. ‘‘He said, ‘Rick, could you prepare yourself in case Leon kind of falls off the stage one night?’ And I said, ‘I’ll definitely learn the songs’. Lo and behold, about two weeks later they rang me and said, can you get on a plane tomorrow, and join us in Denver. And I did that and that’s how I got to play with Lynyrd Skynyrd for the next six weeks.’’
Wills’ musical leanings emerged from his youth in Cambridge, where he frequented the same teen hangouts and music store as future Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. The pair formed a band together, and struggled to learn their craft in Spain and France before Gilmour got the call in 1967 from his pals in Pink Floyd.
Wills later rejoined forces with Gilmour for Gilmour’s first solo album, in 1978, and it was not long after that Wills forged his foremost career connection, a 13-year stint anchoring melodic hard rockers Foreigner, which began with the album Head Games (1979).
Foreigner have continued to tour to the present day, albeit with founder and songwriter Mick Jones the only enduring link to the 70s line-up. That changed last year when original recording members including Wills got together for two shows in Michigan, sharing the stage alternately with the current members. Those appearances will be celebrated in a DVD release and projected tour.
Wills’ other major band association has been with Bad Company. Wills’ spell began in the early-90s after the bassist, feeling things were winding down with Foreigner without original singer Lou Gramm, placed a call to Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke. ‘‘I just don’t like being out of work, basically … and that took care of the next 10 years of my life.’’
Rounding out his musical CV is a mid-70s stint with the reformed Small Faces that left indelible memories of singer Steve Marriott. Wills is performing a tribute to the Small Faces as part of the Rock Steady show.
Surviving the lifestyle hazards that took their toll on Marriott has been in no small measure due to the support of his long-standing wife Lynn.
‘‘I’m not innocent. But I managed to get through it because I have a strong wife who would always say to me, ‘Rick, your feet aren’t on the ground. You’ve got to come down to earth and get real’. And that’s what I did.’’