Bad Company “Here Comes Trouble”
While there is no unassailable definition of “supergroup,” I’ve always understood it to mean a band composed entirely of members who’d already achieved fame or success with some previous band. To define it simply on the basis of skill, independent of fame or success, would vastly broaden the pool—half the Prog universe might qualify on those terms. On the other hand, to draw hard lines around what constitutes “fame” and “success” would disqualify bands firmly in the canon. Ever listen to The Graham Bond Organisation? I suspect not—though that’s where Cream drummer, Ginger Baker, cut his teeth. Ever rock out to The Band of Joy? Unlikely—though Robert Plant and John Bonham led that band before forming Led Zeppelin. You get the point, a supergroup is like porn—hard to define but you know it when you see it.
Despite their fuzzy definition, at some point I concluded that (a) supergroups were not built to last (too much talent, too many egos) and (b) many of them were not actually so “super” (Asia, Damn Yankees, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, most of post-Cream Ginger Baker, more than half of Jeff Beck’s ouevre, twentieth century Sammy Hagar-entities, etc.). And with one major exception, I was never particularly interested in supergroups. But—whoa—that exception was exceptional—both the platonic ideal and the outlier. Bad Company was a no bones about it, one hundred percent by any measure supergroup. Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke of Free, Mick Ralphs of Mott the Hoople and Boz Burrell of King Crimson. From their inception, they were English Rock royalty. Maybe not kings or princes, but certainly Dukes or Earles. Moreover, they were stacked across the board—not a weak spot in the lineup. More moreover, they somehow lasted—ten years in their first, classic incarnation and forty more after they broke the mold that broke the mold.
Bad Company’s self-titled debut—a cocksure statement of purpose adorned with a cover that showed nothing but said it all (“BAD CO”)—was released two weeks before I was born. Which means that the band was in the air for my very first breaths, but also that I came to them late, after their prime, through cassette players and car radios playing Classic Rock. And while I suspect that there are bands who were played more frequently on Classic Rock radio (Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Eagles and Floyd), Bad Company were perhaps the apotheosis of the format.
More than those diamond selling icons, and more than hitmakers like Foreigner and Boston, Bad Company did the heavy lifting for stations trying to figure out how to fill hours between the last time they played “Black Dog” and the next time they were going to play “Comfortably Numb.” “Can’t Get Enough,” “Feel Like Making Love,” Ready for Love,” “Bad Company” and—to a lesser extent—”Shooting Star” and "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy,” were the grist of half the FM dial between 1985 and 1995. On the basis of those six songs—as heard on 92.3 WXRK and 102.7 WNEW and, as importantly, my cassette of their first greatest hits collection, “10 from 6”—I naturally assumed that Bad Co were towering, timeless Rock legends.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. At their very best, Bad Company was among the best to ever do the job. They had muscles that Deep Purple lacked. They had a groove that never seemed to interest AC/DC. They were sexier than Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band. And they rocked harder than Foreigner. On the other hand, Bad Company were only occasionally at their very best. They could never be credibly accused of making “Album Oriented Rock” (AOR) because their albums could not match the grandeur of their singles—which is less an indictment of their filler and more an exaltation of their titanic hits. For eight songs per album, Bad Company could not keep up with Fleetwood Mac or The Eagles. But, not unlike Queen, one or two times per record, they hit the ball out of the stadium.
The eminence of Bad Company lies in their clarity—the way in which you can hear every instrument and how every instrument is always doing its job precisely the way it should be done. Also the way in which they introduce their riffs and insist on them—never straying too far from the central idea. But perhaps most of all, the greatness of Bad Co was born from the range and texture of their (first) lead singer’s voice. No one—not Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury or Steve Perry—has ever balanced virtuosity and purity like Paul Rodgers. It’s not so much that he was a superior singer to those frontmen but rather that he was never too much of anything. Never too high or too low. Never too theatrical or too domineering. Rodgers’ vocals on “Can’t Get Enough” and “Feel Like Making Love” and “Ready for Love” are less memorable than they are pitch perfect. They are pure pleasure. No false notes. He sounds both extremely human and also superhuman—as though he were sent to earth from some heavenly mountaintop to show us what Hard Rock could be.
Obviously such glory was not sustainable. Which is why Bad Company was the sort of band—like Queen, like Foreigner and like ABBA—whose greatest hits collection is also their only “essential” album. Bad Company were a great band capable of making god-tier songs, but who only made good albums. Not only were they unable to churn out dozens of “Can’t Get Enoughs,” they also could not endure the toll of arena-rocking—touring for months on end, city to city, country to country. The party became too much for Bad Company, but most acutely for Paul Rodgers, who by the end of the Seventies, had become an increasingly sober, increasingly exhausted father of two young children.
And so, in late 1982, shortly after the release of “Rough Diamonds,” Bad Company disbanded. They’d had quite a run—thriving for the better part of ten years, which was more than original supergroups Cream (less than three years) or CSNY (also less than three years) could say about their first go round. Along the way, Bad Co racked up a five platinum-selling records, a slew of hit singles and a legacy cemented on Classic Rock radio. After a short sabbatical, Rodgers made a solo album before starting another supergroup—the Firm. Meanwhile, Kirke and Ralphs kept the party going, first on Ralphs’ solo debut and then on an unnamed project which, through the nudging of their record label, became Bad Co 2.0.
The biggest difference between Bad Company and Bad Company 2.0 was, of course, the lead singer. Recruited from Ted Nugent, Brian Howe was—by all accounts—a highly qualified, somewhat distinguished frontman. But, to state the obvious, he was no Paul Rodgers. But in addition to the arrival of Howe, there were also environmental changes afoot. Bad Co 2.0 reemerged into a market obsessed with Pop and New Wave and fatigued by Hard Rock.
Curiously, while most of the world showed disinterest in the Howe-fronted version of Bad Company, America remained open to the idea. Two of the four records Bad Co made with Howe were certified gold and one was platinum. Additionally, they scored three top forty Pop and nine top forty Rock hits. During the reign of Foreigner and The Boss and Tom Petty and Huey Lewis and Johnny Cougar and Van Halen, Rock radio remained extremely loyal to Bad Company. As I perused a list of those 2.0 hits—titles like ”Holy Water,” “If You Need Somebody” and "No Smoke Without a Fire"—I determined that either I’d never heard any of them or that they simply were not all that memorable. Mainstream Rock Radio in the Eighties was a very different world from Top Forty radio, and even Classic Rock radio—meaning that it is entirely possible these songs were huge in some nearby reality but just never made it to my teen radar. But also, nine (9) hits is a lot for such a short time—enough to make me wonder. Enough to make me want to investigate Bad Co 2.0 further.
My weeklong investigation—spinning the four Howe-era records—didn’t turn up much. Bad Co 2.0 was an excellent, but not exceptional Hard Rock band. They did not have the Pop sensibilities of Foreigner or Journey. They were not as loud as Whitesnake or Def Leppard or as photogenic as Mötley Crüe or Poison. They were obviously skilled but more obviously generic, and yet not so generic as to be soundtrack fare. They were a known and respected brand name churning out records to a shrinking but loyal audience. They were a disappointing sequel but by no means a bomb. And I could have easily moved on from the exercise if not for “Here Comes Trouble.”
Released in the Fall of 1992, “Here Comes Trouble” arrived at a cultural moment scored by R&B (Boyz II Men, En Vogue, Mary J. Blige) and Grunge (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden) and Alt (REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Depeche Mode). Mainstream Rock radio was a withering graveyard of fading icons and loud but passing fancies. For a nostalgic and counter-countercultural few, Bad Company was still plenty interesting in 1992. But to the rest of the world, Bad Co existed somewhere between uncool and irrelevant. Simultaneously, because they were a brand name without a recognizable face, they were also an easy target. As a result, there are shockingly few features or interviews to be found from the time of “Here Comes Trouble,” with the notable exception of Entertainment Weekly’s forty word dismissal punctuated by an “F” letter grade. But aside from a smattering of uber-loyal fans and (less than) one handful of writers who deemed it beneath contempt, most of the world blithely ignored Bad Co’s tenth studio album.
Which is one of several reasons I found myself so interested in it. That snarky “EW” reviewer was deeply offended by—among other things—the inclusion of a listener survey in “Here Comes Trouble’s” CD packaging. To her, this corporate tack confirmed what she had no doubt assumed—that Bad Co were making product, not art. In fact, this was the entire thesis of her takedown—that Bad Company had regressed and were making generic product. And you know what? She was right. Bad Company had regressed. They were not the arena filling band they once were. And yes, “Here Comes Trouble” does at times sound extremely familiar but not exactly memorable. And—also yes—the early Nineties CD boom was defined by the shiny, plastic productization of music. But you know what else is generic? Coke, McDonalds, Kleenex, and Toyota Corollas—and I quite enjoy all of those things. And you know what else regresses? Everything and everyone.
So yes, there is nothing “cool” about “Here Comes Trouble.” Its touchstones are early Eighties Foreigner and Extreme much more than they are Free and Mott the Hoople. And yes, every member of the band—with the exception of (thirty-nine year old) Brian Howe—was over forty at the time of its release. Bad Co 2.0 was not merely on the other side of the mountain, they were on the other side of the second mountain. Even if you were to earnestly listen to the album—to ignore the Grunge and Hip Hop and New Jack Swing and everything else in the zeitgeist of 1992—there was something anachronistic to the point of silly about the album. “Here Comes Trouble” was the easiest of targets. And yet, I must confess that, three decades later, I was more than a little impressed with Bad Co’s near death knell.
It's not so much that “Here Comes Trouble” is exceptional—it’s absolutely not. But rather that it is often exceptionally good. Never much better and almost never any worse. It is both what I expected—professional, middle of the road, twenty percent softer than Hard Rock—and also a complete surprise—melodic, enjoyable, immaculately recorded music that splits the difference between “I Want to Know What Love Is” and “Jukebox Hero.”
Foreigner is really the best comparison I can think of, though twenty-first century Bon Jovi—with their fist pumping choruses and compressed guitars and vocals—are also in the mix. So are everyone from Richard Marx to Van Halen in that Bad Co had traded in their blues-based, Classic Rock bonafides for a sound vacillating between Soft Rock and Heavy Metal. Had they been younger, blonder or prettier, I suspect it might have worked out. In fact, it nearly did. “How About That” reached the top of the Rock charts and the top forty of the Pop charts and, by the time the dust had cleared, the album was certified gold.
This proved true in spite of the fact that “Here Comes Trouble” is ostensibly a Brian Howe and Terry Thomas album, featuring Mick Ralphs and Simon Kirke from Bad Company. And in spite of the cultural milieu which was—to put it mildly—not friendly to aging Hard Rock bands. According to Howe, Ralphs and Kirke had grown tired from the weight of Bad Company. They hung along to collect checks and because the brand name was better than that of their side projects. They played their parts but were not actually creative partners—and you can absolutely hear the shift. The two songs that Ralphs co-wrote—”Both Feet in the Water” and “Little Angel”—are the bluesiest but also least cogent tracks on the record. They’re restless, top heavy and dated. They’re curious filler that stand apart from the Howe and Thomas’ material, which is deeply accessible.
And on occasion, much more than just accessible. The aforementioned “How About That” is almost unnecessarily infectious. “What About You” is a darn good Foreigner stand-in. And “This Could be the One” and “Hold Onto My Heart”—with their gargantuan choruses and overwrought cliches—are undeniable in the way a second tier Rom Com can be. They bring absolutely nothing new to the table, but that is in part because they understand how much we enjoy what’s already on the table. Despite its title, there’s very little trouble on “Here Comes Trouble.” Most of the tracks toil in middle aged, romantic ennui—music about lonely men daring enough to give love just one more shot. When they stray from the formula—as they do on Ralphs’ songs and as they do when they try to rev up the engines on “Brokenhearted”—they strain to keep up.
While Howe and Co were not Bad Co, they as close as any band got to the sonic umami that catapulted Foreigner from Arena Rock stars to global Pop stars. And yet, they did not get close enough. Howe’s vocals were not inviting like Lou Gramm, and his songs lacked the dynamics of Mick Jones. Whereas Rodgers’ Bad Co was refined but loose, Howe’s version was precise but taut. On the other hand, Howe could still sing the hell out of a tune and his compositional skills insulated Ralphs and Kirke from past prime embarrassment. Protecting the legacy while propping up Ralphs and Kirke while while forging his own path while competing with Grunge and Alt proved to be too much for Howe, who left Bad Company in 1994.
A couple years later, Ralphs and Kirke, along with journeyman singer Robert Hart, released an Americana-tinged album featuring new takes on classic Bad Company tracks. Soon thereafter, Rodgers rejoined the band—ostensibly as a non-recording, highly compensated touring business. And finally, in 2025, Bad Company was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, five years after Brian Howe passed away at the age of sixty-six. Howe left behind three children, three grandchildren and the inglorious distinction of succeeding one of the great lead singers of all time by remaking a supergroup into merely a very good group. Barely a footnote in their history, “Here Comes Trouble” is a better than middling Bad Co record that is also an exceptional Brian Howe and Terry Thomas record.