Can't Get Enough

Mick Ralphs opens "Can't Get Enough" with one of the most immediately recognizable guitar figures of the entire 1970s hard rock canon — a descending, bluesy riff with a swagger so complete it doesn't build toward anything, it simply arrives, fully formed and certain of itself. But the song's real instrument is Paul Rodgers, whose voice is among the great instruments of the era: a baritone that carries genuine blues authority without affectation, capable of moving from a low conversational growl to a full-throated cry with no seams showing. The rhythm section under Bad Company's debut is muscular and unhurried — Simon Kirke's drumming has a physical solidity, never rushing, and that patience gives the track its particular sense of inevitability. The song is about insatiable desire, but Rodgers delivers it with such physical ease that it sounds less like complaint and more like celebration. There's no anxiety in this song, no ambivalence. It emerged from the wreckage of Free and Mott the Hoople at exactly the moment that radio wanted something lean and powerful without the progressive rock pretensions then crowding the marketplace. Reach for this when you want music that commits entirely to what it is — when you need something that doesn't hedge or apologize, that fills whatever room it enters from the first note to the last.