Time Away

Album: Back Street Crawler (1973)
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Songfacts®:

  • Like so many talented rock musicians from the 1960s onwards, Paul Kossoff found not only fame but heroin addiction at the end of the rainbow.

    In an October 1975 interview with New Musical Express shortly after his discharge from a six-week spell in hospital, he said he had been clinically dead for 35 minutes. He had though visited his record company the previous Friday, and was planning to travel to the United States later that year.

    The title of this lengthy, haunting blues-type jam was inspired by an earlier experience, which has been described as (only) near death.
  • The track's ethereal sound was obtained by playing a Fender Stratocaster through a Marshall-powered Leslie cabinet.
  • Kossoff kept his promise, but in March the following year he boarded a plane at Los Angeles, and by the time it arrived at New York he was dead, and this time there was no reviving him. He was still only 25 years old.
  • The full version of "Time Away" runs to nearly twenty minutes, and is a fitting epitaph for a guitarist who although ranked #51 in the world by Rolling Stone had yet to reach his full potential. >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England, for all above

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