This year’s inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame were announced recently, and I’m pleased to see several vintage rockers finally get the nod: Joe Cocker, Bad Company, Warren Zevon, Nicky Hopkins. I first wrote about Cocker, then Hopkins and Zevon, and this week, I’m wrapping up these profiles with a piece on British rockers Bad Company.

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The term “supergroup” — a band whose members have already been successful as solo artists or as members of other prominent groups — came into being in the late ’60s with the likes of Cream, Blind Faith and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. By the mid-’70s, rock artists continued to occasionally team up for one-off LP projects or charity events, and a few joined forces and stuck around for multiple tours and albums.

One of the most commercially successful was Bad Company, formed in 1973 with alumni from the British bands Free, Mott the Hoople and King Crimson. They hit a home run out of the gate by reaching #1 on the US album charts (#3 in the UK) with their self-titled debut album, and maintained a sizable following through the rest of the ’70s, with four of their five albums peaking in the Top Ten in both countries as well as in Canada and Australia.

Personally, I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Bad Company. I found much of their material to be rather pedestrian — mainstream riff-rock without much creativity or depth — but there are about a dozen tracks from their catalog that stand up quite well in the pantheon of 1970s rock. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s not the big singles that grabbed me but the lesser known album tracks that struck my fancy: “Seagull,” “Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Run With the Pack,” “Crazy Circles,” “Electricland,” “She Brings Me Love,” “Morning Sun” and especially the eponymous anthem “Bad Company,” the song that sparked the group into existence in the first place.

As far as I’m concerned, the band’s biggest talent was vocalist Paul Rodgers, who I rank among the Top 50 singers in rock history. He’s got an earthy, forceful yet melodic vocal command that makes even their lesser numbers solidly listenable. Guitarist Mick Ralphs deserves credit as well, coming up with some amazing riffs and crunchy solos and writing about half of Bad Company’s repertoire. Boz Burrell on bass and Simon Kirke on drums rounded out the foursome as their competent rhythm section.

Truth be told, if I had to choose, I think Bad Company’s predecessor Free was the more interesting band, thanks in large part to their blues rock repertoire, Rodgers’ captivating vocals and the guitar work of Paul Kossoff, but most music fans are sadly unaware of Free except for the huge 1970 hit “All Right Now,” still a classic rock staple. Once you hear the ten Free tunes I’ve included in the playlist (especially “I’ll Be Creepin’,” “Oh I Wept,” “The Stealer” and “Wishing Well”), I think you’ll be wondering what took you so long to discover them.

Conversely, Ralphs’ old band, Mott the Hoople, didn’t do much for me because I found singer Ian Hunter average at best and their songs unexceptional, except for the magnificent “All the Young Dudes,” written and produced by David Bowie, and Mott’s cover of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane.” Still, as often happens when I give an artist a second chance years later, I found a few more Mott tracks that you might like (“Thunderbuck Ram,” “Rock and Roll Queen,” “All the Way From Memphis,” “I’m a Cadillac/El Camino Dolo Roso”).

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Rodgers came out of Middlesbrough, a port city in Northeast England, and sang in a couple of R&B bands there before making his way to London, where he found kindred souls in Kossoff and Kirke, who were looking for a solid vocalist/frontman to give their fledgling group stage presence. They performed relentlessly, adopting the name Free and recording their debut LP in early 1969 when the foursome were all still in their teens (Rodgers was just 18). Melody Maker said of them, “Free, one of the few bands to come out of the ‘blues boom’ who are worth your time, has a distinctive, hard-edged style.”

Coincidentally, Ralphs, who had helped found Mott the Hoople, felt too much tension with singer Ian Hunter and, in 1973, the time had come to try something else. He had already met Rodgers, and they agreed to see if they perhaps they could start a band together. “I got to talking with Paul and he felt a bit like me,” Ralphs said. “We had both been in situations where we weren’t entirely at liberty to do what we wanted to do. I had a few songs from my Mott days, and Paul was working on a few things as well.”

Rodgers was writing a song inspired by a book he’d seen in his younger days. “It was a book on morals, which showed a drawing of this Victorian-era punk. He was dressed like a tough, with a top hat and the spats and vests, and the watch in the pocket, and the tails and all of that. But everything was raggedy. The guy was leaning on a lamppost with a bottle in his hand and a pipe in his mouth, obviously a dodgy person. And at his feet sat this little choirboy, a little kid, actually, looking up to him. And underneath, it said, ‘Beware of bad company.‘”

Ralphs heard the phrase and said, “Yes, that’s it! That’s what we gotta call the band!” Rodgers replied, “No, it’s actually a song, you know, I’m just working on.” Ralphs insisted, “No no, we’ve got to call the band Bad Company. That’s it!” Rodgers agreed but also continued developing the song with that title, “I think because it had never really been done, as far as I knew. I thought it would be cool to come out as a brand-new band with its own theme song.”

Rodgers approached Peter Grant, the aggressive, hands-on manager of The Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin, who immediately liked Bad Company and their music. He not only agreed to manage them but also signed them to Led Zeppelin’s new Swan Song record label. With that kind of promotional muscle and relational cachet, the stars were aligned for Bad Company to make a big initial impact.

They recorded their debut in Headley Grange, a former workhouse in the English countryside where Zeppelin had recorded much of their multiplatinum third, fourth and fifth LPs. Rodgers recalls, “To capture the right vibe for the vocal on the title track, our producer set up mics in the field behind the building, and we recorded it out there at night under a full moon to get the atmosphere. It was very beautiful. You know, you can hear a wind blowing at the very end of it because the mic picked it up. I wrote the song with that Western feel, with an almost biblical, promise-land kind of lawless feel to it. The name backed it up in a lot of respects.”

Ralphs had recorded his song “Ready For Love” with Mott and then re-recorded it with Bad Company, but it was his tune “Can’t Get Enough” that became a Top Five hit in the US, with “Movin’ On” coming in at #19 in the fall of 1974. The group toured as a supporting act for Edgar Winter, Golden Earring and/or Foghat at first, but within a couple months, they were the headlining act in arenas and major venues across the US and Europe.

Their second and third albums — “Straight Shooter” (1975) and “Run With the Pack” (1976) — continued the band’s momentum as Top Five LPs. Ralphs said they ran out of gas for a while as they were recording the fourth album, “Burnin’ Sky,” which wasn’t quite as successful, but their 1979 LP “Desolation Angels” was a strong return to form.

By the end of the 1970s, however, the band grew increasingly disenchanted with playing large stadiums. In addition, Grant lost interest in artist management in general after Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died in 1980, which effectively ended that band. Said Kirke, “Peter was definitely the glue which held us all together, and in his absence, we came apart too.”

One more album in 1982, “Rough Diamonds,” was the end of the line for Rodgers, who joined up with Jimmy Page in The Firm for two decent LPs in 1984-85, including the hit “Radioactive.” Bad Company took a hiatus before Ralphs and Kirke joined forces for a return in the late ’80s and early ’90s with new members, most notably replacement singer Brian Howe, who had sung with Ted Nugent’s band and, while inferior to Rodgers, did a creditable job. That version of Bad Company released three LPs, with a power ballad, “If You Needed Somebody,” reaching the Top 20 in the US in 1990. Another singer, Robert Hart, took over for two tours and two lackluster albums in the mid-’90s.

Bad Company’s original foursome reunited in 1999 for a victorious US tour to help promote “The Original Bad Co. Anthology” compilation package, which included four new songs.

On his own, Rodgers enjoyed a Grammy nomination for his 1993 solo LP “Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters” (now strangely out of print), with Rodgers singing classic blues tracks featuring a dozen different guitarists including Brian May, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, Slash, Steve Miller and David Gilmour.

A few years later, the members of Queen invited Rodgers to stand in for the late Freddie Mercury at an awards show performance in London. It went over so well that a lengthy “Queen + Paul Rodgers” tour was mounted that went on intermittently for more than three years (2005-2008).

Ralphs, meanwhile, announced he was retiring from touring, citing a fear of flying that he’d never overcome. He recorded an all-instrumental solo album in 2001 and agreed to a few reunion performances with Mott the Hoople’s original lineup. In 2011 he formed the Mick Ralphs Blues Band and did a couple dozen gigs in clubs around London.

He suffered a debilitating stroke in 2016 and, in a stroke of cruel irony, Ralphs passed away ten days ago at age 81, only a few months before the band is due to be inducted into the R&R Hall of Fame. Bassist Boz Burrell had died of a heart attack at 60 in 2006, which leaves only Rodgers and drummer Kirke to attend the ceremonies in November in Los Angeles.

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This playlist includes more than two dozen Bad Company tracks, and for added perspective, I’ve included ten tracks each from Free’s and Mott the Hoople’s catalogs.