Freddie Salem Stage-Worn Leather Jacket Wildcats Outlaws COA Freddie Salem

Presented is an item from Freddie Salem’s personal collection. This was one of his stylish black leather jackets. He wore it throughout his career while touring with the Outlaws. The vintage tags show it was made by Wilsons leather and is a [size] 46. It is a button up and shows wear throughout. It was also worn in and featured in a promotional album piece he did for the Wildcats.  The Wildcats had Freddie Salem (guitar, vocals), David Jackson (piano, synthesizer, vocals), Peter Wood (organ, synthesizer), Fernando Saunders (bass, backing vocals) and Myron Grombacher (drums).The jacket includes a letter of provenance from Freddie Salem.

Salem was part of the legendary The Chambers Brothers Band as their lead guitar player then went on to join the Outlaws when he was 23 years old.  These days, Salem spends much of his time in the studio, working sessions (“Just another day at the office,” he says) and producing other acts. It took several decades to amass these rare treasures from the rock n’ roll world.

Salem started performing professionally at the age of 16 as he played with various bands from the Midwest before joining The Chambers Brothers Band as their lead guitar player. He recorded and toured with the Brothers for a year and a half. And it was a great learning experience at a young age. In 1977, Salem joined the popular southern rock-n-roll band, The Outlaws. For six years Freddie played lead guitar for ‘The Florida Guitar Army’ and wrote many songs on their albums which sold over 10 million copies worldwide, earning Freddie platinum and gold albums with Arista Records.

The Outlaws did manage to make an imprint on the mainstream market courtesy of a series of album rock standbys, “There Goes Another Love Song,” “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” and “Green Grass and High Tides,” as well as the fact they were the first signing to Clive Davis’ Arista Records label. Given Davis’ reputation as a credible hitmaker during his fabled ’60s tenure as president of Columbia Records, the band should have excelled to a greater degree. (According to legend, Davis first spied them opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd and was subsequently told by the band’s Ronnie Van Zant, “If you don’t sign The Outlaws, you’re the dumbest music person I’ve ever met — and I know you’re not.”).

“Of course, nothing compares with my tenure with The Outlaws,” Salem says in hindsight. “It was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful part of my career, which I will never forget. Rolling back the hands of time and then rolling forward until now, that version of The Outlaws would still be extremely vibrant in today’s market. 

Freddie Salem Stage-Worn Leather Jacket Outlaws COA Freddie Salem