Well, seems like I’ve assembled the better part of a Rod Stewart Greatest Hits collection here, but if you look a little more closely, no, I haven’t. Not at all. “Best of”, maybe, but most of his really big hits, the ones that came in the late Seventies and early Eighties, are nowhere to be found, and never will be in this space. Stewart’s career followed a strange arc. He started out earning his street cred. as a vocalist for the Jeff Beck Group, and later as a member of The Faces (formerly the Small Faces, but with a revamped lineup that included Stewart and Ron Wood), before breaking out powerfully as a solo artist. In the beginning, he really was terrific; yet, at the peak of his success, just a few years later, he turned into something of a caricature of his former self, warbling airplay-friendly trifles like Tonight’s the Night, Hot Legs, Do Ya Think I’m Sexy and, God help us, Young Turks and Tonight I’m Yours (singing along with the latter, the boys and I replaced its repeated refrain of “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me” with “No herpes, no herpes“, which was probably more appropriate to the theme. Hyuk.). (Hey, we were young). It was sad to see, because time was that young Rod was somebody to be taken seriously, as exemplified by his two early Seventies breakout albums, Every Picture Tells a Story and Never a Dull Moment. Almost everything below is taken from those albums.
The attached songs display what were once the hallmarks of most of his early work, in particular a wry humour and a certain wistful humanity that betrays real affection for the people at the hearts of their narratives, with all their little quirks and foibles. They feel authentic. He’s singing about real people as they really are, including himself. Take this from the hard-rocking Every Picture Tells a Story, a coming of age story in which the protagonist, unsure of himself and awkward, sets out at his father’s urging to take an adventure and see the world:
Spent some time feeling inferior
Standing in front of my mirror
Combed my hair in a thousand ways
But I came out looking just the same
Maybe he doesn’t feel quite up to it, but he leaves home anyway, has all sorts of affairs with all sorts of exotic women in all kinds of exotic places, Paris, Rome, the Far East, and has himself just a hell of a time, all of which leads him, finally, to realize:
Wait a minute
I firmly believed that I
Didn’t need anyone but me
I sincerely thought I was so complete
Look how wrong you can be
He set out fancying himself a cavalier love-’em’-and-leave-’em playboy, and wound up knowing it was all empty without having somebody to love.
Or consider Maggie Mae, in which the young narrator is completely derailed while losing himself in a doomed but intoxicating May-December romance. He loves this woman, he surely does, but he can’t go on like this. There’s no future in it. The drifting has to end. He has to get back on track, and go back to his life.
Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you
It’s late September and I really should be back at school
I know I keep you amused, but I feel I’m being used
Oh Maggie, I couldn’t have tried anymore
You led me away from home
Just to save you from being alone
You stole my heart and that’s what really hurts
It’s truly a lovely, melodic song, artfully arranged, that cements its grip on the listener’s heart with its gorgeous, extended mandolin coda, a graceful, borderline melancholy musical interlude of uncommon beauty, as he sings, obviously without really meaning it, that he wishes he’d never seen Maggie’s face. Not for nothing, it was a huge #1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and its appeal hasn’t waned a bit as the decades have passed. It’s timeless.
The mandolins return, appropriately enough, in Mandolin Wind, a moving little masterpiece which, unlikely as it might seem in the context of an early Seventies rock album, tells a story of pioneer life, of homesteaders struggling to hang on through the coldest winter in fourteen years, so harsh that even the bison out in the snowy fields are starving and freezing to death. It’s a tender love song. The narrator can barely believe the devotion with which his wife toughs it out by his side, through thick and thin, bearing the burden of what was probably his unilateral decision to head West and stake a claim to piece of an untamed wilderness, and looking at her, gaunt and pale, he feels ashamed.
I recall the night we knelt and prayed
Noticing your face was thin and pale
I found it hard to hide my tears
I felt ashamed, I felt I’d let you down
The expansive instrumental bridge – if “bridge” isn’t too diminutive a word for a beautiful acoustic instrumental which practically stands on its own as a song within a song – is unlike anything you were going to find on any contemporary popular album. It’s more folk than rock, and utterly captivating. I remember, back in the antediluvian days of my early adulthood, taking advantage of the features of my then new-fangled CD player to repeatedly reverse and replay it, over and over. Once again, timeless.
There’s plenty to appreciate in the other attachments too, each of them gems in their own right. Lost Paraguayos is an upbeat (and expertly played) acoustic romp, albeit one that’s a little less politically correct than optimal these days, what with it being about carrying on with a girl who’s just barely this side of legal, and with whom the singer, having had his fun, is plainly desperate to break it off; True Blue and Farewell continue with the theme of leaving home, the former about wondering whether it isn’t time to head on back, the latter, graced by maybe the most lovely melody Stewart ever produced, about needing to light out and make one’s own way in the world; Angel is a surprisingly deft cover of a fine original by Jimi Hendrix; Tomorrow is Such a Long Time is an equally affecting cover of Dylan. They’re all as pleasingly listenable as they were when first released over fifty years ago, (which seems impossible, but there you have it – I must be fifty years older than I used to be). When hearing them, you don’t get the sense that popular music has gone anywhere or said anything particularly new and exciting in the intervening decades. Quite the contrary. At the risk, once again, of painting myself as a grumpy old fogey and living fossil with one foot in the grave, I can’t help but opine that they just don’t make them like that anymore. They really don’t.
When you get right down to it, Stewart wasn’t by any means a technically gifted vocalist, with his scratchy delivery and somewhat limited range, but he could hold a tune just fine, and back when he was making his name he sang it all with real heart. That made all the difference.
the needlefish 