I know in the past I’ve briefly mentioned Crooner Rod Stewart, so therefore I feel, well, ‘Nuff said. If you like it, fine. It’s good to have someone selling Great American Songbook albums, whatever I might personally think of them. (As a reminder, I neither hate nor love them: I listened once, and that was enough.)
But the other Rod Stewart? That’s something else.
At the time, the late 60s, Stewart suddenly seemed to be everywhere. When I look at the release days of the music now, he was only sort of everywhere, but it was close enough. It started with the Jeff Beck Group and the album “Truth.” Everyone accepted this as a great album immediately, and it introduced Stewart’s voice to the world at large. (Even in those pre-interwebs days we already had an inkling of who Jeff Beck was.) Next thing you knew, Stewart was singing with the Faces, a group that immediately rose to the forefront as a result of its preexistence as Small Faces, creators of the all-time great “Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake” album. In reality, its preexistence was both Small Faces and Stewart and Rod Wood breaking off from the Jeff Beck Group; I would have known all this back in 1969 if my copy of Wikipedia hadn’t gotten lost in the mail. Faces immediately hit the stratosphere; “First Step,” “Long Player,” and “A Nod is as Good as a Wink” are bursting at the seams with great cuts, all released in the space of about a year in the wake of “Truth” and “Beck-Ola.”
So while all this is going on a friend of mine turns up in my college apartment with “The Rod Stewart Album.” It was amazing how much studio time these guys got back in the day. I remember reading at the time that the desire for Stewart to have his own material was that as a singer he liked slower, more deliberate songs than what the instrumentalists in the bands preferred. There’s no question that his first three solo albums are much softer than the Faces material. Of course, it was his third solo album, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” that finally made Stewart the relatively indestructible pop chameleon he is now well known as. If you Google him today, your first hit is a list of his upcoming concert dates. The man was born in 1945. No doubt he and Mick Jagger and a handful of others know something the rest of us don’t. (Maybe it’s that whole wives-younger-than-your-daughters thing…)
I bring all of this up because when I was originally working on my GOATs playlist, I had naturally simply dropped in Every P sight unseen sound unheard, a pure memory play. The title song and “Maggie May,” after all, are certainly all-time greats. But now I happened to be listening to “The Rod Stewart Album,” and the thought arose, “Wait a minute, this stuff is really great.” I mean, you simply cannot beat “Street-Fighting Man.”* At the break, when the temp changes… Well, this got me listening to those first three albums one after the other, bam, bam, bam. And when it was over, it was the first one that came out the clear winner. I went through the plodding process of removing Every P from the GOATs playlist and replacing it with The RSA. I will always love Every Picture and Maggie, but once you’re heard “Handbags & Gladrags,” there is no turning back. As for “Gasoline Alley?” Too many of those soft, singlerly takes.
If you have nothing better to do, and you’re feeling in the mood for some rock history, treat yourself to these three albums, and make your own decisions. You won’t regret spending the time.
- I asked the Boomer Manque for his opinion, and after giving the first album a listen, he claimed he enjoyed it accept for Stewart’s “anemic” version of “Street-Fighting Man.” That was the word he used. Anemic. The poor fellow. It isn’t easy missing a whole generation…
