Rod Stewart Says He’s Sorry
NEW YORK CITY
Atriumph, Sir!” the little man kept saying as he hoisted his champagne glass in Rod Stewart‘s direction. “A triumph!” He was balding, with a pencil mustache and a dark, rumpled suit, and nobody seemed to know who he was. Not that it mattered; the scene inside the glitzy Manhattan disco was utter chaos, and one pie-eyed little man didn’t make much difference.
The disco had offered to throw a “small, intimate” party for Stewart, his band and friends after the first of his two Madison Square Garden concerts last November. It was near the beginning of Stewart’s 1981-’82 tour, which eventually would carry on until March, and which would present a newly rejuvenated Rod Stewart to the public. On this night, Stewart himself didn’t seem to mind the mayhem inside the disco, but Russell Shaw, his right-hand man, was seeing a loony, and quite possibly an assassin, behind every pair of glazed, bloodshot eyes.
“Rod, let’s get out of here,” Shaw kept saying. “We should try to hold out a little bit longer,” Stewart tried to reply, but he was drowned out by “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” which was blaring full throttle from the sound system. A phalanx of discolitas was dancing and giggling and making faces at him; a garish neon sign was blinking NEW YORK LOVES ROD STEWART on and off, on and off. And the little man was still talking. “A triumph!” he reiterated. “What will it be next, Mr. Stewart? Films, perhaps? Hollywood!”
“Listen, mate,” Stewart said, leaning toward the man so he could be heard above the unholy din. “I’m not falling over backward trying to find a part. I have too much music to make. Too much music.”
Shaw staged a retreat into the disco’s back room, and Stewart and friends went pushing through the mob, which pressed in from every side, grinning, leering, asking for autographs. Finally, after more urging from Shaw, the group dashed for the limos and fled. “I talked to that little bloke with the mustache,” Stewart reported. “He hadn’t even been to the concert.”
Robert! Your shoes! I think you need a new pair,” said a grinning Rod Stewart as he gazed down at my cracked, tattered Adidases. It was a couple of months before his Madison Square Garden Shows, and Stewart was in New York to appear on Saturday Night Live. Since I had met him for the first time not more than a minute earlier, I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t been at all sure I was going to like the guy, and here he was making fun of my shoes. Besides, I had been up all night and was chugging cup after cup of coffee in a frustrating, fruitless attempt to be coherent. We sat in the living room of Stewart’s Manhattan hotel suite, talking desultorily, me asking unbelievably routine rock-star-interview questions and getting unbelievably routine rock-star-interview answers:
“Who were your early vocal influences?”
“Ramblin’ Jack Elliott early on, and after that I moved on to black artists. Sam Cooke was a big influence, as far as the voice. At one time I copied black singers, but I don’t think my voice sounds particularly black anymore; it just sounds like me. It’s a very copied voice.”
So he is stuck up, I thought. Making fun of my fucking shoes. . . .
“Listen,” Stewart said suddenly, “I was up at nine this morning, rehearsing for Saturday Night Live, and I’m fallin’ asleep. Could we get back together in three or four hours, downstairs in the bar? I’d really appreciate it. I’m just so fucking tired. . . .” We mumbled mutual apologies and stumbled off.
I left with an advance cassette of Stewart’s new album, Tonight I’m Yours; when I got home, I put it on and was surprised at what I heard. As far as most critics were concerned (and I agreed), Stewart had been in artistic decline since the mid-Seventies. He hadn’t made a solo album to match Gasoline Alley or Every Picture Tells a Story, his early masterpieces, and the bands he’d put together since the breakup of the Faces in 1976 had been either ordinary or tastelessly flashy or rhythmically club-footed or all of the above. The first sign that the illness might really be terminal was the 1976 album A Night on the Town; it began promisingly, with two of Stewart’s most evocative songs, “Tonight’s the Night” and “The Killing of Georgie,” but it ended appallingly, with the Mac-Donald/Salter composition “Trade Winds,” a piece of pretentious MOR — “the trade winds of our time” indeed!
And then, in 1978, came the nadir, Blondes Have More Fun, which included such profundities as “Ain’t Love a Bitch,” “Dirty Weekend,” “Attractive Female Wanted” and, of course, “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Foolish Behaviour, released in 1980, did include “Oh God, I Wish I Was Home Tonight,” which proved that Stewart’s songwriting talent hadn’t dissipated entirely. But it was still a long way from the cocksure yet sensitive rock-and-soul of his best work.
And now here, without warning, was Tonight I’m Yours, a commanding, utterly convincing return to the eternal verities of passionately personal lyrics and kick-ass rock & roll. The new band was a big help, but the triumph was unmistakably Stewart’s. I headed back to his hotel, determined to find out how he had managed such a spectacular coup. On the way, I decided to forgive him for kidding me about my shoes.
I hope the album’s as good as I think it is,” Stewart said before I even had a chance to mention it,” ’cause I’ve taken so much of a bashing over the last three or four years.”
After no more than a couple of hours of sleep, Stewart was bright, alert and contagiously enthusiastic. And he seemed willing to talk about that “bashing,” which had to do with more than just the deterioration of his music. To the punk rockers of the mid-Seventies, he was the perfect symbol of everything false, bloated and self-satisfied in the rock-star establishment. He’d left England and his working-class roots far behind and become a tax exile. Even worse, he’d settled in Tinseltown, U.S.A., in a mansion in the exclusive Holmby Hills area, where his neighbors included Gregory Peck and Burt Reynolds. He’d become a fixture in the gossip columns, a Hollywood playboy who went out with blond, long-legged stars and starlets and models and didn’t seem to have much else on his mind.
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