by Rod Stewart
The entire process is a mystery to me, in any case. When we wrote ‘Maggie May’ and the song was in its formative stages, just a sequence of chords that needed some words and a melody to fit, I hadn’t got a clue what the number was going to be about. I was just mouthing away and making noises, some of them words, in the spaces where the vocal was supposed to be. And suddenly ‘Wake up’ snapped into my mind – not even ‘Wake up, Maggie’, just ‘Wake up’. And where that came from, or why, I have no idea. You just have to think, ‘Thank fuck’ and allow yourself to set off after it, down the path to the rest of the story.
Most times I would have to drag myself, screaming, to the paper. I would leave it until the last minute – the night before the session, or even the morning of the session, or even in the taxi on the way to the studio, and use the pressure of the deadline to squeeze it all out. And I would feel fantastically self-conscious about anything that I came up with and really reluctant to expose it to people: unavoidably, there’s some part of yourself in there, so it’s like opening up your diary. Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s like opening up your diary and singing from it. In a roomful of musicians. My lyrics often drew on experiences in my past. The experiences would frequently end up very altered by the process of writing the lyric. But, nevertheless, personal experiences were often the basis of them. ‘Cindy’s Lament’, for instance, is about trying to impress a girl from a social class above your own: a big theme for me in my early romancing, right back to the days of trying to persuade girls that I lived in a posher house than I did. And because of that personal element, it could feel raw exposing what I had written to people that first time – a feeling that could haul me right back to being pulled out in front of the class at school and made to sing. And that embarrassment wasn’t just in the early days: it lasted for years. When I have gone in to record the vocal on a new song, and reveal newly written lyrics for the first time, I have more often than not had the studio cleared of everyone except the engineer – the producer at a push. It’s the only way I can get around the self-consciousness.
And then, even when it’s gone OK, and the recording is finished and I’ve been happy with it – proud of it, even – there can come the private backlash, maybe weeks later, where I suddenly feel embarrassed all over again by what I’ve done, and turn on it and dismiss it. That has happened to me periodically in the past – and occasionally to the irritation of record companies who were just gearing themselves up to promote the album that I have since turned against. It happened to me with that first album: almost as soon as the album was released, I was dismissing my own songs, privately, but also to journalists, as being not up to much, not good enough.
It was almost certainly defensiveness, a self-protective desire to get the criticism in pre-emptively, before someone else could. But let’s be charitable: with the perspective of time, those songs were pretty good for starters. And that’s true of the whole album. It’s a hodge-podge of styles and a little casually executed in places. On the track ‘An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down’, for instance, there was meant to be a double-tracked bass part all the way through, except that Ronnie Wood accidentally got rolling drunk after recording the first one, with the result that the second one never quite materialised. (Just the idea, of course, suggests that youthful craving for novelty: ‘I know: let’s put two basses on it. It’ll be great.’) But it hangs together and it endures.
The album was released in America first, in October 1969, on the basis that I had an American following of sorts after the Jeff Beck Group tours. I wanted to call the record Thin, which just happened to be a word I liked throwing into conversation at the time, and also because I was expecting thin sales. But the American record company preferred to avoid all possibility of confusion and to tell it like it was. They called it The Rod Stewart Album. In order to humour me, the word ‘thin’ appeared in small letters in the bottom left-hand corner of the first print-run of the sleeve, where it has baffled discoverers ever since.
In the UK, however, where the album came out in February 1970, just after my twenty-fifth birthday, I got to use the title An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down – a far better name, although the choice of photograph for the front cover, in which an elderly man in a mac appears to be menacing a small child in a park, probably wouldn’t have got very far through the marketing meetings today. What can I say? I thought it was a beguiling image at the time.
I remember feeling relief when the sales in America passed 30,000 – thinking, ‘It’s OK – there’s an audience for this.’ Sales there pretty quickly reached 100,000, which wasn’t shoddy at all for a debut album. In the UK, however, the album was what you call a ‘critical success’, meaning that only critics liked it. And they, of course, hadn’t had to buy it. Still, better a critical success than no success at all. The main thing was, the album had done enough to earn me the right to make another, and just six months later, in the summer of 1970, I went back into the studio and recorded Gasoline Alley.
This one took a fortnight, from start to finish – which, come the gloriously indulgent 1980s, would be about the amount of time you would spend sitting on a leather sofa drinking coffee while the engineer sorted out a bass-drum sound. Then again, I should point out that the financial arrangement for this second album was as follows. Mercury in America agreed to provide Lou Reizner in London with a $12,000 budget for the recording. What was left over, after the bills were settled for the musicians and the studio time, I could keep. Why would you linger, in those circumstances? Why would you linger if, in particular, you had your eye on a rather nice four-bedroom mock-Tudor house on a quiet street in Winchmore Hill? It’s basic accountancy, surely. (In 1969 I finally had enough money to move out of my parents’ place and buy a small house with a front porch, not too far away, in Ellington Road, in Muswell Hill. But I was soon looking to upgrade. I kept Ellington Road, though, and through the early 1970s rented it out to Long John Baldry, who became a familiar figure in the Muswell Hill area thanks to his habit of walking out to the post office in the company of his white pet goat, which he had on a lead.)
We recorded the second solo album at Morgan Studios in Willesden Green, north-west London, which was not only the first studio in London to get a 24-track Ampex tape machine, but was also, much more importantly, the first studio in London to have its own downstairs bar – a potentially disastrous idea, you would have thought, from the point of view of getting any creative work done, but one that inevitably warmed one to the place.
In fact, we were very disciplined and didn’t let the bar distract us unduly. I was on a mission to get the album completed, and I worked hard at it. I got the title Gasoline Alley from something said to me by a girl backstage at San Francisco’s Fillmore West after a Jeff Beck Group gig. I had been chatting her up and she suddenly announced, ‘I’ve got to get home, or else my mother will say, “Where have you been – down Gasoline Alley?”’ The expression stayed with me and triggered the song I wrote with Ronnie Wood, about setting out boldly on a journey and then regretting it and longing to be at home.
Again, I wanted a mix of styles. There was another Bob Dylan cover – ‘Only a Hobo’ – because you can’t have too many of those. For the violin on that track, I invited along a fiddle player who had come serenading around the tables one night at a restaurant in Beauchamp Place. There was another Stones cover, too – ‘It’s All Over Now’, and one of Eddie Cochran’s hits, ‘Cut Across Shorty’. As with the first album, there were strands of folk, rock ’n’ roll, soul and blues, plucked from all sorts of different places and gently twisted together. And, as with the first album, there was a certain amount of making-do. Ian McLagan didn’t make it into the studio on the day we were scheduled to record ‘You’re My Girl (I Don’t Want to Discuss It)’, so we simply went ahead and did it without him. But that was a demonstration of my haste as much as anything else.
It worked. The reviews were even better than for the first album. According to Melody Maker,
‘Rod’s voice is an extraordinary tool, seemingly shot to pieces and at times barely seeming to exist, yet retaining a power and depth of communication with which few can compare.’ In Rolling Stone, meanwhile, I found myself hailed as ‘a supremely fine artist’. That made me very proud. Not bad for a bloke with a frog in his throat.
Gasoline Alley very quickly sold 250,000 copies in the US and went into the Billboard Top 30. That was a huge breakthrough. Britain, on the other hand, the land of my birth, still remained stoically immune to my charms. The album crawled into the UK album chart somewhere in the high sixties and crawled out again a week later.
Third time lucky, though. Every Picture Tells a Story was recorded in 1971. This time it really was just me producing – left entirely alone to get on with it. Whether that’s because Lou Reizner had another wedding to go to, or because I was now considered competent, I’m not sure. But let’s go with the latter.
By now, at the third time of asking, the band really knew each other’s playing, and you could hear it in the recordings. There was the usual mix-up of styles. I wanted to record ‘Amazing Grace’ and maybe use that as the title of the album, but Judy Collins beat me to it. We also did the now obligatory Dylan cover, ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’; Tim Hardin’s ‘Reason to Believe; a touch of gospel on ‘Seems Like a Long Time’, which was originally a folk tune; Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right’, which had given Elvis a hit, although we did it country-style; and a version of the Temptations’ ‘(I Know) I’m Losing You’.
And then there were the three original songs: ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’, ‘Mandolin Wind’ and ‘Maggie May’ – a loose recounting, as we noted earlier, of the loss of my virginity in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it encounter with an older woman at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival of 1961. And ‘Maggie May’, of course, changed everything.
Good job I didn’t throw it away, really – which looked like an option at one point. I co-wrote the song with the aforementioned Martin Quittenton, a gentle chap, very quiet and studious with a permanently furrowed brow (and a lovely girlfriend), who was about the most inventive acoustic guitarist I had come across at that point, and had a head full of chords like I had never imagined, let alone been able to get my fingers around in my own stilted strummings. Martin, who lived in Sussex, stayed over at my house during the recording sessions for the album and we worked out the basic structure of ‘Maggie May’ one evening in the sitting room.
The whole song was recorded in two takes – not including cymbals. When The Beatles finished ‘Please Please Me’, George Martin allegedly clicked on the talkback and said, ‘Congratulations, boys, you’ve just recorded your first number one.’ What would I have said, had I spoken to the studio after finishing ‘Maggie May’? Probably, ‘Well, that’s sort of OK, I suppose. Drink, anyone?’
I mean, nice enough song, obviously. Good little tale. Nice mandolin part, played by Ray Jackson from the folk-rock group Lindisfarne – and you don’t often hear mandolin on a pop song, but it was a texture I had always loved in folk music. I certainly didn’t think it should be a single, though. Actually, I even wondered for a while about leaving it off the album. It didn’t have a chorus. It just had these rambling verses. It didn’t really have a hook. How could you hope to have a hit single with a song that was all verse and no chorus and no hook? And it went on a bit: it was more than five minutes long, for God’s sake, which was pretty much operatic by the standards of the pop single. In the end, it got shoved on the B-side of ‘Reason to Believe’, which seemed to me the best place for it. ‘Reason to Believe’ was much more like the kind of thing that might get on the radio.
And then, of course, what happens is that some DJ on an American radio station, allegedly in Cleveland, Ohio, plays ‘Maggie May’ instead of ‘Reason to Believe’. Either he preferred ‘Maggie May’ or he simply had the single on the deck the wrong way up. It doesn’t really matter. Within a matter of weeks, DJs everywhere, in the US and the UK alike, were doing the same thing, forcing the record company to reclassify ‘Maggie’ as the A-side.
Maybe I should have known from listening to Bob Dylan that a song didn’t have to have a catchy phrase in the middle to be popular: that there was room for a good old rambling song. Yet in a way that I didn’t predict, something in the story of the lyric and the flow of the song and the feel of the arrangement – all these things bundled together reached people. An awful lot of people. In October 1971, ‘Maggie May’ went to number one in the UK charts. It did the same thing, at the same time, in the US charts. And as a consequence of the curiosity sparked off by ‘Maggie May’, Every Picture Tells a Story simultaneously went to the top of the album charts, in both countries. To my own dizzy amazement, and not inconsiderable pride, I suddenly had the number one single and the number one album, at the same time, on both sides of the Atlantic. It was like all the planets aligning. Nobody had ever done that: not even Presley, not even the Beatles.
The album got dislodged eventually by John Lennon’s Imagine. The following week, Every Picture upped and dislodged Imagine and was back at the top again. The only album that outsold Every Picture in 1971 was Bridge over Troubled Water. The only single that outsold ‘Maggie May’ was George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’.
And suddenly it was raining fame and money. How would I cope? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t wait to find out.
Two more albums for Mercury would follow those first three: Never a Dull Moment in 1972 and Smiler in 1974. Busy, busy times. Hectically busy. Impractically busy, you could even say. Especially when you factor in the other little detail, which is that, for the whole of this period, I was also in a band. Quite a good one.
CHAPTER 9
In which our hero throws in his lot with the damaged remnants of the Small Faces and is reluctantly made alert to the perils of trying to run two careers at once. With sundry meditations on graffiti, Ronnie Wood’s hooter and the wearing of velvet in hot rooms.
IN 1969, WITH a solo record deal under my belt, a debut album recorded and about to be released, and with individual success on both sides of the Atlantic a tantalising possibility if I simply put in some dedicated hard graft, I once again confounded my advisers by running headlong for the comfort blanket of a band. Call me a bundle of insecurity, call me a mess of contradictions or call me a plain old scaredy-cat – it’s immaterial to me, because the band was the Faces, we were together for five years and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
On a good night, the Faces were something special. On a bad night, we were bloody awful. But with the Faces, being bloody awful could sometimes be even more special than being good. And the feeling between the five of us – me, Ronnie Wood, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones – when we were onstage was hard to surpass. Outside of certain football teams, I don’t think it would be possible to experience camaraderie like it. By the end, of course, bands being bands, we’d all be travelling in separate limos, staying in separate hotels, threatening to quit every five minutes and squabbling like cats in a sack. But while it worked – God, it was brilliant.
That said, I couldn’t have joined a band that was less enchanted by the idea of having a lead singer – not just me, but any lead singer. When Steve Marriott walked out on the Small Faces in 1969 and went away to form Humble Pie, the rest of the band were left with a mistrust of front-men that would last them for the rest of their days. They had been bowling along, making some of the most iconic pop music of the 1960s (‘All or Nothing’, ‘Itchycoo Park’, ‘Tin Soldier’, all of The Autumn Stone album, which Ronnie Wood and I listened to all the time), and then Marriott had pulled the plug on them. Lead vocalists (or LVs) were, in the sneering phrase used by the band, ‘Luncheon Vouchers’. The automatic suspicion was that singers were on the make, permanently alert to the main chance and out for themselves; that if they invited another one to join them, he would come in, take over the band and then walk out leaving everyone else in the lurch. And given the way it eventually panned o
ut with me, Ronnie Lane and Mac, in particular, would probably have felt their suspicion was triumphantly vindicated. Well, they took a view. But I will always argue that it wasn’t like that.
The remains of the Small Faces were rehearsing in a studio in the basement of a warehouse at 47 Bermondsey Street that belonged to the Rolling Stones, who used the place principally as a storage facility. You would walk in and there would be all these boxed two-inch tapes and quarter-inch masters on the shelves with things like ‘Honky Tonk Women’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ written on them. And we all loved the Stones, and thought there was no rhythm section like theirs in the world when they were on song, so you couldn’t help but feel the hairs go up on your neck slightly at the sight of that. The Stones were very good to the Faces in those early days: they never charged us for the use of the room. They were mentors of sorts and there was a good spirit between the bands – at least until the Stones purloined Ronnie Wood, when relations were put on hold for a while.
I was at a party with Mick Jagger in 1974, when the rumours of Ronnie leaving the Faces were beginning to bubble.
Me: ‘Are you going to nick Woody from us?’
Mick: ‘I would never do that. I would never break up the Faces.’
Oh yes you would, Mick.
But that was at the end. At the beginning was this basement where Ronnie Lane, Mac and Kenney were knocking around, trying to find a new direction. And then Ronnie Wood, at a loose end after the demise of the Jeff Beck Group, started going down there with his guitar to join in, and I went along there with him a few times, just to have some drinks and stand around listening – mostly looking forward to the moment in the evening when we would all go to the King’s Arms pub up the road. The landlord there thought we were ‘nice boys’ on account of the fact that we drank pricy spirits – rum and Cokes, mostly – rather than cheaply nursing half a pint of beer all night. That’s a landlord’s definition of ‘nice’ for you.