by Rod Stewart
And yet, in the same moment, I appeared to have alienated a portion of the people who up until then had felt close to me. Some of the fans from the Gasoline Alley days, in particular, felt truly let down. Some regarded disco as the bitter enemy, and wondered what I was doing, consorting with the other side. Music was strewn with battle lines in those days, in ways that (God be praised) it no longer is. In the late 1970s, there was soul and there was heavy metal and there was punk, and so on – with their followers all in their separate trenches with bayonets drawn. And you couldn’t hoist yourself out of, say, the rock trench and make a sprint for the soul trench, even just to say hello, without serious risk of getting your head blown off.
Well, I had always mixed things up, right from the beginning, on all my albums – taken a bit of rhythm and blues, a bit of folk, a standard, some rock ’n’ roll, and hoped that the voice bound it all together. And, in a solo campaign lasting almost a decade, I had only sustained very light wounding as a result of these tactics. But disco was clearly regarded in some places as a dash too far. Cue heavy artillery fire – and especially from music critics who wrote off ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ as a big old lump of cheese and the work of a terrible show-off, to boot.
What could I say? I got tired of pointing out that the lyric was written in the third person – ‘She sits alone, waiting for suggestions, He’s so nervous, avoiding all the questions’ and so on – and that when it opens up into the first person in the chorus, you’re meant to be hearing the unspoken thoughts of the bloke and the girl in the song, who are aching to get each other’s clothes off but don’t quite know how to broach the topic (‘If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy’, etc.). It wasn’t me, asking every Tom, Dick and Harriet in the world if they thought I was sexy. There was a story being told here. But that rather tended to get brushed aside. And I didn’t get much help from my management and the marketing people, whose campaign for this single had me stretched out in full spandex-clad glory beneath the slogan ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’. Heaven knows how a lot of my male fans must have been feeling at this point. Possibly like putting my old albums out of sight at the back of their wardrobes for a while.
Just to complicate matters, the Brazilian musician Jorge Ben Jor eventually pointed out the similarity of the melody in the chorus to a song of his from 1972 called ‘Taj Mahal’. Bang to rights, too. I held my hand up straight away. Not that I had stood in the studio and said, ‘Here, I know, we’ll use that tune from “Taj Mahal” as the chorus and be done with it. The writer lives in Brazil, so he’ll never find out.’ But I had been to the Carnival in Rio earlier in 1978, with Elton and Freddie Mercury, where two significant things had happened: firstly, I had developed a brief and hopeless crush on a lesbian Brazilian film star who wouldn’t let me anywhere near her; and secondly I had heard Jorge Ben Jor’s ‘Taj Mahal’ being given heavy rotation all over the place. It had been re-released that year, and clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced when I was trying to find a line to fit the chords. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple. I handed over the royalties, again wondering whether ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ was partly cursed.
Now, the synth hook at the start of the song: that I did whip, very deliberately, from the strings on Bobby Womack’s ‘(If You Want My Love) Put Something Down On It’. But the rules are that you can lift a line from an arrangement – as distinct from a melody line – without infringing copyright. So you can’t touch me for that.
I took the song out of the live show for a while at the beginning of the 2000s, feeling tired of it, but people who had bought tickets complained and I felt I was selling them short by not doing it. And then when I put it back on the set list I realised that I was enjoying singing it again anyway. So it’s back in the show now – late on, as a rule, where it tends to turn into a bit of a romp. It seems to evoke a whole era for people – the late 1970s disco period – and to connect them with their pasts, and you have to be grateful, as a songwriter, to have something as potent as that in your locker.
Also, I make no apologies for the bum-wiggling in the video, though this too attracted some flak at the time. I don’t know why: it was nothing new for me. Since I had first properly discovered my confidence as a front-man, in the Faces, I had been a major proponent of the bum-wiggle, firmly believing the arse to be an important part of the rock ’n’ roll stage performer’s armoury and a powerfully communicative tool, if harnessed appropriately. Plus I just happen to dance that way.
I’m prepared to admit, however, that the black spandex trousers – worn, for the purposes of this video, with a billowing silk blouson – gave the buttocks a prominence that they hadn’t enjoyed in earlier, looser outfits. The same went for the leopard-print versions, in similar material, that I took a shine to in this period. But we’re talking about a difference in fashion here, and the cut of the clothes, rather than a wholesale change in my approach to buttock-work. Different trousers, yes; but same wiggling arse. That’s my contention, anyway.
One final point about that video for ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’: you may notice that, in the performance sections, when the band is on a stage, miming to the track, I quite often spin away from the camera and face the back. That was to hide the fact that I kept forgetting the lyric. You would have seen a lot less of my arse if I could only have remembered the bloody words.
The British leg of the tour for the Blondes Have More Fun album opened in Manchester in December 1978. Still keen to spend as little time apart as possible, Alana and I rented a house in Chester Square in London to use as a base, and brought Ashley over with us. I hadn’t played in England for two years, and I didn’t know what to expect. The UK press had been less than enthusiastic about the album. Did anybody care any more? Would anybody turn up? It’s something I live with constantly: the terror of the empty seat, the all too visible sign that you’re on the fade, that the decline is underway. I once read how Al Jolson, one of my childhood heroes, was completely paranoid about the sight of empty seats and I have definitely caught his fear.
No problem this time, though. The tartan hordes were still rampant, rushing the front of the stalls as usual, completely ignoring the seating plan. The tour seemed to build and build through to five nights at Olympia at the end of December, and the atmosphere of those shows and the atmosphere of Christmas seemed to combine to create a delirium like I had never known. And, more than once, when I started into ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ and heard the words come back at me off the audience, heard the audience take the song out of my hands completely and charge off with it as they usually did, I got choked up and couldn’t have sung along with them if I had wanted to.
* * *
At the start of 1979, Alana said she thought she was coming down with flu. She wasn’t, though. She was pregnant.
We had talked about children. I knew I wanted them. I had loved living with Britt’s children, Victoria and Nikolaj. I loved Alana’s son, Ashley. I loved being around kids. I came from a big family and I wanted a big family. I couldn’t see how children were anything other than a good thing.
But did I want them now, in 1979 – like, in less than nine months’ time?
The reality of it threw me for a loop. I panicked, and in my panic I turned cool on Alana and we had a couple of really bad months. I got cold feet and behaved badly. On tour in Australia in February 1979, I had a fling with Belinda Green, the Australian model and former Miss World. I was on the other side of the globe, and in those days, when news travelled slowly and with difficulty, I genuinely expected to get away with it. A big feature in the Sydney Morning Herald, with a photograph, meant that I didn’t. Word got back to Alana, who, understandably, was fantastically upset.
I felt about as popular as the lookout at Pearl Harbor. However, I managed to persuade myself, and her, that this transgression had been a final fling, just the terror of impending responsibility forcing me astray. And when Alana flew out to join the tour in Japan, we patche
d things up. And in the process of patching things up, we remembered that we were still in love and we decided to get married. There was no big romantic proposal, no going down on bended knee. Just a decision between the two of us that this was the right way. In the hotel, I wanted to pass the news to my parents back in London, but I was so afraid of telling them. I knew they wouldn’t approve. I got my secretary, Gail Williams, to break it to them first, and then I took the receiver and spoke to them, slightly cringing and very nervous, perched on the end of a twin hotel bed. It was an awkward conversation. My mum did her best to sound pleased. (It was much later that she shared with the press her agreement with my dad’s view that I ‘should have married a nice Scots girl’.) My dad just came right out and said, ‘You’re not old enough.’
Ridiculous, of course: I was thirty-four, for heaven’s sake.
We were married in April, although not before I had experienced a further couple of bouts of cold feet. In advance of the actual wedding, on the day when we were due to go together to pick up our marriage licence, I disappeared off to a car showroom to look into buying a car – the sign, perhaps, of a certain lack of commitment on my part to the project. Clearly, the bachelor in me wasn’t going to go under without a fight. I didn’t bolt, though. On the day of the wedding, the bride wore cream and so did the groom – although Alana’s was an off-the-shoulder number and mine was a suit, with a pink tie. We held the ceremony very privately among the glass and marble at Tina Sinatra’s house. Tina was the maid of honour and Billy Gaff was my best man. And then we drove down to L’Ermitage, a French restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, for the reception. Nobody had been told that the party was for our wedding. We said it was simply to celebrate the start of the American leg of my tour. We even kept the arrangements secret from Tony Toon because we realised that letting Toon in on the secret would have been like posting the plan on a billboard on the Sunset Strip. Nevertheless, people seemed to have twigged the real reason for the occasion: the pavement outside the restaurant was jammed with photographers, which tipped off most of the guests, too. We didn’t care. A great party ensued. The plan had been to spend our wedding night at the Hotel Bel-Air, but the press would probably have followed us all the way in and up to the room, so we went back to Carolwood instead, and we were profoundly happy.
Marriage worked like the click of a switch. It wiped away all the doubts, cleared away all the fear. My transgression in Australia was forgotten. I became a husband: in love with Alana, in love with the role, in love with the whole idea. I was touring America, but I was flying home every night so that I could be with her. Why wouldn’t I be happy? We were a newly wedded husband and wife, with a child on the way – a boy, of course. Roderick Christian Stewart. We had the name ready because, even though we chose not to find out the sex beforehand, we absolutely knew it was going to be a boy.
In August the baby came, arriving at the blissful end of a three-and-a-half-hour labour, during which Alana unleashed her inner Texan to a degree that even I had never witnessed. Language poured forth from her that I didn’t know existed, even in Texas. And out came, not Roderick Christian, but Kimberly Alana. And there is, of course, nothing like it. And there was, of course, nothing like her. I held her before Alana did. The doctor gave her to me and I was absolutely in love with her from the second I laid eyes on her. Our Kimberly.
So now we were parents and, at the same time, Hollywood hosts on a major scale. These were heady days. Alana’s connections had taken me, blinking rather wildly, into a social world that I had never thought I would be a part of. We had a ballroom built onto one end of Carolwood, with an upper gallery all around it, and we would throw the most amazing parties – elaborately formal affairs, with tables set for dinner and drapery and dance bands and guests instructed to dress smartly. It was our Great Gatsby period. On the guest list would be people like Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Albert Finney, Linda Evans, Joan and Jackie Collins, Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett, with whom Alana was very close . . . it just went on and on. People say, ‘What were all those guys like?’ Well, they all seemed great to me, but of course I saw them only when they were drunk or stoned and having a fabulous time, and when I was the same. I never saw them the morning after.
This was when I was introduced to serious cocaine – proper, extremely high-quality stuff. It was considered so chic at the time, not least among showbusiness types, to whom its use was pretty much confined. The idea wasn’t to snort line after line and then see in the dawn, goggle-eyed and gasping. You were using it more like snuff, to pep the evening along – just a little puff of this pillowy white powder off the back of your hand. And then maybe another little puff. And perhaps another . . . But no headaches afterwards, miraculously, and no nosebleeds – and no sense for me, slightly deluding myself, that something so pure could possibly be damaging my voice. Just a rather wonderful sense of well-being and overall enhancement. Some magical evenings ensued. Late one night, after dinner when everyone else had gone home, Tony Curtis ended up in the sitting room teaching me how to do the jive with a chair – skipping it up onto one leg, twirling it around. On another evening, similarly at the end of an evening when the guests had departed, I watched my great friend Jim Cregan, the guitarist in my band, playing flamenco and dancing with Liza Minnelli. Which would have been plausible if Jim could actually play flamenco. All in all, life appeared to have taken on the quality of an extraordinary dream.
To mark our first wedding anniversary, in April 1980, Alana and I had a sit-down dinner in the ballroom for a hundred guests, catered by Chasen’s – caviar, Château d’Yquem wine, the works – the room all beautifully draped and dressed. Elton flew in for it, and David and Dani Janssen were there, and Gregory and Veronique Peck, and David Niven Jnr, and Jacqueline Bisset, and Johnny Carson, and Billy Wilder, and Tita and Sammy Cahn. A swing band set up on the gallery, and nobody below knew they were there until after the dinner when they launched into some Glenn Miller and everybody got up and danced. Freddie de Cordova, the producer of The Tonight Show, rose and said it was the best party he had ever been to in Hollywood.
Gregory and Veronique Peck, incidentally, were our next-door neighbours, and you couldn’t have asked for nicer ones. They never once complained about the noise of my band rehearsing in the garage. Indeed, I went over and apologised to them about it one time, and they said, ‘Oh, no. We like to sit out on the terrace and listen.’ They cut a hole in their fence so that I could go through and use their tennis court whenever I fancied it.
Gregory came to see me in concert once, too, at the Forum in Los Angeles in 1979. He brought Fred Astaire with him, and when they took their seats the house lights were up and the whole place rose for them. I was so proud that I had an audience who would do that. They both came backstage afterwards and Astaire said, ‘Now, tell me, who does your choreography?’ I had to say, ‘Well . . . you know . . . I just sort of make it up as I go along.’ Which, of course, he would have worked out for himself. But it was very charming of him to ask.
So, life was, in so many ways, extraordinary. And very quickly Alana was pregnant again. Kim was only about four months old when it happened. Alana didn’t know it was possible to conceive while you were breastfeeding. And when the baby came, we were in Malibu, somewhat inconveniently. When I was on tour, back at the start of 1978, Alana had found us a beautiful beach house on a relatively deserted stretch of sand, with 270 feet of beach frontage and only a handful of neighbouring properties. It looked like a miniature version of the Sydney Opera House, a big clam shell, and as soon as I had seen the photographs that Alana sent, I wanted it. We had great times at that weekend house in those early years. Alana used to say it was the only place she ever saw me properly relax. I can be restless. I need to be moving or doing things. But there I felt happy for once to be still, to have tea with the kids outside, sitting in the sand. It was a family place, when so much of the rest of our lives was filled with other people and
moving around.
Anyway, it was in the beach house that weekend in September 1980 that Alana went into labour that second time, which sent us chasing into central Los Angeles from Malibu up the Freeway, with Alana in serious danger, it occurred to me, not merely of having the baby in the car, but also of ruining the upholstery. With these two thoughts in mind, my foot was flat to the floor, and before long the lights of a police car were flashing in my rear-view mirror. I pulled over and, without thinking, and even as Alana was shouting ‘No! No! Don’t do that!’, I jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran back towards the police car – which is, of course, the last thing you should do when pulled over by traffic cops, unless you want to give them the wrong impression. A police car door duly opened and a cop climbed out with his gun pointing straight at me. I was shouting, ‘My wife’s having a baby!’ The cop seemed to recognise me – or at least he lowered his gun and came towards the car, looking in at Alana, who was now shouting, ‘I’ve got to get to the hospital! I’ve got to get to the hospital!’
The cop said, ‘We’ll call you an ambulance, ma’am.’ Alana, really now feeling that the baby was emerging, screamed, ‘There isn’t fucking time! Get me to the fucking hospital or I’ll fucking drive there myself!’ At this, the cops seemed to decide she was not to be reasoned with and provided us with a police escort, lights flashing, all the way to Cedars-Sinai.