Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  There was some competitive turkey cooking in the kitchen. It was generally agreed that Alana’s turkey turned out best, while Rachel had ruined hers by throwing at it every single herb she could find. Kelly did the roast potatoes and the sprouts. Penny, very cannily, stood back and let them get on with it. Everybody got along well enough and the children, of course, loved it. Was it the kind of Christmas the adults in the party would choose to have every year? Perhaps not. Have we done it again since? No. But I was able to look around the room during that afternoon and cast my eyes from one face to the next, and think to myself, ‘OK, maybe you wouldn’t have sat down and planned it this way, and Lord knows there was enough grief and strife along the road. But in a profound and unshakeable way, this family is a unit and it works.’ Twelve years later, I feel that even more strongly.

  It’s impossible for me to recount in full the immense joy I have had from my children, the mountains of love that I have received from them and the pleasure I have had in watching them grow from little toddlers to strong, young adults – and now doing it all again with Alastair and Aiden. It’s a blessing. No record sales compare to that, nor ever will.

  CHAPTER 19

  In which our hero despairs of ever having a hit again and then promptly has a whole bunch of them. With musings upon personal reinvention, cottages in Scotland and the wisdom of dancing cheek to cheek with a music industry legend.

  ONE NIGHT, I was having dinner with Arnold in Morton’s on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and after we had ordered I ran past him the idea I had for the next album.

  I said, ‘I think I should do a record of standards.’

  Could it be that, at this exact moment, a crumb of bread roll went the wrong way down Arnold’s throat? I couldn’t be sure, but his face had gone very red and he seemed to be having trouble suppressing a fit of alarmed coughing.

  I carried on, regardless. ‘Yes, a standards album – the wonderful American songs, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart. The songs I grew up with, the stuff I heard while sitting on my dad’s knee.’

  I could see Arnold trying to compose his face as if I hadn’t just announced a near-certain death wish.

  In due course, he said, ‘Can I be absolutely honest with you?’

  I said, ‘Of course.’

  Arnold said, ‘I think you should store that idea away for a decade or two.’

  And he was absolutely correct. The dinner I’m talking about took place in 1983. Arnold had only recently taken over as my manager. Of the tasks facing us both at that particular moment, probably the most pressing was fixing the collateral damage caused by the wild success of ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ and taking all necessary measures to realign people’s mistaken impression of me as Mr Disco Trousers. It’s unlikely that this problem would have been best dealt with by releasing a version of ‘These Foolish Things’, no matter how hot. So, instead, I went away under orders from Arnold to reconnect with my rock ’n’ roll roots and made the Camouflage album.

  Still, I mention this conversation in order to show how the urge to record those great American songs was always there, bubbling away. They had been a part of me since the warm tones of Ella Fitzgerald came flooding out of the radiogram in Archway Road. And finally, nineteen years later, the time did come.

  Even then, it felt like a giant leap. A British rock singer with a fondness for football and a penchant for lobbing his microphone stand about, tackling the American popular classics? Quite apart from the possible charges of presumptuousness, I knew I would be entirely repositioning myself in many people’s eyes, and throwing a lot of expectations up in the air. Yet it was a risk I felt inclined to take. The last album I had released – Human, in 2001 – had sold poorly. Alarmingly poorly. It had seemed to go down about as well as a verruca plaster in a swimming pool. It had the worst opening week for sales of any album I had ever made. It was also the first album I had ever released to which I contributed absolutely no songs of my own. If those two facts were related to one another, I certainly didn’t have the confidence to make the connection myself. Indeed, my assumption was that I was completely finished as a songwriter.

  Why wouldn’t I think that? The last really successful song I had written was ‘Forever Young’ in 1988 – since when almost fourteen years had passed. Songwriting has always been hard for me, but in the 1990s it seemed to become impossible – and for reasons that I couldn’t explain, which only increased the frustration of it. I remember discussing the problem with the producer Trevor Horn. Trevor said, ‘Why don’t you rent a cottage in Scotland and just go up there on your own with an acoustic guitar and see what happens?’ He meant well, but I couldn’t think of anything worse. The idea of being alone in a remote part of the country with an acoustic guitar was pretty much my definition of hell.

  And when I did manage to write songs in that period, I suffered some knock-backs. I put some material forward to the record company which got dismissed as derivative and not up to muster. I was failing to get songs on my own albums, which was discouraging. I only had two of my own songs on A Spanner in the Works, the 1995 album, and When We Were the New Boys, which came out in 1998, contained just one song that I had a hand in: the title track. The rest were songs plucked out for me by the record company, who did their best. But I wasn’t bringing anything to the table and I was beginning to think of myself as entirely a voice for hire: tell me what to sing, and I’ll sing it. And on Human, it showed. All in all, it felt like a very good moment to try something different.

  One night, I was out for dinner with the producer Richard Perry, a good friend of mine. Richard had produced some of the greatest pop tracks of all time: Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’, Barbra Streisand’s ‘Stoney End’, albums by Harry Nilsson, the Temptations, Art Garfunkel, Tina Turner and many others. Richard’s home in West Hollywood sat just above Sunset Boulevard and was always known for what he christened ‘Perry’s Pub’ – a party room with a fully stocked bar. It was the scene of much late-night skulduggery through the 1970s and beyond, and a place you knew you could always fall into at the end of an evening for a full-blown knees-up with drink and music and dancing.

  Over dinner, I mentioned to Richard my long-standing dream of a standards album. He loved Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as much as I did, and he really warmed to the notion. We started throwing titles of songs at each other: ‘Cheek to Cheek’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘September in the Rain’ . . . I had to ask the waiter for a pen and some paper so I could write them down. One of us would mention a song, and I would start singing it to Richard, testing whether it would work. The other diners in the restaurant must have thought they were present at some wildly over-cooked seduction scene – me singing ‘It Had to Be You’ loudly at the man across the table.

  We decided to record some demos. Richard hired some crack jazz-pop session musicians and we laid down five songs off our list in three or four hours. But I wasn’t that thrilled with them. The approach was very conventional and I thought anybody could do it that way, and had done it that way. I wanted to make it different and open it up to more contemporary influences. So Richard started again, with some different musicians, this time in a little demo studio in the Valley, and built a set of backing tracks that were much more lush and synthesised and altogether more modern-sounding.

  Eventually we had ten tracks in some shape or other, ready to show people – songs like ‘You Go to My Head’, ‘Stormy Weather’, and ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’, the Lerner and Loewe song from My Fair Lady, a number I had already recorded back in 1974 for the Smiler album. We felt it was a strong set and were pretty excited about it.

  The question was, would anybody else like it? Arnold promptly took the tracks to Val Azzoli, the co-chairman of Atlantic Records, part of Warner Bros., which was my label at the time, to see if he would be interested in releasing a Rod Stewart standards album. Azzoli shook his head and said, ‘No, certainly not.’

  Not selected by my own
team: that was a bitter blow.

  Arnold’s next port of call was Mo and Michael Ostin and Lenny Waronker, with whom I had worked for a long time and very successfully at Warner Bros., but who were now at DreamWorks. Their reaction was like Azzoli’s, only slightly worse. They said, ‘This is terrible. This will never sell. This is not good for Rod’s career.’

  Blow number two.

  Still, having done the decent thing and given the first looks to our closest and firmest associates in the business, Arnold now at least felt able to widen the net and take the record to the person he had always thought would be ideal: Clive Davis, the quintessential artist/music man, a legend in the industry and the former president of Columbia Records and Arista Records who, in 2000, had founded the label J Records. Arnold flew in to see him in New York and played the tracks to him in his office.

  Clive listened carefully and said, ‘I love the concept, and I love some of the song choices, but I don’t think the tracks sound right.’ Arnold thought he was about to be shown the door again. But something about the notion had clearly hooked Clive. After a while he said, ‘If Rod Stewart’s willing to risk it, so am I. Let’s do it. But it’s a one-album deal.’ Some hours and lots of excited talk later, Arnold left Clive with a two-album deal in hand.

  Clive thought the contemporary production was a mistake, so Richard and I made some more demos in which we took out the synthesisers and the programmed percussion and put in band instruments and strings. One afternoon in 2002, we took these versions to Clive in Bungalow 8A at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he was staying. It turned into one of the most surreal business meetings I have ever attended. It was clear that the demos were closer to what Clive was hoping to hear, but he still wanted the songs to be more danceable. He said, ‘I don’t want these low movie strings. I want it lilting, lilting – like Fred and Ginger, lilting, lilting.’ And as he spoke, this seventy-year-old music mogul stood up and began wafting his hands in front of him as if conducting an orchestra, and swaying from side to side. And Arnold and I stood up and began doing the same – conducting with our hands and weaving our shoulders, and then Richard stood up, and suddenly all four of us were Fred and Gingering round the room and saying, ‘Lilting, lilting . . .’ Arnold and I were still dancing when we left, twisting and turning along the path, calling out, ‘Lilting, lilting . . .’

  So, with that message received, we went back into the studio. Richard got to produce some of the songs and the producer Phil Ramone, a very sweet man with an incredible track record encompassing everyone from Dylan to Sinatra, was brought in to provide additional ‘Fred and Gingerfication’ on the others.

  It was in this phase that I felt the project become extremely personal to me. I was playing this new material to Penny. After dinner, up at Perry’s Pub, Richard and I would play tracks to her and gauge from her reaction if they were working. This was in the very early stages of my and Penny’s relationship, when she was going back and forth to London to complete her college photography course and her suitcase always seemed to be packed and waiting by the door. And so many of the songs I was working on seemed to speak directly to our predicament: parting and reuniting, longing for each other from a distance, those first pangs of romance. ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, ‘The Very Thought of You’, ‘We’ll Be Together Again’, ‘The Nearness of You’: these songs were a soundtrack to those first months of our courtship, almost as if they were designed to tell its story, which, in turn, caused me to form an even stronger bond with the material and an even greater desire to get it right.

  Eventually, we had an album: It Had to Be You . . . The Great American Songbook. Now all I needed to do was convince the public that Rod Stewart, hitherto known primarily as a rock star, was also a plausible singer of 32-bar ballads. I loved singing these songs as much as I loved singing anything. The internal rhymes, the unforced, conversational way in which the lyric rides the tune, the sheer amount of craft and polish in the construction – for a singer, this stuff is a gift.

  But it was one thing to close your eyes in the privacy of a studio and deliver songs made famous by Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and quite another to go and do it in front of other people. One of the most nervous times of my life was before the launch event for the album at the St Regis Hotel in Los Angeles. It was set up as a swanky listening session, over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, in a huge, lavishly decorated ballroom, with little round candlelit tables, for 500 music-industry and showbusiness bigwigs. Clive was tireless in the promotion of this record – gave countless interviews, came on television with me to talk it up (which was great, because I hate doing that stuff myself), and generally treated the thing as if it were the second coming of The Beatles.

  On this particular night, he went onto the stage and talked about the music with love and conviction and played some of the tracks. And then I came out and, as a surprise, sang four of the songs live. Round the back beforehand I realised I was experiencing the kind of fear I hadn’t known since I got up with the Jeff Beck Group at the Fillmore East in New York all those years ago and first sang the blues to Americans. I had the exact same sense that I was about to be exposed. I said to Arnold something that I had found myself telling him pretty frequently during the development of this project: ‘Management, if this all goes tits-up, then be it on your head.’ And then I breathed deeply, knocked back a cocktail, went out there and gave them ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, ‘These Foolish Things’ and ‘You Go to My Head’. Really, all I wanted to prove was that I wasn’t there as an impostor, that I could treat the songs with reverence, just giving them voice and letting their truthfulness come out.

  And it went well. Soon after, on a Saturday evening in New York, I taped for television an in-concert live performance of the songs at Sony Studios, and this bolstered my confidence even more. The show was rehearsed with a full orchestra, on a beautifully lit stage, in front of an audience of a couple of hundred people, with music stands with an ‘RS’ logo on them: the works. I wore white tie and tails that night, and as I put them on in the dressing room, the trepidation was there again, but once I was out there I got over it by listening to the band and sinking into the songs, and gradually my shoulders went down and it began to flow.

  The album went platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US, sold 5 million copies and launched a series. To my amazement, a second volume, released the next year in 2003, entitled As Time Goes By . . . The Great American Songbook 2, was as successful as the first. And on it went. By the time this series wrapped, we’d clocked 22 million copies.

  The clincher for me, though, was some time after the fourth Songbook volume came out, when I got into a conversation in a café in Los Angeles with an American GI who had been part of the second wave of allied landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy in the Second World War. After we had talked about that for a while, this guy said, ‘By the way, you make those old songs sound brand new.’ I couldn’t have hoped for a better vote of confidence from a better source.

  And I actually won a Grammy – Best Traditional Pop Vocal – for 2004’s Stardust: The Great American Songbook 3. When I found out (I was on tour in Australia when the awards were announced), I knew for sure that the world truly was upside down. I had been nominated for one of the American music industry’s prestigious awards no fewer than twelve times in my career, stretching back to 1980, and had never won one, and I had long since decided that it must have been something I had said.

  The staggering and unlooked-for success of the Songbook series – and, more specifically, the fact that this staggering and unlooked-for success came when it did – was just fantastically empowering, unexpected, validating, and something for which I will always be grateful. In 2001, before it happened, I was thinking, ‘Well, it’s been a good run, mate, but maybe it’s time to admit that the party’s over and get your coat.’

  And then, the next thing I know, it’s 2010, I’m sixty-five years old, and I’m looking
back over what was the most commercially successful decade of my entire life.

  CONCLUSION

  In which our hero meditates profoundly on his retirement from everything, recounts a visit to Buckingham Palace in unconventional neckwear and rules out golf.

  I AM UNDER no illusions. I know that one day it will come to an end. I know that eventually – and it may be sooner, rather than later – I will reach a stage where getting out there and performing is simply no longer possible. And I don’t know how I’m going to feel about that. It’s been there all my life. I’ve given so much to it, and it’s given so much back to me. I worry about the hole it will leave.

  I’m talking about playing football, obviously.

  For now, though, I’m hanging on in there. I play in an over-fifties league for Fram, a team founded by expat Norwegians in Los Angeles, but now mostly featuring expat Brits. You’ll find me up bright and early on a Sunday morning and driving out to the coast to our home ground, Framsen Field – surely the best pitch in the league for having a good flat covering of grass and no potholes, bunkers or exposed sprinkler spikes, unlike some of the other death-pit places where we play. And we’re all more crocked than we’ll ever admit, but we simply don’t care because we’re out there in the kit, playing. And I’ve still got my cuffs clamped in my palms like Denis Law, and, at sixty-seven, I’m still good for forty-five minutes, maybe even seventy if it comes to it, and still jogging over to deliver an utterly lethal inswinging corner from the left-hand side when called upon.

  And then, when the game’s done, we’ll all trudge – and often limp – back to the clapboard changing room, which is decked with British football memorabilia, scarves from Scotland and England, pictures of Charlie Cooke and George Best playing in California, and a photo of me, clipped from Playboy. And we’ll sit around on the benches for a while – Ken and Trevor who run the team, Freddie, Celtic John – and someone will open a box of beers and Tommy the Scot will get up and tell utterly disgusting jokes and there’ll be banter and piss-taking, some of it at the expense of my rather lovely, soft brown Prada kitbag, and for that half an hour or so I’m as contented as a man can be.