Rod Stewart

Something I have in common with my mom: we both like Rod Stewart. Not so much in common is the era of Rod Stewart we respectively enjoy.

Never has someone had so much talent and so thoroughly betrayed that talent. - unknown

Someone said this once. I don't remember who, but the quote stuck with me because of it's glaring truthfulness.

So, every year, around Christmas time it seems that Rod Stewart releases another of his crooning "standards" albums. He's up to four volumes now, I think. Those are the albums where he sings cover songs all Vegas style. Even worse than the "Forever Young" and that craptastic song from Legal Eagles, "Love Touch" junk he was doing. Blech. But my mom likes them, so they make good Christmas presents.

But let's rewind about 30-35 years. It's the late 60's and early 70's and Jesus Christ did this guy put out some great stuff. The only shame of the matter is that it took me so long to discover it. Roughly it went like this: About two years ago, a guy at work suggested I check out "Truth" by Jeff Beck. He mentioned that Stewart sang on it and I was immeadiately skeptical. But I gave it a chance and it turned out to be quite good. Fast forward some time. I recall hearing the song "Every Picture Tells a Story" on my way home from Lowell. (Why I was in Lowell, I don't recall.) Again, I was pleasantly surprised. Fast forward to about 9-10 months ago, I hear from a few different people about a band called the Faces. Typically when the same name pops up in a few different places at around the same time, it gets stuck in my head, and I'll check it out.

The best way to describe the Faces, if you don't know them, is that they were the 70's version of the Black Crowes. The started out as the Small Faces and changed their name once Stewart and Ron Wood joined (although they did release one last album with the Small Faces name.) Quite simply these guys have been one of my favorite bands since I started listening to them. Boozy, fun, bar room rock. Except that they're English, so I guess that makes them pub rock. I scooped up all their albums, as well as the four disc box set.

At the same time the Fcaes were going on, Stewart was also releasing quality solo albums. And now, just over the past few days, I've picked up a few: Every Picture Tells a Story and Never a Dull Moment. And they're both great as well.

There's still a few more of his early solo albums I want to get before I can consider my Stewart collection complete. But with what I have so far, between the years of 1968 and 1973, just five years, he has sang/written on 8 albums that I really like. (And at least two more that I intend buy and fully expect to like.) That's pretty unheard of.

On the song "True Blue" from Never a Dull Moment, he sings that he'll never be a millionaire. That obviously turned out to be false. The unfortunate fact is that it never happened while he was turning out diamonds instead of rough. It's too bad that it occured after, as allmusic.com puts it:

Rod Stewart may have began his career as a respected singer, yet that respect eroded as he got older, as he became more concerned with stardom than music. While he has recorded some terrible albums — and he would admit that freely — Stewart was once rock & roll's best interpretive singer, as well as an accomplished songwriter, creating a raw combination of folk, rock, blues, and country that sounded like no other folk-rock or country-rock. Instead of finding the folk in rock, he found how folk rocked like hell on its own. After Stewart became successful, he began to lose the rootsier elements of his music, yet he remained a superb singer, even as he abandoned his own artistic path in favor of following pop trends.

Sometimes that fame can be a real talent killer.