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Topic: Rod Stewart. Twisting delight away Return to archive
18th February 2007 06:43 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Rod Stewart. Twisting delight away

Yes, his recent albums have given us no reasons to believe, but there was a time when Rod 'the Mod' was perhaps the most vital vocal stylist in rock. Perhaps that's why fans still care
BERNARD PERUSSE, Montreal Gazette
Published: Saturday, February 17, 2007

Does success always come at the expense of art? If Rod Stewart were still sending chills up spines with a desolate Lady Day instead of phoning in pop-rock covers of songs by his inferiors, would he still be filling arenas?

Rock history, in part, is the story of artists who try to negotiate the line between poetry and commerce, hoping they can both sing for their supper and make a statement that carries the ring of truth and honesty.

It's tough to say when Stewart stopped being a writer and interpreter with an exciting vision and became a mere crowd-pleaser. Conventional wisdom says he sold his soul to the show biz devil when he moved to Los Angeles in 1975.

If Smiler (1974) was Stewart's last great album - with the rarest glimpses of half-remembered genius surfacing during the ensuing three decades - the chances of an artistic resurrection have all but died.

Should Stewart care? His four tepid, generic supperclub revisits of the Great American Songbook sold millions of copies. His latest disc, Still the Same ... Great Rock Classics of Our Time debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts - in spite of the fact that it's every bit as lame as its misleading title.

The people have spoken. They still love Rod and they'll follow him anywhere for another Maggie May singalong. And if he's stooped to by-the-numbers covers of so-called classics like Bonnie Tyler's It's a Heartache or John Waite's Missing You - themselves poor-man's Rod imitations - so be it. The damage would fall squarely in the laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank category.

Yet this is the same man who so radically recast Street Fighting Man and Dirty Old Town on his 1969 debut that he deserved a writer's credit. And his own superb originals and co-writes from that era, like Gasoline Alley, Lady Day and True Blue, held their own beside the inspired interpretations.

Stewart - with and without his drunken cohorts in the Faces - could do little wrong during the five years following that stunning maiden album, An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down (titled The Rod Stewart Album here). Gasoline Alley (1970), Every Picture Tells a Story (1971), Never a Dull Moment (1972) and Smiler followed, each one maintaining the standard set by its predecessor, give or take.

Those early tracks remind us of the promise he brought. They are an opening salvo so powerful that they still make us hope for a miracle after 33 years. In the end, it's the vertiginous heights of those recordings that make Stewart's artistic decline among the most dramatic in rock history.

Stewart's music was American-influenced roots rock, full of wooden instruments. It was folk, country and blues as they could only be filtered through the sensibilities of a baby-boomer Brit on a mission. The lyrics, at times, were so touching and personal that you could swear the singer had read your diaries.

His voice - a raspy, soulful magnificent instrument - might not have had the velvety quality of Sam Cooke's, but it knew its way around Cooke's sweet phrasing.

And the whole package was perched on top of a rock 'n' roll beat.

Stewart was running a parallel career with the Faces throughout this period. For every Stewart release, a Faces record would feature his vocals. The group's sloppy, booze-fuelled offerings helped solidify Stewart's image as one of the boys - an endearing part of his appeal that he still cultivates today.

Writing in the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, published in 1976 - when Stewart's fall from grace had yet to be officially pronounced - the late Paul Nelson led the cheerleading.

"Stewart, even in front of tens of thousands, projects an ex-athlete's warmth, sets up towel-snapping camaraderie among the players, and somehow manages to embody both the extrovert, one-of-the-boys hijinks of the macho carouser and the introvert, aw-she'd probably-never-notice-me-anyway self-consciousness of the shyest kid on the block," Nelson wrote.

"If he had never written a word of his own, he would still deserve a place in the history of popular music for his almost unerring choice of material, the canniness of his production concepts and the scope of his emotional range as a singer - arguably the finest in rock and roll."

Tellingly, however, the chapter on Stewart was dropped from the third edition of the authoritative book, published in 1992. In the current history, his legacy has been relegated to a section in the chapter titled Britain: The Second Wave.

What happened in the meantime was a series of albums that seemed to chip away steadily at Stewart's relevance, starting in earnest with the brutal Blondes Have More Fun (1978) and its disco-influenced hit single Do Ya Think I'm Sexy. That song - which seemed to epitomize the starlet-dating, jet-setting Rod - became to Stewart what Silly Love Songs turned out to be for Paul McCartney: the song detractors reach for first. On punk's public-enemies list, Stewart was No. 1.

"I don't know what I was doing," Stewart told Q Magazine in 1995. "(Blondes) sold 6-and-a-half million and there isn't a decent track on it."

Releases continued to arrive with regularity, none of them living up to the promise of the early years. Some, like Tonight I'm Yours (1981) and When We Were the New Boys (1998), had their moments, but only the diehards were still listening. Luckily for Stewart, there were still enough of them to keep the concert venues full.

In 2001, Stewart reached for a more sophisticated audience by trying his hand at the Great American Songbook with It Had To Be You. A largely new fan base ate it up and delivered multiplatinum sales. Three sequels - one each year - had similar success.

In a telephone conference with media representatives in 2004, Stewart repeatedly said that he recorded the albums simply because he loved the songs. "I'm past pleasing other people," he said. "I think my fans have just got to grow up with me. You can't be an 18-year-old rock 'n' roll star all your life."

He's right, of course, although there are contemporaries - Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Robert Plant, for example - who clearly didn't see easy-listening covers as the only way out.

But against all odds, the last words in Nelson's 1976 article don't seem hopelessly out of date. "I care about him," Nelson wrote. "In the end, quite a lot."

That's why we still turn out for his shows, searching for something.

Rod Stewart performs Feb. 24 at 8 at the Bell Centre. Tickets cost $55 to $125. Phone 514-790-1245 or go to www.admission.com.
18th February 2007 08:39 AM
guitarman53 He's trying to be another Tony Bennett.
18th February 2007 09:16 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Concert Review:
Rod Stewart still making the ladies scream

Sunday, February 18, 2007
By Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

This isn't exactly breaking news, but we've hit a strange era of pop culture where the rock icons who launched in the '60s have now hit their 60s.

And not all of them have held up like Mick Jagger.

Rod Stewart, who played Mellon Arena Saturday night, is a bit more mortal. Mind you, he looks amazing for 62. His blonde hair still spikes up and he can still squeeze himself into a tight pair of jeans and make the ladies scream.

There's only once place where he's lacking in the "wow" department -- the voice. It's always sounded raspy and worn, as if he gargled with Scotch. Now, it's more so. Hitting the stage with "Tonight I'm Yours," Rod also hit a few bad notes. Frankly, his version of "You Wear it Well," one of his classics, sounded more worn than well.

But Stewart eventually got on track, even if he was wrestling all night with his limitations. He shied away from the upper register, never really achieving a vocal that blew you away. It was like a quarterback put out there to "manage" the game.

He had a lot of help in that department. At one point he joked, like a carnival barker, that he was offering "real value for your money up here." Indeed. He had an elaborate stage in the round with a highlander plaid curtain, multiple screens and a variety of ramps on which to play. His band, decked out in matching suits (for the first set), featured two drummers, two guitarists, two keyboard players, bass, three lively backup singers, a fiddler, a electric banjo player and a totally hot female sax player with whom Stewart seemed to have absolutely no rapport.

If you came because you like the "Great American Songbook," you were out of luck, as Stewart said early on, "this is a rock 'n' roll show all the way through." It was indeed a rock 'n' roll show, albeit one with a Vegas feel. How much of a rock 'n' roll show could it have been when he left out his two most rocking songs, "Every Picture Tells a Story" and "Stay With Me"?

The first set took on a soulful oldies quality with two Temptations songs -- "(I Know) I'm Losing You" and "This Old Heart of Mine" -- plus Sam Cooke's "Having a Party," and the girls taking center stage on "Piece of My Heart," so he could slip into something more comfortable. Stewart also managed to swing from a countrified "Reason to Believe" to the throwback disco of "Infatuation" and "Hot Legs" to the Irish folk of "Dirty Old Town."

Set two was with a midtempo hits festival starting with "The First Cut is the Deepest" and rolling through "You're In My Heart," "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" and "Tonight's the Night," on which he really should reconsider singing the line about "my virgin child."

The arena crowd was responsive, but, for the most part, wasn't exactly going wild over this spectacle. He managed to hype them up at the end with "Young Turks" and a classy finish on "Maggie May."

In there at the end was a song he introduced as one you "either love or hate" -- "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy." That's a dangerous question for a 62-year-old rock star to ask.

Then again, what are they gonna say?

WHAT HE PLAYED

Tonight I'm Yours
You Wear It Well
Lost In You
Reason To Believe
Infatuation
(I Know) I'm Losing You
Father And Son
I Don't Want To Talk About It
This Old Heart Of Mine
Having a Party
Have I Told You Lately
Piece Of My Heart
Hot Legs
Cut Across Shorty
Dirty Old Town

Intermission

The First Cut Is The Deepest
Tonight's The Night
You're In My Heart
Fooled Around And Fell In Love
Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
Forever Young
It's A Heartache
Downtown Train
Do Ya Think I???m Sexy
Young Turks
Rhythm Of My Heart

Encore
Maggie May
18th February 2007 09:32 AM
fireontheplatter

wow..27 songs. no mandolin wind or gasoline ally tho. i think those are two of his best songs.
i don't buy his music anymore, but i still like him. he has a great voice and his lyrics i can relate to.

go rod....
18th February 2007 09:35 AM
BuckBuckBucky Be what it may what you think of Stewart,the reviewer was finding fault that his voice isn't what it used to be but the man did have throat cancer(or a cancerous polyp or something) and had surgery and is lucky to be speaking nevertheless singing.Now many I know would be cheering that fact but at the very least the reviewer should have acknowledged that... fair is fair!
19th February 2007 06:59 PM
Soldatti His last album blows but the chicks love him.
19th February 2007 07:31 PM
mojoman
quote:
guitarman53 wrote:
He's trying to be another Tony Bennett.



maybe tom jones
19th February 2007 08:42 PM
ShaneJazz C'mon Rod, dig into Stay With Me just one more time. Fantastic rock song. Who cares if the overweight 55 year old housewives that dominate the audience would rather hear Some Guys Have All the Luck? Let 'em go change their Depends during it.
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