“The best for me”: the album Rod Stewart always wanted to capture again
It’s insanely hard for any artist to keep the fire burning forever in one genre. Some great moments can come from someone who’s on a roll playing one particular style of music, but there comes a moment where people start to wonder how far they can go when listening to the same style of song over and over again. Although Rod Stewart has made a habit of changing things up with every album that he makes, he knew enough to realise when there were one-offs in his catalogue that could never be repeated.
Then again, some of them don’t get repeated for a damn good reason. A song like ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ does have its fair share of fans and some decent production for the time, but given how vitriolic the backlash was for the song, even Stewart himself is content to move past it a bit, even saying that he would have been genuinely worried if he were a fan of his own music after that stunt.
Especially coming from his work with The Faces, though, his latest chapter of making adult contemporary music would have seemed miles away. Because before he had even though about channelling his inner crooner, he was more than happy to scream his ass off in The Faces, making sure that he could get the entire crowd moving in the same way his blues heroes used to do.
But that was only one side to what Stewart could do. He had a lot of different sides to him, and when he hit upon albums like Every Picture Tells a Story, it was clear that he was growing out of his old band in many respects. They could play blues all of their lives, but a song like ‘Maggie May’ was a priceless bit of folksy magic that no one could manage to repeat if they had a hard rock act behind them.
“That was a freak album. It sold a ridiculous amount of records.”
Rod Stewart
In fact, it might have been a bit too good for Stewart. Even though he was content to be in The Faces for the rest of his life, it was clear that he was moving away from their brand of blues, eventually finding some more magic in his back pages once the 1980s rolled around on tunes like ‘Young Turks’ and ‘Forever Young’.
Still, he always had a soft spot for those moments when everything was right on the money before his major break, saying at the time, “I can’t expect to have another album as successful as Every Picture Tells A Story. That was a freak album. It sold a ridiculous amount of records. Yet Gasoline Alley was the best for me. If I could capture that again, I’d be well pleased.”
And given his history with blues rock before, you can’t find much better than Gasoline Alley. It might not be the one with the most hits out of his catalogue, but there’s a certain sense of swagger that manages to sustain itself all the way to the end, especially when he starts hinting at where he would be going by covering songs by his close friend and noted rival Elton John on ‘Country Comfort’.
There are a handful of tracks that might not work and even be considered a lesser footnote in Stewart’s body of work, but in terms of what he could do on the microphone, Gasoline Alley is the one moment where he’s playing to his absolute strengths. Compared to the more lighthearted tunes of his later career, this is where to go to remind people of the muscle he had behind his greatest hits.
