A heavenly voice: the artist Rod Stewart always regretted not seeing live
Every artist has to deal with more than a few missed opportunities in their lives. Where would The Beatles have been had they decided to get their business endeavours in order, and what would the Sex Pistols have accomplished had they decided to take a break from anarchy for a good five minutes? You can only look back and wonder ‘what if’ for so long, but Rod Stewart said that he had always looked back in shame over not seeing Sam Cooke when he had the chance.
Because when you look at Stewart’s resume, he’s not really a rock singer in the true sense of the word. Listening back to tracks like ‘Maggie May’, Stewart sounds like a soul singer trapped in a rock star’s body, often making the same kind of blue-eyed soul songs with a more aggressive touch to them when he was with The Faces.
Before rock and roll had even begun, though, Cooke was already riveting crowds with the sweet sounds of soulful pop. Since the biggest names in music were still acts like Little Richard and Elvis Presley, Cooke was his own unique entity, bringing a certain sophistication back into music, all while singing the most challenging music of his time. Picture Frank Sinatra if he were singing with Presley’s grit, and you’re somewhere in the ballpark.
Compared to the other soul singers that would come after him, like Aretha Franklin or Marvin Gaye, Cooke had the kind of rasp in his voice that any singer would kill for, including the massive hook of the song ‘You Send Me’. If this shook up everyone who listened to him in America, one can only imagine how Stewart felt hearing it from a dingy radio in the middle of England.
Recalling his first time hearing him, Stewart was gutted that he never got to see the man in action, telling BBC Radio 2, “Sam was probably the biggest influence after Eddie (Cochran). I remember going to work with my mate and we were listening to a little transistor radio. Then this heavenly voice came on, Sam Cooke ‘Cupid’. I never saw him sing. That is one regret. I wish I had gone to see him sing live.”
If Cooke’s live album Live at the Harlem Square Club is to be believed, though, fans really didn’t know what they were witnessing. While Cooke may not have been the kind of engaging figure a la James Brown, he held the crowd in the palm of his hand for the entire night, having as much charisma in every bead of sweat as most frontmen can hope to have in an entire show.
While Stewart may have tried to emulate what Cooke had done throughout his career, it never equalled what the soul legend does. For as much as he might like to linger on notes and make the occasional soft ballad, Stewart’s rasp could easily be mistaken for a lesser Motown vocalist than coming anywhere close to what Cooke does.
In Stewart’s case, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, the fact that he can’t sing as well as Cooke meant that he got closer to sounding like himself on his records, finding that middle ground between bluesy flair and soulful crooning. Then again, anyone who was going to compare themselves to Cooke was going to be competing for second place. Once you’ve hit the ceiling on a song like ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, there’s nowhere to go but down.
