The night Mick Jagger invited Rod Stewart to an orgy: “I’m a romantic”
There are several connections between Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart, including a shared guitarist in Ronnie Wood. However, outside of being British rock icons who emerged in the same era, both men are also known for their wild sex lives.
While Jagger and his band The Rolling Stones cut different figures from most of the 1960s pioneers due to them packaging palpable sexual energy into their blues-laden music, this is a tact that Stewart also found success with. He once revealed that his best-loved track, ‘Maggie May’, was based on a true story about him losing his virginity to a much older and, according to him, “larger” woman at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the New Forest.
Although Jagger’s romantic and sexual exploits are some of the most famous found in the extensive annals of rock, Stewart has some of his own. Undoubtedly, the most notorious is the myth that he orally serviced a group of sailors in a gay bar in San Diego and, in a sign of the time in which the rumour emerged, that he had to check into a local hospital to have his stomach pumped afterwards.
Stewart has denied the claims many times and did so once and for all in his comical journey through the past, Rod: The Autobiography. He asserts that the rumour was the doing of an angry publicist that he fired for severe dereliction of duty. He wrote: “I have never orally pleasured even a solitary sailor, let alone a ship’s worth in one evening. And I have never had my stomach pumped, either of naval-issue semen or of any other kind of semen.”
Due to how deeply this fictional tale has pierced pop culture lore, Stewart has been forced to deny it on several high-profile occasions. In his typically self-confident way, he once told Katie Couric: “I’m as heterosexual as they come”.
Regardless of his preferences, it’s clear that Stewart has a voracious appetite for bonking that hasn’t waned over the years. Take the following excerpt from ‘Kookooaramabama’ from 2021’s The Tears of Hercules. At one point, Stewart, who is nearly 80, sings earnestly: “Sex is cool, and sex is nice / Sex will leave you in paradise / Sex is good for everyone / Come on, people, let’s have some fun right now”.
It’s safe to say that Stewart has had an equally as wild sex life as Mick Jagger and once revealed a time that they both nearly converged in the bedroom. In 2013, he explained the story to Radio Times in an interview and said that he once turned down The Rolling Stones frontman’s invitation for group sex.
It happened at some point during the cocaine and alcohol-laced madness of the early-mid 1970s when Stewart was dating the model Dee Harrington. According to the ‘Maggie May’ singer, his Rolling Stones counterpart suggested that he and his then-wife, Bianca, get under the sheets with Stewart and Harrington. However, Stewart wasn’t into the idea. He’s a traditionalist, he maintained, and preferred a one-on-one situation.
“I’ve only done that sort of thing once in my life, with a couple of oriental girls, and it’s not my thing,” he said. “I’m a romantic and like a one-on-one situation, candlelight and foreplay, all the old-fashioned things.”
Forget dirty Mars bars and San Diego sailors. If that dalliance had happened, it would have gone down as one of the most notorious instances in rock history.
