Rod Stewart’s first sexual encounter with ‘Maggie May’
Over 50 years have now passed since Rod Stewart’s timeless classic ‘Maggie May’ beat Donny Osmond’s ‘Go Away Little Girl’ to claim the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100. It marked the moment when Stewart finally came into his own and became a star name worldwide.
The track actually explains Stewart’s first sexual encounter, which occurred at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in Hampshire. Recalling the experience, Stewart said, “I lost my, by then, not remotely prized virginity to an older woman who has come on to me very strongly in the beer tent. How much older, I can’t tell you exactly — but old enough that she was highly disappointed by the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity of the experience.”
Stewart had been writing the tracks for his 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story when, for whatever reason, he recalled that fateful evening of some 10 years prior. He then conjured up the tale of an intimate relationship with an older woman, ala Mrs Robinson.
However, despite the track’s eventual success, not too many of Stewart’s band and entourage felt like it had single potential. Stewart noted, “I even wondered for a while about leaving it off the album. It didn’t have a chorus. It just had three rambling verses. It didn’t really have a hook. How could you hope to have a hit single with a song that was all verse and no chorus and no hook?”
‘Maggie May’ was also a far longer track than was expected for a radio-friendly single release. Stewart added on this, “And it went on for a bit: it was five minutes long, for God’s sake, which was pretty much operatic by the standards of the pop single. ‘Reason to Believe’ was much more like the kind of thing that might wind up on the radio.”
So ‘Maggie May’ ended up being the B-side to Stewart’s cover of Tim Hardin’s reason to believe. However, a radio DJ in Cleveland, Ohio, broadcast the tune, either by accident or because he thought it was, in fact, the A-side. The rest is history, and Stewart’s label eventually reclassified ‘Maggie May’ as the official A-side of the single.
By the time ‘Maggie May’ came out, Stewart had formed the Faces with none other than Ronnie Wood. They released an album together, but quite soon, it was overshadowed by Stewart’s solo output. When the Faces toured, the audiences longed for Rod’s solo hits, which would ultimately end in the demise of the band in 1975.
Check out this classic video of the Faces playing Maggie May in 1973.
