Rod Stewart’s attempt to mimic The Rolling Stones: “I want a song like ‘Missing You’”
After a brief creative wobble, The Rolling Stones reestablished their mantle of the world’s finest rock band by 1978.
At the beginning of the decade, the Stones were in the midst of their golden album pomp. Firing all cylinders at the peaks of their mythos, the band had strutted into the 1970s with a degree of countercultural primacy few matched, leading the way for the previous decade’s latter-end roots revivalism and scoring the death of the hippy idyll along with Detroit’s furious garage rock explosion.
Then the stodge crept in. While not bad albums, in fact, Goats Head Soup’s is much overrated; the same listless stult that curdled much of the rock scene by the mid-1970s sank its teeth into the Stones across subsequent records.
‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (but I Like It’ is a live standard, but a lot less interesting than is remembered and attached to a very average album, and although numbers like ‘Hot Stuff’ are fun, the lapses into self-parody began to threaten the Stones’ trajectory toward a dead end by the decade’s close.
Suddenly, they found themselves squarely in the target of punk. While sowing the seeds a decade earlier with ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’s eternal clarion call to youth dissent, suddenly a new generation of kids unimpressed with ‘Fool to Cry’s soppy balladry wrote off the Stones as ruthlessly as they had Led Zeppelin or Queen’s creaking dinosaur acts. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Despite the public sniping toward the Sex Pistols, the Stones borrowed some of punk’s urgent grit and disco’s emerging dancefloor beats to shape their rawer Some Girls in 1978, led by the US number one ‘Miss You’.
It was an extraordinary comeback, cementing a pop relevancy from the 1960s veterans of swinging London, only rivalled by The Who’s monster ‘Who Are You’. Counting themselves as one of ‘Miss You’s biggest fans was Rod Stewart. Enjoying some punk pedigree from his time fronting Faces—performing with future Stone Ronnie Wood—Stewart had shuffled into a trite of easy rock croon that pleased his fans while repelling much of everyone else. Eager to grab a slice of disco for himself, Stewart gave strict instructions to his backing band drummer, Carmine Appice.
“I want a song like ‘Missing You,’ like the Stones,” he reportedly quipped. Playing with a keyboard and drum machine back home, Appice and pianist Duane Hitchings began to work out a demo on their portable 8-track TX studio. The basic guts of a disco tune were in gestation, albeit with an arrangement leaning closer to rock. Stewart loved it, and once producer Tom Dowd got his hands on the sketch, expansions to as much as 48-track and orchestral touches turned the ‘Miss You’ copy into a serious chart contender.
The dabble with disco paid off handsomely. Released six months after the Stones’ disco-flecked comeback, ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ would storm to the top of both the UK and US charts, pushing its Blondes Have More Fun album to similar Billboard 200 peaks. In came Stewart’s second chapter, chiefly peroxide-hair, leopard-printed jackets, and plenty of spandex for the next few years, Stewart swaggering into the era’s worst disco culprits tefloned with a wry self-awareness to it all.
“We Rock and Roll guys thought we were dead meat when that movie [Saturday Night Fever] and the Bee Gees came out,” Hitchings confessed to Rock United in 2007. “The Bee Gees were brilliant musicians and really nice people. No big egos. Rod, in his brilliance, decided to do a spoof on disco. VERY smart man. There is no such thing as a ‘dumb’ super success in the music business”.
