The song Rod Stewart said he played better than the original: “I brought the chorus alive”
Every artist has to do a little something extra when making a cover song. It would be easy for most people to learn a track to the best of their ability and manage to not make any mistakes, but what’s the point in making a direct comparison with your influences if fans are going to look up the original anyway? While Rod Stewart had a unique way of transforming songs whenever he played a cover tune, there are only a few times where he admitted to outshining one of his heroes on a track.
Granted, playing cover tunes was nothing new for Stewart when he was starting out. Working with The Jeff Beck Group gave him the opportunity to inhabit the same territory as Robert Plant and Steve Marriott by singing blues songs, and even if Led Zeppelin are the ones that stand out the most from this era, his versions of songs like ‘You Shook Me’ on Truth are still stunning, if only for that husky tenor voice soaring above everything.
But while Stewart’s tone lent itself well to the blues, there were still certain tunes that he knew he could never touch. As much as he loved genres like soul music and The Temptations, there was no way that he was going to match the precision of David Ruffin’s voice if he tried, especially when all he had was maybe a handful of backing vocalists behind him.
By the 1980s, though, Stewart didn’t need to rely on cover songs anymore. There were still places that he could go once synths were introduced, but listening back to his tunes like ‘Young Turks’ and ‘Forever Young’, it was clear that he was making the kind of music that catered to typical middle-of-the-road rock radio rather than trying to break any new ground like he did back in the day.
“It’s beautiful, but he barely gets up and barely gets down to the lower notes, so I took it to the extreme. That was a case where I brought the chorus alive.”
rod stewart
He did have his eclectic side, and if there was one artist that seemed like Stewart’s polar opposite at the time, it was Tom Waits. Both of them had raspy voices, but whereas Stewart always worked around it and pushed himself, Waits always leaned into it half the time, almost making sure that he sounded completely incomprehensible whenever he made some of his later material.
And while ‘Downtown Train’ did give Waits some traction on the charts, Stewart had no problem admitting that he smoked him when recording his own version of the tune, saying, “I’m sure Tom Waits wouldn’t mind me saying this – Tom’s ‘Downtown Train’, I realised there was a melody there in the chorus, and it’s beautiful, but he barely gets up and barely gets down to the lower notes, so I took it to the extreme. That was a case where I brought the chorus alive.”
And as much as Waits’s version does a great job at serving the story, Stewart’s version is far from inferior. There might have been some purists who weren’t used to hearing a lyric like this get a healthy 1980s sheen behind it, but Stewart manages to turn the song into practically a singalong track that can be played in stadiums rather than one that sounds like it could be played in the middle of a sweaty club.
It might sound different to people who still regularly play Rain Dogs, but it’s never a bad thing to hear another interpretation of a classic. Stewart might not have the most glowing track record of any classic rocker, but if he was able to do justice to Waits like this, perhaps he can be forgiven for his crimes on ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’.
