The 1950s singer who made Rod Stewart fall back in love with rock: “I love it so much”
It was going to take a lot to get Rod Stewart back into the rock and roll world after going astray for so long.
Stewart didn’t mind getting back up onstage with people like Jeff Beck if he wanted to, but after spending the majority of his later career pulling from the golden oldies, he seemed to be much more interested to leave his rock and roll chops back with The Faces and never return. But sometimes it takes that one song or singer to show everyone why they had become such a fan in their early days.
Because as much as Stewart is a fan of making easy listening music from the Great American Songbook, people tend to forget there was once a time where he really kicked ass. The Faces was one of the greatest boozy rock and roll bands of the late 1960s, and no one would get the opportunity to sing with one of the greatest guitarists to ever walk the Earth by merely being a decent singer. The kind of chops he had were second to only Robert Plant, and there wasn’t much standing in his way when he went solo.
But even if ‘Maggie May’ has become a mainstay in his catalogue, the fact that he managed to transition into the 1980s pretty gracefully is somewhat commendable. Not everything has worked out in his favour, and he has gone on record saying that he would have probably traded in his disco years for sticking to exclusively rock, but there are more than a few times where the glittery synths were perfect for his voice.
‘Young Turks’ is the kind of high-energy rock and roll tune that no one would have imagined that he could have pulled off, but after emulating everyone from Otis Redding to Sam Cooke, it was only a matter of time before he got back to real rock and roll. And while Ray Charles and Chuck Berry started it all back in the day, Stewart felt that he could find a place in the genre when he first heard Buddy Holly.
Despite being one of the biggest names in rock history, Holly didn’t exactly look the part of a frontman. His thick wire-rimmed glasses were the exact look that every nerd had at school, but Holly’s way around a melody was perfect for the times. His tunes were the epitome of what a pop song was supposed to be, and after listening to tunes like ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘Peggy Sue’ over again, it was as if Stewart found out what he had been missing all of those years away from the genre.
Rock could still be fun in his old age, and he had Holly to thank for reminding him of what the genre was all about, saying, “I recently went to this play Buddy, about Buddy Holly, and I just fell in love with music again. When you’ve been on the road for nine months you get a bit jaded and it’s hard to get up there every night and be enthusiastic about it all over again. You manage to do it – but every now and again I have to put that old music on to remind me why I love it so much and it’s why I got involved in this thing. These were the people who started it for me.”
Then again, Stewart is just one in a laundry list of people that wouldn’t have been here without Holly. Aside from Rivers Cuomo namechecking him in one of Weezer’s biggest songs, the reason why pop music sounds the way it does today is because of Holly teaching everyone how to write their own songs and make music that didn’t have to be just covers of other people’s material when he played.
It was possible to make music that appealed to kids that you wrote all by yourself, and that left an impression on everyone from Paul Simon to The Beatles to The Rolling Stones. Holly may have been a novelty in his prime, but even with only a few records to his name, he gave everyone the blueprint for what a songwriter was supposed to be.
