The 1962 song Rod Stewart couldn’t compete with: “I could never have sung it better”
Rod Stewart was never going to be a standard rock and roll vocalist.
He had all the characteristics of being a great frontman, but underneath that blues-infused exterior was a man with years of experience listening to everything from the blues to folk music. Soul music was one of his first true loves, and when listening to Sam Cooke, Stewart remembered falling to pieces trying to recreate what he did on ‘Twistin’ The Night Away’.
Then again, Stewart’s voice had never been that far away from R&B at the best of times. For as long as he had been a rock vocalist, he had the same bluesy influences as Ray Charles in his arsenal, but Cooke was a completely different type of beast.
That gap between admiration and imitation is something most great singers have to come to terms with. Stewart wasn’t trying to outdo Cooke so much as understand what made him so compelling, which is a very different challenge altogether.
In the end, that’s where his version finds its footing. Rather than chasing perfection, Stewart leans into feel and character, proving that sometimes the best tribute isn’t matching greatness but responding to it in your own voice.
Years before artists like Mariah Carey got started, Cooke perfected the idea of making a tune that felt lived in every time he sang it. When listening to a piece like ‘You Send Me’, it felt like he was channelling something deep within him rather than focusing on the kind of technique he presented when he sang. Although Cooke could make stirring love songs, ‘Twistin’ The Night Away’ is one of his most lighthearted tracks. Remember, this was when the Twist was still considered a hip new dance that everyone had to learn, and Cooke’s version sees him sliding across the groove with the smoothest high voice anyone had ever heard.
While Stewart saw his version of the tune as a way for him to call back on that older sound, he knew that he was competing for second place before he even opened his mouth, saying, “[It’s] a Sam Cooke song. I could never sing it better, so we just took it in a different direction. The last track recorded for Never A Dull Moment, it speeds up and down, but the feel is right, and that’s all that counts.”
It’s easy to hear that strange push and pull on the final track, but it doesn’t necessarily do a disservice to what Cooke had made. This was a ‘tip-of-the-hat’ moment if there ever was one, considering that Stewart was far more accustomed to making pieces like ‘Maggie May’ around this time.
Then again, the folk-rock tradition wasn’t all that different from where Cooke was heading in the few years before his death. He was more than happy to play soulful songs, but his version of ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ is the kind of political firestorm that’s as relevant today as it was back in the early 1960s, especially considering how many of those lessons tend to fall by the wayside.
As much as Stewart was intimidated to grace the same stage as artists like The Temptations, Cooke was in a whole different league. This was the kind of artist that made every singer around them look small by comparison, and even if someone could hold their own against Cooke, no one was going to deliver a tune with as much charm as he could. He was a man speaking for an entire genre, and even when he was putting out some dance songs that didn’t, he was still going to give his all every time he sang them.
