The 1971 song Rod Stewart knew he’d struggle to top: “We did it in two takes”
In the early 1970s, Rod Stewart was in untouchable form.
On solo songs like ‘Gasoline Alley’, ‘Reason to Believe’ (both a perfect song and a perfect performance), ‘Mama You Been on My Mind’, ‘You Wear It Well’ (also perfect), and ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ (ditto), as well as Faces recordings like ‘Stay With Me’ and ‘You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything’, Stewart brought his rough-edged, soulful and sensual voice, along with his impeccable phrasing, to song after song.
Though he almost seemed to cover tracks written by Bob Dylan more than anything else, and though he spent time on the scene with a rowdy and rag-tag motley crew of long haired British rockers, it was the overarching influence of soul music and the blues of America’s spiritual Deep South, of people like Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Etta James and Bobby Womack, who inspired Stewart’s own signature husky and soulful intonation, and in the process, allowed him to become one of Britain’s greatest ever singers (ignoring plenty of his later work, that is).
And then there was ‘Maggie May’, a song so deeply ingrained in all of our collective memories and consciousness that it’s hard to really fathom there was a time that it didn’t exist, or that there was a brief time that it was in the process of being written and recorded. You can almost dismiss it as overplayed or overrated, until, that is, you hear it again and are taken away by what a fantastic piece of music and performance it is.
You can’t help but sing along with Stewart and move your body with that insistent drum beat, the swirling organ and rhythmic strums of acoustic strings, the bouncing movement of the bassline, the meandering, low rumble of rockabilly electric guitar, and the effervescent mandolin that sees the song out. You wouldn’t change a thing.
But Ron Wood might have done. During the session for the song, he felt he’d recorded a blistering guitar solo that pushed the track onto another level, only to find out at the end of the take that the engineers hadn’t picked it up, and he wasn’t the only one. Stewart himself did understand the popularity of the song (which, naturally, went all the way to number one in the charts), while some of his friends even went as far as to suggest he leave it off his upcoming album Every Picture Tells a Story.
Though Stewart didn’t care much for ‘Maggie May’, he felt the total opposite way about the title track from the new record, describing ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’ as “one of the two best songs I’ve ever written” (it seems that the other one was ‘Mandolin Wind’).
And one of the two best songs he had ever written was captured in just two takes, as well. Recruited to the session to sing backing vocals alongside Stewart, Stone the Crows’ vocalist, Maggie Bell, remembered that “I was just down from Glasgow, so I was nervous. He [Stewart] gave me the lyrics for the song ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’. ‘See what you think’. We did it in two takes. Years later, people thought I was the Maggie in ‘Maggie May’.”
But then, Bell added through a laugh that “Rod wasn’t my type”.
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