The Motown group Rod Stewart wanted to sound like on every song
All genres of music always trace back to the blues. Whether people cater to genres like R&B, rock and roll, or even hip-hop, the true start of everything always came from when people were sitting on a blues riff and talking about all of the raw feelings that were held inside themselves before the modern genre labels started. That’s not to say people couldn’t mix and match, and Rod Stewart was more than willing to throw some soul into his sound whenever the time called for it.
Then again, Stewart’s flirtation with different genres could be a mixed bag every now and again. No one should fault their favourite acts for wanting to expand their horizons, but at the same time, was there anyone asking Stewart to put on a pair of sequined pants and try his hand at disco when the last thing people remembered him for were rootsy songs like ‘Maggie May’?
It would have been a hard sell, but Stewart was never a snob about music, either. He had been used to singing blues his whole life through being in The Faces, but whereas most people would have been willing to roll over and stay with one group the rest of their lives, Stewart quickly found there was more to life than hard rock.
Hanging out with Jeff Beck was bound to get him attuned to all kinds of music, and after breaking out the acoustics, one of the many other flavours of the day was Motown. Even though radio stations had been formatted for different genres at the time, it wasn’t out of the question to hear The Beatles one minute, followed by Bob Dylan the next, and then go right into the smooth sounds of The Four Tops or The Jackson 5.
When talking about the cream of Motown, though, there’s no getting around The Temptations. The vocal icons still have some of the most celebrated songs in the soul music canon, and even if people didn’t hear any of their music outside of ‘My Girl’ or ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone,’ they would still be hearing some of the finest examples of soul mixing with funk that Motown ever spat out.
As soon as Stewart listened to the song ‘Cloud Nine’, he knew that was where his calling was, saying, “They broke ground with the psychedelic soul of ‘Cloud Nine.’ I remember listening to the high-hat rhythms on that record over and over with the guys in the Jeff Beck Group. We’d try to change every one of our songs to try and capture their drumbeats.”
But it’s more than a simple drum beat that hooks people in. The Temptations had already done their fair share of crooning love songs, but hearing them lay down this kind of groove over psychedelic textures seemed to predict where artists like George Clinton got their ideas when they started combining rock and roll guitar solos with funk rock on Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain a few years later.
Even though Stewart, by his own admission, couldn’t hope to sing as well as David Ruffin could, ‘Cloud Nine’ is still the purest example of genres listening to each other. Even if Stewart couldn’t match his heroes’ style-blending when making tracks like ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,’ that kind of imagination on one track is a reminder of what an artist can do when they throw caution to the wind.
