The one singer Rod Stewart loved everything about: “I admire the guy’s courage”
Any rock star would have killed to have the kind of voice that Rod Stewart was blessed with at the start of his career.
The Faces might not have been the most high-profile band when they first got started, but if there was anything that was going to launch them to stardom, it was that raspy voice that was behind every single one of their tunes. It was equal parts rock and roll, pop, and soul all wrapped up into one, but Stewart was still listening out for when the new kids were making songs that he had never thought of before.
Then again, it’s hard to look at The Faces without thinking of the countless other artists that had come before them. They had some fantastic songs and could party like no one else, but it wasn’t like they were the only British blues act making waves at the time. They could have easily been lost in the lurch after a while, so it made sense why Stewart would eventually jump ship to start working with The Jeff Beck Group once he got the call from the guitar legend.
And when he started to work on his own, Stewart was bound to become a star from the moment he sang ‘Maggie May’. His breakout song hardly had a chorus and was more of a story song in the vein of Bob Dylan, and yet listening to that story about a one-night stand never felt so good when coming out of his mouth. But rock and roll had come a long way from the folksy story songs, and after the psychedelic movement dissipated, the genre was bound to go in a few more directions.
But while Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd felt like the reigning kings of rock and roll for a few years, it’s impossible to really put a finger on what David Bowie was doing. ‘The Starman’s first touchdown on the Earth was already strange when listening to ‘Space Oddity’, but once he started to don the famous white makeup and present himself as an extraterrestrial rock star, Stewart fell in love with what he was doing immediately.
Bowie was far from the first to wear makeup onstage or even flirt with androgyny, but being so outspoken about his sexuality was what rock and roll needed as far as Stewart could tell, saying, “I love him and everything he stands for. I don’t listen to his records. I haven’t got any of them. I don’t think I even know any of his tunes, but I like what he’s trying to put together. I admire the guy’s courage.”
Once he got hold of Bowie’s records, he was a lot more adventurous than his apparel would lead you to imply. The androgynous alien was only one facet of what he could do, and throughout the course of his career, he was constantly toying with what a rock star could get away with, whether that meant tearing down his old personas or dipping his toes into a new genre altogether like when he adopted blue-eyed soul on Young Americans and working with industrial giants like Trent Reznor in the 1990s.
If we’re looking purely at the visuals, though, he broke down the door for every single kid that fell in between the cracks of rock and roll history. There was a middle ground between Little Richard, Janis Joplin, and Mick Jagger, and whenever he stepped onstage with Mick Ronson, he was bringing sexual energy to everything he did and was almost daring the straights of the world to judge him for it.
Because at the end of the day, Bowie’s greatest strength was that he didn’t care about what anyone thought of him. He had his fans at heart every single time he made a record, and while Rod Stewart scanned properly as a rock and roll star, there was room for a lot more avenues that someone could go down if they had a guitar in their hands.
