The 1989 song that gave Rod Stewart a musical enemy: “We were livid”
Rod Stewart was the last person who wanted to stir up any controversy during his time in the spotlight.
He liked the idea of making music with his friends, and if he happened to step on anyone’s toes in the music industry, it was usually all in good fun when he was throwing the occasional jab at his friends like Elton John. But sometimes all it takes is one song to turn Stewart from one of the greatest singers of his generation to the one that his peers didn’t want to talk to ever again.
But it’s not like Stewart was trying to weaponise his songs by any stretch. That was reserved for bands that had a lot more drama on their minds, and even though Stewart had his fair share of drama when working with Jeff Beck, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life being petty in song. He wanted to give the audience a good time when he sang, and that usually meant singing some of the biggest hits that he could find.
Not all of them had to be written by him, though. You have to remember that Stewart is a singer before anything else, and sometimes the tunes that best suit his voice are ones that were already written. He had spent half his time trying to be the next incarnation of people like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, so the idea of that same raspy voice trying his hand at singing tunes like ‘Twistin’ The Night Away’ made perfect sense when he started working on his solo catalogue.
The Faces didn’t have to be his only outlet, but aside from the R&B world, Stewart had an ear for fantastic songwriters whenever he made a new record. He liked the idea of finding someone who could twist the knife a little bit harder when writing a breakup song or tug on that one extra heartstring when they made a tearjerker, but not many people would have imagined that one of Stewart’s greatest muses would have come from Tom Waits.
Then again, a lot of people wouldn’t have felt that Waits was a romantic every so often when he picked up a pen. Many of his songs are more than a little bit hard to take in if all you’ve listened to is The Beatles, but when Stewart heard the song ‘Downtown Train’, he knew that he needed to do his own version of the tune to get it on the radio. He knew that he could turn the tune into a hit, but as soon as it started climbing the charts, Stewart ended up getting severe pushback from Bob Seger.
The heartland rocker had had his eye on the tune for years, and the thought of Stewart stealing it right from under his nose pissed him off to no end, with Seger’s manager, Punch Andrews, saying, “We were livid. I called the publisher long ago and was willing to buy the song, for heaven’s sake. But I was assured that wouldn’t be necessary, and that we would still be the only major artist to cut it. Then all of a sudden, Stewart’s version comes out. We couldn’t believe it.”
But that one song may have been a blessing in disguise for Seger, whether he knew it or not. Frustration can normally be the greatest inspiration when coming up with songs, and since he had to watch Stewart’s song climb up the charts, he was going to make as many tunes as he could and push them to radio if he thought that they had a shot at making up for what he lost on ‘Downtown Train’.
And since Seger looked back and didn’t even like his version of the tune, there’s probably some magic behind how everything ended up working out. Stewart walked away with one of the biggest hits that he put out in the 1980s, and Seger got the same drive that he had when he was a kid working on Night Moves.
