The only song Rod Stewart doesn’t want to listen to ever again: “There’s some right bum notes in there”
Rod Stewart wasn’t planning on being a one-note bluesman for the rest of his life.
There are pieces of his work with The Faces and his solo career that are chiselled in rock and roll legend at this point, but the version of ‘Rod The Mod’ that you see today is a lot different from the one that was singing tunes like ‘Hot Legs’ back in the 1970s. He still had a fantastic voice whenever he performed live, but there are more than a few records in his catalogue that he doesn’t really want to go back to.
And while it may surprise you, it’s not actually the disco years that bring out the most ire in him. There are more than a few times when he admitted to being high on his own hype and wanting to make the most ridiculous pop music that he could, but even if ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ is much different from anything he had done before, you can’t fault it for being a silly pop song about celebrating the disco years. He was having fun, but the further you go back, is usually when things get a bit uncomfortable.
Then again, Stewart was the first one to say that he would have gladly never split up The Faces if he had the chance. It was clear that he was becoming one of the biggest songwriters of his generation, and while the band didn’t want to become a backup group to what he was doing, ‘Stay With Me’ was always going to hold a special place in people’s hearts for being one of the band’s major hits.
But right when his solo career was starting, Stewart was still having fun playing one-off tunes with his friends. Jeff Beck was going to be a hard musician to turn down whenever he started playing with him, but compared to what The Faces were doing, hearing Stewart sing on ‘In a Broken Dream’ by Python Lee Jackson was definitely a change of pace from what he was used to doing back in the day.
Everyone knew Stewart could belt up until this point, but giving this kind of massive ballad is the perfect vehicle for his voice. He always had a bit of soul in him since the days when he was first listening to The Temptations in England, but after years of putting his voice through his paces while singing standards, Stewart admitted that it wasn’t necessarily easy for him to go back and listen to this record.
He had once considered it a benchmark in his discography, but his time interpolating The Great American Songbook gave him pause when looking back on his early career, saying, “There’s some right bum notes in there. That was just a demo but it ended up getting used on the finished thing. I couldn’t listen to that now but The Great American Songbook stuff I play all the time.” But comparing a bluesy rock and roll song to some of the most celebrated standards of all time is like night and day.
You don’t really need to mess with the melodies behind some of those tunes, but when looking at the early days of Stewart’s career, there’s a passion that doesn’t come out nearly as often. That’s not to say that Stewart doesn’t sound great to this day, but when you listen to a lot of his older records, you can hear a kid who was hungry to take on the world, which is a kind of energy that you can only match a handful of times when you’re sitting on stacks upon stacks of gold records.
So while Stewart might hear the imperfections today, a lot of rock fans only need to think of the energy that they felt when they heard songs like this back in the day. Some musicians are looking to make everything sound perfect whenever they make a record, but even if Stewart is focusing on making the greatest songs he can, nothing can replace a vocal take that has the right energy behind it.
