“They didn’t want that”: the tour Rod Stewart said broke his heart to play
No artist has a choice in the way they eventually get famous. From their song taking off because it was used in a movie, the gradual word-of-mouth route, or blowing up as a trend on TikTok today, the artist only has the choice of what to do once they become one of the biggest acts in the world. Although Rod Stewart had no problem with playing to huge crowds after a while, he knew that the cost of being a living legend came at a price.
But, really, Stewart would have been happy to play simple club gigs for the rest of his life. He was the definition of a working musician at the time, and when looking at the kind of music The Faces were playing, he was more than capable of keeping things rolling in blues bars around the world. Their music was for the everyman who wanted to listen to some rock and roll, but Stewart’s rasp was already bound to take him to different places.
After all, no one gets the invitation to play with Jeff Beck by being merely passable as a vocalist, and listening to what Stewart sang on Truth, he was already ready to be a foil to another guitar hero. While everyone was coming to the show to see Beck annihilate every single lick he played, Stewart remembered that his applause wasn’t too bad either, or at least that’s what he saw once he bothered to stop hiding behind the amps whenever he was singing on tour in America.
It might have been a simple way to get more exposure, but when Stewart returned to The Faces, the room temperature had changed slightly. Everyone was playing to the best of their ability, but there was no question that everyone was showing up to see what the singer with a voice made out of golden sandpaper was like. They were selling tickets, but the rest of the band had to be wondering who the real attraction was.
“That was really heartbreaking for me.”
Rod Stewart
And when working on his own projects like Every Picture Tells a Story, it was made abundantly clear that management needed to change things around a bit. The band would remain a unit, but with everything taking off, they were starting to become billed as ‘Rod Stewart and The Faces’ now, which was probably going to do nothing for the musicians’ egos when they were signing autographs backstage.
For Stewart, this was all down to management, and looking back on it decades later, he was still torn up about how his bandmates must have felt seeing him commandeer the entire tour, saying, “That was really heartbreaking for me. The boys all went, ‘Fuck it, don’t worry’, but I could tell Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagan were hurt because they’d got away from a somewhat egotistical singer in Steve Marriott, and they didn’t want that again.”
There was bound to be a lot of pent-up resentment there, but it all comes down to the way that the hits were lined up. ‘Stay With Me’ will forever be a staple of the era when the 1960s-era of rock and roll was starting to get heavier, but when placed next to tunes like ‘Maggie May’, there was no way for the rest of the band to compete with what their vocalist was doing.
So whether they liked it or not, the Faces found themselves in the same position as Brian Jones did when he saw Mick Jagger and Keith Richards taking The Stones to greater heights. The paychecks were certainly bigger, but there was no real point in getting that much money if they didn’t enjoy what they were playing.
