And in any case, the length of the journey lent a proper gravity to the serious business of record-buying. Now, I indulge myself whenever I feel like it, even in times when I have had no money at all; there are occasions over the last fifteen or so years when I have come back home yet again with a square-shaped carrier bag and felt sick with guilt and over-consumption. (‘I haven’t even played side two of the album I bought after work on Tuesday, so how come I’ve bought another one today?’) In those Virgin days, I thought and read and talked for weeks before committing myself to something I would have to live with and listen to for months. (Mistakes, like the Van der Graaf Generator record, had to be paid for by the self-flagellation of listening to the wretched thing and kidding myself that I liked it.)
Every Picture Tells a Story seemed a safe bet. I had heard ‘Maggie May’, of course, and knew that any album featuring a song like that would not be actively unpleasant; I could count on songs, and singing, and these seemed like reassuring virtues. And songs and singing was what I got: ‘Maggie May’, ‘Reason to Believe’, a beautiful cover of a Dylan song, ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’, a decent stab at the Temptations’ ‘I Know I’m Losing You’ (I didn’t really approve of Rod singing a song by a Tamla Motown group – Motown was for sisters and people like that – but there were plenty of guitars, so I let it pass) … loads of stuff. There wasn’t anything I didn’t like, really. I played Every Picture Tells a Story to death, and then let it rest in peace.
But, like all the best teen icons, Rod wasn’t a mere recording artiste, he was a lifestyle. You couldn’t just listen to his music, forget about him, and put him away in the little and chronically over-familiar pile of records in your bedroom (I probably had about nine albums by then, and in truth I was pretty sick of all of them). He resonated. For a start, there was this football thing he had. At school, the sight of him kicking balls into the ‘Top of the Pops’ audience excited a great deal of favourable comment; ever since punk, it has been de rigueur for bands to express an interest in the people’s game, but back then, things were different, mostly because of the kind of music I was listening to. Few of the people I watched football with at Arsenal looked as if they knew who Humble Pie were; none of the people I watched Humble Pie with cared how Arsenal had got on. (I remember John Peel attempting to read out the football results at a late-summer Hyde Park concert, and getting booed for doing so.) When I went to see the Who, I saw that rock and football did not have to attract entirely separate audiences, but for the most part, the Afghans at the gigs and the Crombies at the grounds never got to rub against each other; Rod Stewart was a godsend to the countless teenage boys who couldn’t see why Ron Wood and Ron Harris should have to live on different planets.
And it was much easier to be Rod Stewart than it was to be Hendrix or Jagger or Jim Morrison. Tartan scarves were easier to find in Maidenhead than leather trousers, and Rod had never worn a dress, like Jagger had. There was no need to take heroin, or read Rimbaud, or play a guitar with your teeth, or know who Meher Baba was; all you needed to do to acquire Rodness was drink, sing, pick up girls and like football. It was easy. We could all do that without having to go to LA or even Soho. (We weren’t drinking or picking up girls yet, needless to say, or at least not properly, if you catch my drift. But we would, no problem, no need to worry about us, pal.) The photo on the gatefold sleeve of Never a Dull Moment depicted Stewart’s band lined up in a goalmouth; on Smiler, they were all raising pints outside a suitably cor-blimey looking pub. This was transparently shameless stuff and it is impossible to look at these photos now without cringing; we were being conned rotten, but we didn’t know that then, and even if we did we wouldn’t have cared.
I went to see the Faces in 1971, at the Oval, but I cannot remember so much as a bum Ronnie Wood note now. (And the next time I saw them, at the Reading Festival, they left no impression either. This may well have been a result of their liberal pre-gig refreshment policy.) In 1972, when I was fifteen, there was ‘You Wear It Well’, which, reassuringly, sounded exactly the same as ‘Maggie May’, but with its own tune, and the album Never a Dull Moment, and the Faces album A Nod’s as Good as a Wink, and the single ‘Stay With Me’, and the single ‘What’s Made Milwaukee Famous’, which came in a tartan picture sleeve, and the Python Lee Jackson single ‘In A Broken Dream’, which became the traditional bottom-groping finale to every village hall disco I went to. I didn’t need to think about any other pop singers; there was enough Rod Stewart product to soak up all the record-buying money I had. (It was no use being a Stones fan, or a Dylan fan, or a Floyd fan – you had to wait years.) A Nod’s as Good as a Wink was dreadful, the usual admixture of tired Chuck Berryisms, duff lyrics and a chronic fluff-on-the-needle production; I didn’t even like ‘Stay With Me’ that much, although it was OK if you wanted to pretend to share a microphone with a pal (then – as now, as far as I am able to tell from ‘The Chart Show’ – you leaned back, head on one side, with the arm furthest from the mike punching the air).
The solo stuff was different, much more tender, and certainly more wrought. The booze-and-football photos, it is clear now, were intended to compensate for the rampant sissiness of the recordings, the Bob Dylan covers (‘Mama You Been on My Mind’, ‘Girl from the North Country’), the McCartney ballads (‘Mine for Me’), and Stewart’s own sentimental cod-Celtic songs. This was the stuff I preferred; indeed, I would still rather listen to a ballad than anything else, and maybe this is Rod’s legacy to me.
They still sound surprisingly good, those three solo albums (Every Picture … , Never a Dull Moment and Smiler) that created the Hampden-and-bitter Stewart image. The cover versions are immaculate: so good, in fact, that when I sought out the originals (during that purist phase all Music Blokes go through, when we believe that originals must by definition be superior to the copies), I was disappointed by them. Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It on Home to Me’ didn’t have that rollicking string arrangement; Dylan’s ‘Mama You Been on My Mind’ was pretty but plain, and anyway Dylan couldn’t sing.
And Stewart’s voice still sounds great. Why Caucasians used to believe that rock stars with croaky voices – Stewart, Janis Joplin, Frankie Miller, Joe Cocker, Paul Young – are white soul singers remains one of life’s impenetrable mysteries. (During the eighties, thankfully, with the advent of the more honey-toned George Michael and Boy George, this perplexing claim ceased to be made.) Only the overrated Otis Redding sounds as though he is gargling through porridge; neither Al Green nor Marvin Gaye nor Aretha Franklin seems as distressed, as pained, as the Croakies. Surely one of the points of soul singing is its effortlessness? But Stewart pinches other things from black music traditions: his vocal mannerisms, his laughs and spoken asides, and the way he rides the beat and slides under and over the melody line … these are the telltale signs of somebody with a good record collection and a sharp pair of ears, and they set him apart from the opposition. And anyway, Stewart had grown up with folk (hence the Dylan and the Tim Hardin covers) as well as the more ubiquitous R&B. He wasn’t a Jagger or an Elton John, but a straightforward, uncomplicated interpreter of popular songs: fifteen years earlier, he might have been our answer to Dean Martin; fifteen years later, he probably would have been a one-hit wonder for Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
Things went downhill fast after Smiler. There was one great last Faces single, ‘You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything’, which swung in a way that most English rock songs do not (mostly, I discovered years later, because Stewart and Wood had liberated a huge chunk of a Bobby Womack song for their fade-out), and then the band split up. Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones, a move which, distressingly, made a lot of sense. And a year or so later Atlantic Crossing was released. There was no football pitch or pub photo on the sleeve of this one: just a monstrous cartoon drawing of Stewart, wearing an improbable silver jump-suit and, well, crossing the Atlantic.