I bought Atlantic Crossing anyway, for its two aching ballads, ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ and It’s Not the Spotlight’, but it was the weakest of his solo work – and therefore of the entire Stewart oeuvre – to date. And then I went to college, and listened to punk and blues and soul and reggae, and it should have stopped there, but it didn’t. My devotion intensified: I wore a Rod Stewart T-shirt that I’d bought for 50p, and I had a Rod Stewart poster on the wall of my college bedroom. It was, I guess, an ironic devotion – Rod had become a post-punk figure of fun by that time, and you would have to have been particularly imbecilic not to get the joke – but there was a glimmer of earnestness there, too: I was frightened by the Athena prints of Renoir and Matisse paintings that hung on my neighbours’ walls, and of the classical music that I occasionally heard coming from their stereos, and used Rod as a kind of talisman to protect me from these evil and alien forces. So I stuck with it for a while, until I felt more comfortable with University and with myself, and then I gave up. I preferred the Tom Waits version of ‘Downtown Train’ – he still listens, you have to give him credit for that – and I haven’t even bothered with the Unplugged album, which seemed aimed straight at me, and those like me.
But these are the records I own because of Rod: His California Album, by Bobby Bland, which is where Stewart first heard ‘It’s Not the Spotlight’ (and though Stewart’s version is flatter and less piquant than Bland’s, Rod wisely didn’t bother with Bland’s unattractive trademark phlegm-clearing whoops), and maybe even ‘If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)’; my entire Bobby Womack collection; my Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade; my Temptations’ Greatest Hits; and my Sam Cooke album. I was introduced to the Isley Brothers (‘This Old Heart of Mine’), Aretha Franklin (‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman/Man’), and Crazy Horse (‘I Don’t Want to Talk about It’). And once I had been introduced to Aretha Franklin and Bobby Bland and the Temptations and Chuck Berry, I got to know B.B. King and the Four Tops and Atlantic Records and Chess Records and … He gave me a good start in life, and as a young man, a pop innocent, one cannot ask for anything more than that. If I had been similarly smitten by Elton John or James Taylor or Jethro Tull or Mike Oldfield, all of whom were competing for attention at around the same time, it is possible that I would have junked my entire record collection a decade or so ago.
The people who stick with pop the longest, it seems to me now, are those who entrust themselves at a tender age to somebody like Stewart, somebody who loves and listens to pop music. Those who fell for the Stones got to hear, if they could be bothered, Arthur Alexander and Solomon Burke and Don Covay (and if they got to hear Don Covay they would find themselves wondering what, precisely, Jagger had brought to the Sixties party). Those who went for Led Zeppelin went on to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Genesis and Pink Floyd led you up a blind alley: there was nowhere to go, and so a good many people I knew stopped dead. Today’s youngsters, eh? Where are they heading for after they’ve chewed up the Sisters of Mercy or the Happy Mondays? (Suede and Teenage Fanclub, on the other hand …) Even after all these years, even after Britt and ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy’ and blah blah blah, I’d still like to buy Rod a drink; I’d like to sit him down and talk to him, not about Celtic or Jock Stein or Denis Law or ligaments or real ale, but about music. He knows much more than he’s ever let on.
IN 1972, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG TEENAGER living in Glasgow, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come to town. I had been going to gigs since I was thirteen and as Glasgow was a popular venue for music I had already seen most of the biggest progressive rock bands of the day – Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart, Mott the Hoople, Alex Harvey, Deep Purple, The Who, and many more. (With great foolishness I declined to go and see T. Rex, deeming them to be too poppy. How silly can you get?) Nonetheless, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come. They were too big, and too serious. I mean, they didn’t release singles or anything.
I had no clear idea of what the daily life of Led Zeppelin might be and assumed vaguely that they lived in some sort of Valhalla, sipping mead, talking to the muses and occasionally making records. Possibly they granted a few divine favours in between times. Whatever they did it would not include touring Scotland because, at least in my school, Led Zeppelin were a class apart, and we were not worthy.
People, including me, used to marvel that anything as good as them could possibly exist. We used to walk around the playground carrying their albums despite the fact that there was nowhere in school to play them. It was just good to have them around, and be seen with them. I spent a fair part of my early youth walking back and forth clutching Led Zeppelin Two, singing the riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and conscientiously imitating all the guitar solos. (I bought this record before I had a record player. Really.)
This for me is the stuff of strong memories. For instance, when Led Zeppelin Four was released the first reports were confused. Two separate people who had skipped school for the day reported that they had seen it in shop windows but each of their descriptions of the album sleeve was radically different. This led us to wild and lengthy speculations in class ranging from the likelihood of two Led Zeppelin albums being simultaneously released to one of the sightseers being strongly affected by LSD, which was always a possibility in the early seventies, even among the very young.
Strangely enough, the solution turned out to be that one shop was displaying one side of the sleeve and the other shop was showing the other. It was of course a mighty and complex gatefold sleeve, .the like of which is no longer to be seen in these post-heroic days. Such was our immense Led Zeppelin interest that this sort of thing was fuel for hours and hours of fevered discussion which I still recall though I have no idea what I might have been supposed to be learning in the class at the time.
I think it was shortly after this that we heard that they were coming to play in Glasgow. Now for me, already hurt and disillusioned in life because other boys had girlfriends and I had no idea how to go about this, my main happiness and only spiritual elevation was obtained by lying around in incense-filled rooms, listening to Led Zeppelin. The prospect of seeing them live was therefore overwhelming.
I queued up overnight for my ticket. The police patrolling this queue were particularly and needlessly unpleasant but I will not dwell on this as I do not wish to spoil the memory. The venue was Green’s Playhouse, later to become the Apollo. This had several features which would annoy me now, namely it did not sell alcohol and it was seated but I don’t recall being troubled by this at the time. Everyone generally stood on the seats or rushed to the front when the band played. As to alcohol, this was more of a problem, particularly as we were all too young to buy it legally elsewhere. Much creative thinking was done to obtain a few cans of McEwans and it was necessary to drink them quickly and surreptitiously in the street before the gig. Many junior rock fans, forced to bolt down their beer in the short distance between the bus stop and the venue, paid a heavy price later in terms of illness, disorientation and utterly irate parents.
I have probably never been as excited as when waiting for Led Zeppelin to come onstage. In the weeks since buying the tickets I had talked of little else. Well, probably nothing else. Although everybody had their different preferred bands we were entirely united in regarding Led Zeppelin as by far the best, apart from the out and out pop music fans, of whom I seem to remember there were relatively few, and possibly one or two hard-core