One of the many things I learned from Rod Stewart’s memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, is that the technical process of recording a studio album is very strange. For instance, the lead singer usually records his vocal track in a soundproofed room, by himself, wearing headphones so that he can listen to the band’s instrumental track.
It seems a very sterile and artificial process–not at all what one pictures when imagining a rock singer at work. And so I was impressed to learn that Stewart has always rejected this technique, insisting on recording all tracks directly with his band:
When we were recording, I liked to be in the sound room with the band, walking around with a microphone in hand, so that I could look them in the eye, interact with them, perform with them, basically. I think it slightly startled the engineer, who was more used to having the singer isolated behind screens, or in an entirely separate vocal booth. I remember hearing how Frank Sinatra had once been parked by an engineer behind a screen in a recording studio and he had made them take it down. In order to sing, he needed to feel the sound of the orchestra hit him in the chest. I guess this was my own version of that.
It’s interesting that Stewart draws a comparison between himself and Sinatra. As I learned from James Kaplan’s fine bio of Sinatra, the great crooner himself exerted tremendous effort when preparing for one his recordings. He was known to read the song lyrics aloud to himself, almost like prose. He felt he had to discover the emotional truth of the lyric before he could sing it, and if that truth was not forthcoming, he would nix the song.
Similarly, Rod Stewart’s particular form of genius lies in his ability to find the vibe in a song, the tragedy or the thrill lurking somewhere in it. This is true both of his famous covers (“Train to Jordan”) and in his own work—especially his early masterpieces like “Maggie May” and “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Like all great musicians, Stewart is able to create songs that penetrate the heart. When he sings the hopelessly sad, conflicted lyrics of Maggie May, for instance, he forces us to think back to our own first loves, in all their exhilarating tragedy.
In short, Stewart is a hell of a good singer, as his two-hundred million album sales can attest. How many other rock singers have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame…twice? 
As Stewart himself puts it: “Not bad for a bloke with a frog in his throat.”
Besides being a great singer, Stewart has always been a very good athlete. He was almost hired as a professional football player while in his teens, and he has continued to be an avid amateur player even now, well into his 60s. After reading his book, it occurred to me that athleticism forms a kind of theme running through his story. It spilled over into his all-out, balls-to-the-wall singing style, not to mention his legendary concert performances (which are equaled only by Mick Jagger’s for pure kinetic physicality).
A strong aspect of athleticism also obtains in Stewart’s incredibly prolific sex life (for which he is almost as famous as for his singing). In his lighthearted, slightly apologetic tone, Stewart recounts his many, many love affairs with women whose relative physical beauty ranged the full gamut from gorgeous to really gorgeous. Early in the story, for example, he leaves his drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend for the world-famous sex symbol Britt Ekland. Then, later in the book, comes this passage:
I started dating Bebe Buell, a former Playboy centerfold who had recently finished an affair with Todd Rundgren, the American rock musician. Things might have gone better with Bebe if I hadn’t brought her to London for a week and then, while we were there, grown rather distracted by Marcy Hanson. At this point, I was technically two-timing a Playboy model with another Playboy model.
Such is the dizzying montage of fame and sex that Stewart relays in witty, slang-infused detail. The entire book, in fact, reads like a wonderfully funny bar story. Take this passage, for instance, where Stewart frankly talks about his second most famous asset: his hair.
The bouffant stayed with me and then evolved into the spiked top during the Jeff Beck Group days. I developed this look in tandem with Ronnie Wood, who was also in that band and had the same kind of hair, although his is a bit thicker than mine. Ronnie and I used to do each other’s barnet in that period—in hotel rooms or at each other’s parent’s house. And we didn’t go in for some amateur, pudding-bowl setup, either. We had this method of pulling the hair down between thumb and forefinger and chopping at it with the scissors—very professional. And we’d stop all the time to check it in the mirror. We’d take ages doing it, ages, to get it right for each other. What a wonderful bond that is between two men. Most blokes would have been sabatoging each other’s hair, “Yeah, that looks all right, leave it.” Not us.
In case you didn’t already know. “Barnet” is short for “Barnet Fair”, which is Cockney rhyming slang for “hair”. And it’s exactly this kind of detail—frank, funny, and decidedly British—that makes Stewart’s book so much fun.
It also goes a long way toward making the reader forgive some of his rather atrocious personal behavior. I previously described his tone as “apologetic,” and it is, but only regarding episodes of outright infidelity and dishonesty. As to the matter of his epic promiscuity itself—as well as his Herculean appetite for booze and cocaine—he remains cheerfully unrepentant.
And, incidentally, I never thought in this period that the “being a rock star” aspect of being a rock star was beside the point, or even something I had to apologize for. On the contrary, it seemed to me (a) where an awful lot of the fun was, and (b) exactly what one had signed up for in the first place. That was the deal, surely. If I hadn’t considered the drinking/shagging/carrying-on to be at least a part of my terms of employment—and if I hadn’t done my best to hold my end up as nobly as possible in those areas—I would have felt I was letting down the union.
I must admit he has a point. Sports superstars and rock legends have a lot in common. They give ordinary people a supreme, almost mythological symbol of the life force at its purest. If there was something superhuman about Michael Jordan in his prime, there was something similarly larger-than-life about Rod Stewart in the 1970s. He poured everything he had into every song, not to mention every boozer and “shag.” While not exactly transcendent, Stewart is always “living in the moment,” as the Buddhists would say, and he is usually enjoying the hell out of it.
Even so, the book feels a little bit too good to be true, at least in the emotional sense. One wonders how much grief and heartbreak Stewart has left out of his book. The only emotional crisis he discusses at any length is his famous divorce from Rachel Hunter (another world-famous beauty). Hunter was the first of Stewart’s long list of lovers to dump him outright, and their subsequent divorce ravaged him physically and emotionally:
We said goodbye, quietly and painfully, and Rachel flew off to New Zealand with the kids too see her family. It was only when I was back in Los Angeles, on my own in the house we had shared, and realizing that our relationship was genuinely over, that the misery really came over me. It was like some kind of nineteenth-century romantic fever. For four months, I was beside myself. I lost twelve pounds in weight. I felt cold all the time. I took to lying on the sofa in the day, with a blanket over me and holding a hot water bottle against my chest. I knew then why they call it heartbroken; you can feel it in your heart.
Of course, it’s difficult to conjure much sympathy for a (then) forty-five-year-old millionaire whose much younger wife has left him, but Stewart is so candid and genuine in his telling that I actually felt sorry for him. This is this kind of emotional magic trick that Stewart has played all his life. He makes you care for him, even though he probably doesn’t deserve it.
Or does he? For all his hedonism and serial adultery, there is one aspect of his life to which Stewart has always remained faithful: his music. During an incredible burst of creativity in the early 1970s, Stewart recorded some of the best songs of the decade. He was also the front man for The Faces, a role that probably would have secured him a place in rock history even if not for his amazing solo work.
By his own admission, there has only been one of his albums that could reasonably be called a sell-out: 1978’s Blondes Have More Fun. That was the one with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” the disco number even Stewart describes as an artistic mistake. But hey, it was the 1970s. Everybody sold out in the 70s, even The Rolling Stones. (And, although he does not call attention to it in his book, he donated all of the royalties from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” to UNICEF.)
Like The Stones, Stewart quickly redeemed himself by crafting some great songs in later years, such as “Forever Young” and “Downtown Train.” Stewart also seems to have settled down at last, finding marital happiness with his current wife, Penny Lancaster. In recent years, he has recaptured some critical and commercial success with his “Great American Songbook” series of records. These latest records are an unabashed foray into pure nostalgia, but they are still beautifully crafted and inventive interpretation of great songs. Stewart, of course, has never had a problem with covering other artists. These days, it’s more likely that younger artists are covering him.
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