This Day in Rock History (Stewart Becomes Solo Superstar with ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’)

May 28, 1971—The LP Every Picture Tells a Story primarily featured song covers, but it was a tune co-written by Rod Stewart—one that he considered leaving off the finished product—that propelled the 26-year-old to solo superstardom, after stints with the Hoochie Coochie Men, Steampacket, the Jeff Beck Group and The Faces.

As he had done with his solo studio album from the prior year, Gasoline Alley, Stewart included a composition by Bob Dylan, “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” on this new 10-song Mercury collection.

But the influence of Dylan may have been more strongly, if unconsciously, absorbed when the working-class son of a North London plumber let his creativity flow on what became the album’s monster hit, “Maggie May.” 

Recalling why he had reservations about including this song that he had recorded rapidly in the studio, Stewart remembered in his 2012 autobiography, Rod:

“It didn’t have a chorus. It just had these rambling verses. It didn’t really have a hook. How could you hope to have a hit single with a song that was all verse and no chorus and no hook? And it went on a bit: it was more than five minutes long, for God's sake, which was pretty much operatic by the standards of the pop single."

Perhaps he “should have known from listening to Bob Dylan,” Stewart reasoned, that “the lack of a catchy phrase in the middle,” not to mention a song exceeding the average length of a single, was not necessarily an impediment to significant radio time. (Indeed, see "Positively 4th Street" and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”)

Nor was Stewart’s raspy voice an obstacle to success: Dylan’s vocals, likened to “a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire” by an unnamed Missouri folk singer cited by critic Nat Hentoff, had already proven that unconventional sounds could be tolerated if they were also expressive and evocative. Similarly, in the counterculture’s periodical bible, Rolling Stone, John Mendelsohn, reviewing the album, wrote that Stewart possessed “the most unique male voice in rock, a voice anyone could recognize instantly at five hundred paces through a Dixie cup….He’s got soul to spare.”

To Stewart’s surprise and delight, then, an American DJ (“allegedly in Cleveland, Ohio”) went with playing “Maggie May” rather than the designated single, a cover of Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.” It peaked at #1 on the Billboard U.S. singles chart in early October 1971.

I wonder, though, if there might have been another reason for Stewart’s initial hesitancy about releasing “Maggie May?” I was surprised to learn from Rod that, when recording the vocals on his own compositions, he has sometimes felt so vulnerable over revealing his feelings that he has the studio emptied out “of everyone except the engineer—the producer at a push.”

There could hardly be a more personal song than “Maggie May,” his semi-autobiographical memory of losing virginity at age 15 in the summer of 1961 at the Bealieu Jazz Festival to “an older (and larger) woman” who propositioned him in the beer tent.

It’s hard to believe that the randy rooster who has undoubtedly scored with the ladies in virtually every stop on his world tours could feel this way. But who are we to argue?

The album also conveyed Stewart’s bone-deep appreciation for blues, soul and folk. Produced by Stewart himself, it exhibited a raw, go-for-it quality that crackles with energy, especially on the title track, the singer’s episodic tale of careening across Europe as a teenager and what he learned from the opposite sex—a kind of Tom Jones for the age of rock ‘n’ roll.

“That whole album was done in 10 days, two weeks, about as long as it takes to get a drum sound right nowadays," Stewart recalled in an interview for Mojo Magazine in 1995. He trusted his backup musicians—guitarist Ron Wood, pianist Pete Sears, and fiddler Dick Powell—and they delivered to a man, perhaps none more so than acoustic guitarist Martin Quittenton, who not only co-wrote “Maggie May” with Stewart but contributed its memorable, and ultimately exhilarating, mandolin sound.

In the years since, Stewart has sometimes been maddeningly unmindful of his gifts, whether through roosterish posturing on “Hot Legs” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” or his early-millennium ill-advised turn towards “The Great American Songbook.”

But Every Picture Tells a Story demonstrates why fans on both sides of the Atlantic embraced him so ardently near the beginning of his journey. Or, as he put it in his ruminating 2012 song, “Can’t Stop Me Now”:

I stood up straight and sang for the record-company man, my enthusiasm filled the room
I was young and I was keen with that devil in my stream as I hollered out an old blues tune.

Song Lyric of the Day (Rod Stewart, on a Month Associated With a Woman)

“Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you

It's late September and I really should be back at school.”— Rod Stewart and Martin Quittenton, “Maggie May,” performed by Rod Stewart from his LP, Every Picture Tells A Story (1971)

I heard this song over the weekend yet again, introduced by WFUV-FM deejay Don McGee in the simplest but most evocative fashion: “It’s late September.” A whole world was summoned for me of the first time I heard it, back as a tween.

“Maggie May” may be the second-best-known cougar in rock ‘n’ roll history, after Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson. The record that immortalized her was composed and produced on the fly, with all the raw heartache that Rod Stewart could summon in what has become his familiar, raspy voice. (It involved only two takes--in contrast, The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" each went through six months.) The rowdy British rock ‘n’ roller has had many hits since then, but I don’t think he’s ever been better.

The song was inspired by an incident that happened to Stewart, at age 16, at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the early 1960s: “I'd snuck in with some mates via an overflow sewage pipe,” he recalled in his 2012 bestseller, Rod:The Autobiography. “And there on a secluded patch of grass, I lost my not-remotely-prized virginity with an older (and larger) woman who'd come on to me very strongly in the beer tent. How much older, I can't tell you - but old enough to be highly disappointed by the brevity of the experience." (Less than half a minute, if you really must know—a rather inauspicious start for one of pop music’s most notorious lotharios.)

Sad to say, but Stewart would not, from the song that made his career, pay out more than a standard musician’s session fee to Ray Jackson, who played the mandolin on the song. In fact, Stewart rubbed salt into the wound—and probably ensured that Jackson would sue him (unsuccessfully) for songwriting credit years later—with the following tossed-off  credit on the original liner notes: “The mandolin was played by the mandolin player in Lindisfarne. The name slips my mind."

Now that I know this session player, I will, from here on forward, mentally tip my hat to this musician who provided one of the most exhilarating closing instrumentals that I have ever heard on a rock ‘n’ roll song.

Quote of the Day (Rod Stewart, With Elton John on Safari!)

“Even on safari, Elton insisted on bringing his diamonds with him. He had a black box with various pieces of Cartier jewelry in it, worth God only knows how much, entrusted to his assistant Bob—a bit like the way the U.S. president has someone with him with a briefcase containing the nuclear codes. One night in Africa, as we were having dinner, members of the party decided to sneak this precious box away from Bob and hide it, just to get a reaction. But Elton is a very difficult person to faze. Bob began to panic, but Elton simply said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, it’s only the daytime stuff.’”—Rod Stewart, “Rod’s Wild Years: High Times With the Faces, Elton and the Stones—An Exclusive Excerpt From Rod Stewart’s New Memoir,” Rolling Stone, October 25, 2012

(Photograph of Elton John from the Cher show, air date February 9, 1975)

Quote of the Day (Rod Stewart, on Wedding Rachel Hunter)

“I’ve been tamed. I've put my last banana in the fruit bowl."—Rod Stewart, following his marriage to model Rachel Hunter on December 15, 1990, quoted in John Walsh, “The Saturday Profile: Rod Stewart, Rock Star: Do Ya Still Think I’m Sexy?” The Guardian, December 5, 1998

Do I even need to write that the couple separated in 1999? I guess you can say that for Rod Stewart, this relationship devolved from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” to (given his recent gravitation toward what a friend of mine once termed “Grandma’s Music”) “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

None of us should be surprised that the relationships of entertainers last about as long as summer fireflies. Compared with the eight-day marriage of Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips (see my post from the other day), the union of Stewart and New Zealand supermodel Rachel Hunter amounted to an entirety.

(Before we go any further, a question: what does a young woman have to do to graduate from being just a model to being a “supermodel”? A Sports Illustrated appearance? Million-dollar contracts? What, exactly?)

What continually gets me, though, is how silly entertainers sound when they profess eternal fealty in public. It’s like what someone told me when I asked him why so many CEOs spout optimism about their firms when financial results tell a far different story: “They’re caught up in the moment—they can’t help themselves.”

Among the people who haven’t been able to “help themselves,” for instance, is Brad Pitt, who praised his beaming honey in the audience at one awards show as “my angel.” Who was this seraphim? Angelina Jolie? Jennifer Aniston? No, try Gwyneth Paltrow, about 14 years ago, right after their Seven came out.

On another such occasion, Jim Carrey spotted his beloved (no, not Renee Zellwegger or Jenny McCarthy—perhaps it was Lauren Holly?) down the aisle, then pronounced, before millions worldwide watching on TV, “I would slay dragons for you.”

An easy promise to make—no dragons have been around since St. George, to my knowledge—but when it comes to something harder, like sticking with the person he loved after their 10th fight over mirror time, Carrey had no desire to go the distance. As all my married relatives and friends (nearly all of whom are married longer than Stewart, Pitt or Carrey) have told me, marriage requires inordinate patience, even hard work.

But you have to ask yourself, why was Stewart so confident that his relationship would last? His own prior history with Britt Ekland, Kelly Emberg, Alana Hamilton, and God knows who else didn’t exactly inspire optimism about his connubial endurance.

Neither did the age difference between him and his toothsome blond bride. Once, in a live version of the immortal song about his youthful love for what would now be termed a “cougar,” “Maggie May,” he joked that his wife was still in diapers at the time it was recorded. Put another way: she was 21 and he was 45 when they wed.

At some point, Ms. Hunter was bound to look at the man who still thought of himself as a bantam rooster and conclude that he was getting long in the tooth. Though marketers are fond of telling us that today’s youth are not as loyal to brands as earlier generations, I’m afraid the same holds true for how long they stay with older partners. That meant Ms. Hunter would, at some point or other, join Cheryl Tiegs, Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford, and others among the legion of MCSs (Maritally Challenged Supermodels).