Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #28 in April 1978.
I know readers will look at today’s choice and think, “Wha? Why not ‘Love Touch’ or ‘All for Love’ or ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’?” Well, the Legal Eagles soundtrack hit is silly froth, while “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” works as decent rock-disco with a perfect mirror ball of a keyboard line and an excellent Phil Chen bass part. “Hot Legs,” however, stands out for its leering grossness: few things are less attractive in rock, especially rock in this period, than singers blowing out their larynx in an attempt to convey passion; the listener is put in the position of the woman with the bloody gorgeous legs, running for her life as Stewart and his cronies blow garlic breath in her face.
Soured on boomer myths about rock frontmen’s peaks and valleys after enduring the late eighties success of Steve Winwood, I’m not sure that Rod Stewart wasn’t in 1970 already a singer-songwriter of unquestioned clarity with a lot of hack in him. He liked money and its accompaniments. He would write with anyone in his pickup bands; about the differences between Ron Wood (not himself a paragon of idealism) and Jim Cregan he was spectacularly egalitarian. The Stewart Ethos, insofar as it’s a thing, consists of “‘ere, lads, put some chords together, I’ll come up with some bloody words, and we’ll have a pint or four.” This meant the sinking of the equivalent of a World Bank fund into Foot Loose and Fancy Free‘s “Hot Legs” and almost all of 1979’s Blondes Have More Fun, a disgraceful record with more crap than Body Wishes or Out of Order.
As for “Legs,” it represents the last gasp of Stewart’s “Brown Sugar”/”Tumbling Dice” infatuation and, perhaps, the first gasp of hair metal by way of AC/DC. On earlier numbers like “The Balltrap” Stewart still sounded insouciant; now he sounds like he’s trying to remember what it was like to be a young heart free tonight but reduced to squawking. Why is this so slow? Why is Chen allowed a solo? At least the label didn’t pick “You’re Insane” as the followup.
Humanizing The Vacuum 