Ranking Rod Stewart albums 1970-1978

I have a lot to say about Rod Stewart’s career, but let me confine to his salad years. Confession: I haven’t heard An Old Raincoat Won’t Let You Down, aka The Rod Stewart Album. But I like 1981’s Tonight I’m Yours too.

1. Every Picture Tells a Story (1971)

So much depends on “Maggie May.” More depends on “Mandolin Wind,” the frail, almost Imagist-indebted original composition included on Rod Stewart’s breakthrough album. “Like so many of this period’s key songs, it is patient, happy to stop and start, to pause and consider,” Marcello Carlin wrote in his re-appraisal. The tension between the unnamed mandolin player and Ron Wood and Martin Quittenton’s guitars relaxes whenever Stewart turns to the chorus, as if for warmth. That same sense of ramshackle eternity powers the title track. I said in my Gasoline Alley entry that Micky Waller plays drums like they’re a lead guitar; this applies to “Every Picture Tells a Story,” an AOR staple that has never outgrown its usefulness, thanks to which and a dramatic cover of the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You” I almost believe that Woody squandered talents by becoming Keith Richards’ drinking buddy. As for “Maggie May,” I can think of few original things to write except (a) in the era of the reaction to #MeToo no male singer can get away with what Stewart does in his song; (b) he loathes that he loves her, can’t imagine himself tumbling into such abjectness again, won’t let himself tumble, hence the career replete with sequels to Blondes Have More Fun. Yet he can’t bring himself to hate her. He hates himself, not her. That’s how much Stewart’s vocal suggests.

2. Gasoline Alley (1970)

Perhaps it speaks to my lack of sophistication, but I’m a sucker for singers who follow, often note for note, the melodies picked by guitars or played by pianists. Stewart does it on the title track. It creates vulnerability, as if the melody were a handrail. The other characteristic of this wonderful record is how Micky Waller, in the Keith Moon tradition, uses his drums as a second lead guitar; the Womack cover, “It’s All Over Now,” is a collection of rolls that matches the uneasy stew of resentment and euphoria in Stewart’s vocal. The triumph is “Lady Day,” a masterpiece of rue in which Ron Wood’s bottleneck guitar, as hyperactive as Waller’s drums on other tracks, can’t stop squawking as Stewart inches toward an admission it’s difficult to believe from the vantage point of a high schooler acquainted with “Crazy About Her”: “I get scared when I remember too much.” And I’m liberal about that sort of thing.

3. Never a Dull Moment (1972)

Bored with Greil Marcus’ mantra about the unassailability of Rod Stewart through the Nixon re-election, I asked him in 2007 during what was then called the EMP Pop Conference if he liked anything Stewart recorded after 1972. He replied, “Never been a millionaire/And I tell you mama I don’t care,” quoting “True Blue,” the opening track on Stewart’s EPTAS follow-up. He betrayed his confession, he said. An eighties kid who grew up watching Stewart in flower pot hair and spandex wailing about love touches and Baby Janes and his slatternly heart, I didn’t understand the purity, especially when the eternal “Young Turks” wants a word with him. Raucous and representing only a slight diminution of energy and inspiration, Never a Dull Moment has the “Maggie May” rewrite “You Wear It Well,” several good Ron Wood rocker co-writes. The killer: a cover of Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

4. A Night on the Town (1976)

So what if “The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)” lifts the soul girls from “Walk on the Wild Side” and the melody from Dylan’s “A Simple Twist of Fate”? That’s the point. T.S. Eliot, y’all! I can’t imagine the impact of this self-written show of empathy on gay men in 1976, doubly so coming from one of the biggest and most rakish of rock stars; Stewart places the emphasis on “Georgie was a friend of mine,” and that’s what counts. The rest is a curate’s egg soaked in bourbon. My older readers may like “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)” more than I do, and symmetry required that Stewart followed this grossness draped in sensitivity with a dainty number called “The Balltrap.”

5. Atlantic Crossing (1975)

“Sailing,” a cover of a Sutherland Brothers song, turned into a massive UK hit, yet, like Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre” two years later it did no business stateside. Odd, too — this moist kitsch was at home in the thick nicotine-stained curtained world of the mid-seventies. To acquiesce to the PR and label this record “Rod Stewart’s farewell to England,” in other words, seems…odd. If he crossed the Atlantic so he could work with the likes of Jesse Ed Davis and Steve Cropper, he fortunately brought with him a couple songs — or, more likely, cobbled them together in the studio — that rock without getting sodden about it. “Three-Time Loser,” for instance, the opening track, still figuring out how to sound post-Faces, post-England (the lyric “jackin’ off reading Playboy on a hot afternoon” does appear, fans); “All In The Name Of Rock’n’Roll,” better than the Stones song with the similar name but not by much. The late Danny Whitten’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” gets a poignant reading. It also contains his first version of the Isley Brothers charmer “This Old Heart of Mine,” done better in 1989 with Ron.

6. Footloose and Fancy Free (1977)

The strain of being a hellcat while strumming acoustic would-be charmers showed. The record with “You’re in My Heart (The Final Acclaim)” also has room for the vile “Hot Legs.” On “I Was Only Joking” he explained himself.

7. Smiler (1974)

The home of colorless Goffin-King and Chuck Berry covers, another Elton song (“Let Me Be Your Car” — beep beep beep beep, yeah!), and, of all people to approach, a Paul McCartney castoff called “Mine for Me” given an organ and steel drum arrangement.

8. Blondes Have More Fun (1978)

When I heard this bottom feeder of a record two years ago, I expected trashy fun on the order of lead single “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” Instead, Stewart and his band served trash like “Is That the Thanks I Get?” and “Hot Weekend” and, worse, “Ain’t Love a Bitch,” which he should’ve titled “Ain’t I an Arsehole” and in which Stewart turns himself into a Drake ancestor. How ’bout this one: “Attractive Female Wanted.” On the slush reggae of “Last Summer,” Rod rasps,  “She purred…like a cat in a Panama hat.” Meow.