by Rod Stewart
And then, arching over it all, there was the influence of Long John, which was unquantifiable as far as I was concerned. He led the way for me, partly by example, partly by direct instruction – everything from basic stagecraft to the delivery of a vocal. He told me to make sure that I stood at the microphone with my feet apart, and never with my feet together, which gave you no presence or authority. He showed me how to inhabit a song – to take it over, make it your own. He showed me how to talk to an audience, how to engage with people from a stage, how to forge a connection with a roomful of people that you mostly can’t see. Here were lessons that would inform what I did for the rest of my career and will continue to do so for as long as I stand up in front of people with a microphone in my hand.
Mind you, not all of his wisdom was entirely trustworthy. He once advised me that giving oral sex to women would eventually ruin my voice and that I should desist from the practice immediately, if I valued my career. It was one of the rare occasions when I felt able to ignore him.
Those were golden days, though. I thought: this is it. This is as good as it gets. Wonderful. Doing what I want: singing three or four songs a night, having a drink, looking at the birds, maybe pulling one of the birds, and then going home.’
One of the questions my mum asked me when I went home and told her about Long John’s job offer was, inevitably, ‘Is there a future in it?’ And I’m sure I bluffed and blathered and came up with something to the effect of ‘yes’. The truth is, though, I didn’t know. I certainly hoped so. But whatever happened, I thought, I’ve probably got a job here for nine months, and if that happens, I’ll have enough to buy an MG Midget sports car, which was about £430 at the time. And if I could own an MG Midget – well, happy days.
But it wasn’t just me. Everyone thought what was going on in the music business in the early 1960s was a sudden bright flash in the sky which was destined to fade and fall just as fast as it rose. We thought that the Beatles would have ‘Love Me Do’, and that would be it. We felt the same about the Stones with ‘It’s All Over Now’. We didn’t think this music that was sweeping across Britain, and carrying us with it, was going to last. We thought it was a fad – a big crush that everyone would get over eventually. And so, when you joined a band, you weren’t thinking about the future, or your so-called career path. It was all new, so there was no context or pre-existing pattern to enable you to think of it that way. You were in it because you loved it now, this minute, and anything else that happened along the way was a bonus.
CHAPTER 5
In which management is appointed, a single is recorded which inexplicably fails to set the airwaves alight, and we hear tell of an early brush with Gary Glitter.
JOHN ROWLANDS AND Geoff Wright first saw me sing with the Hoochie Coochie Men at the Marquee Club in London in April 1964. They must have thought I was all right because they came up afterwards and asked if they could manage me.
At my age (I was nineteen at this point), and so early on in my life as a singer, just to be approached by people offering something as sophisticated as ‘management’ was pretty entertaining. At the same time, I was smart enough to know that these are famously shark-infested waters – and that, classically, this is the moment in the story when the emerging singer naïvely, and possibly even drunkenly, signs everything away without realising he has done so, thereby eventually buying some bloke in a suit a big house in Barbados and condemning himself to a life of poverty and expensive court cases.
But Rowlands and Wright clearly weren’t sharks. Or they kept their teeth very well hidden if they were. I rather liked the cut of their jibs. Neither of them seemed exactly hip. Rowlands looked like John Major, the future British prime minister. Wright resembled David Attenborough. He would later say that he found it slightly embarrassing to walk next to me in public, on account of the hair and the clothes. Is that an asset in a manager? Probably not.
But Rowlands had been ‘the Ovaltine Man’ in television commercials, and there’s not a lot of people who can say that. He would later build a PR firm around the careers of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Wright had worked with Tommy Steele, Val Doonican and Des O’Connor (big names, whatever else you want to say about them) and had also looked after the interests of Associated London Scripts, which was the company formed by Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Frankie Howerd, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson – among the funniest writers in English comedy. These were pretty good calling cards to be able to set down.
So I told them I would be happy to have a look at a contract and they, in due course, drew one up and gave it to me. This, again, is a potentially vulnerable moment for the green artist. It’s a classic Catch 22, in fact. What you really need is a manager to advise you on whether or not you should sign a contract with your manager. But, of course, you can’t ask your manager because you don’t have one.
Anyway, I didn’t sign it there and then. I took it home and showed it to my brother Don, who understands numbers, and we both looked at it pretty carefully, and I sat on it, all in all, for about a fortnight, which had the useful effect of increasing Rowlands’ and Wright’s keenness. I’ve heard stuff said about the shrewd, business-like mind that I’ve allegedly been able to call upon during my career, and up to a point there’s some truth in that. But let’s not exaggerate the case. Mostly what it comes down to, it seems to me, is not being taken entirely for a mug. So I returned to Rowlands and Wright with the contract and told them that I was happy with it, so long as we could insert a clause confirming that they couldn’t have a percentage of anything I earned from singing with Long John and the band. (That arrangement pre-dated them, after all, so why should they get a piece of it?)
The document duly adjusted to our mutual satisfaction, there followed a celebratory champagne dinner in the Barrie Room at the Kensington Palace Hotel, by the end of which I had fallen asleep at the table, face down in my plate. Exhaustion, I would claim, rather than the champagne, although it’s possible that the champagne played a part.
My new managers now went about trying to get me a record deal. They needed a demo recording for that, so they booked some time in a pretty basic studio in Poland Street in Soho, got Ian Armitt and Cliff Barton along from the Hoochie Coochie Men, and we recorded seven songs in the space of about four hours: Oscar Brown Jnr and Nat Adderley’s ‘Work Song’; Jimmy Reed’s ‘Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby’ and ‘Bright Lights Big City’; two Big Bill Broonzy numbers, ‘Moppers Blues’ and ‘Keep Your Hands Off Her’, Willie Dixon’s ‘Don’t You Tell Nobody’ and Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Just Like I Treat You’. It was rough and ready, but it was serviceable and probably as good as a demo needed to be.
Some of the feedback from record labels was that my voice was too rough for big commercial success. There’s a bit of gravel in it, and people at the time seemed to be looking for something smooth. I think EMI, specifically, declined me on those grounds. There was also apparently anxiety in some quarters about whether I was conventionally pretty enough to make it as a solo singer. Ruthless old business, isn’t it? Essentially, as far as some executives at the time seemed to think, I was offering gravel and a big nose to a marketplace that wanted smooth and pretty.
Yet with these recordings (and with no attempt to hide my nose), Rowlands and Wright managed to convince Mike Vernon at Decca Records to release a single by me. Decca at that point was the home of the Rolling Stones, last seen (by me) sitting on stools in Richmond, wearing cardigans, but now apparently getting screamed at all over the place. It seemed a decent enough place to start.
However, have there been more professional recording sessions than the one that resulted in my first single? I think we may end up agreeing that there have. The Decca Studios were in Broadhurst Gardens in West Hampstead, and on the morning of 3 September 1964 I report to reception, clutching (I’m not kidding) a small packet of cheese sandwiches made for me that morning by my mum.
‘Rod Stewart,’ I say, casually enough. ‘I’ve got a booking.’
> Which I had – but, as the receptionist discovers, after a few confused moments of flipping through the diary, the booking is for 10 September, a week later. My mistake. I return home, along with my packed lunch.
The following Thursday morning, I’m woken at home some time after eleven by my mum. Apparently, Geoff Wright is on the phone, wondering where I am. Well, actually, in bed is where I am, and slightly the worse for wear after a Hoochie Coochie Men gig the previous night. But I get downstairs to the phone and Geoff reminds me where I ought to be, which is Broadhurst Gardens. The band is in the studio, everyone’s waiting: no singer.
‘Jump in a taxi,’ says Geoff.
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘It’ll cost a fortune.’
‘I’ll pay at this end,’ says Geoff. (Do you see what I did there?)
So I sit in a cab for half an hour or so, while my head slowly clears, and eventually walk into the studio at around midday, two hours into the appointed session, to find an atmosphere of thinly disguised impatience.
The tension doesn’t substantially ease when I then suggest abandoning the proposed songs – which, to be perfectly frank, I haven’t really bothered to learn. (Unlike the band, for whom these songs have been carefully arranged in advance.) The problem is, the material consists of new songs that Decca have put forward, from their catalogue of possible future hits, and they sound a bit poppy, a bit light and (not to put too fine a point on it) a bit crap to me, and nowhere near the sort of earthier, bluesier stuff that I would automatically have in mind for myself.
‘So, what are you suggesting we do record?’ asks Geoff, with a smile so thin-lipped that it isn’t really a smile at all – more a sort of grimace. Studio time, remember, is slipping by at however many pounds per minute, and all these assembled musicians are on Musicians’ Union rates.
My idea, in fact, is that we should record this Sonny Boy Williamson track which I can imagine getting my voice around.
‘OK,’ says Geoff, tentatively. ‘So where’s the music?’
Good question. Hadn’t really thought about that.
But here’s a brainwave: why don’t I just pop out to a local record store and buy a copy of the record? We can play it into the studio, and everyone can pick it up.
Geoff runs this idea past the band, who seem more or less amenable but are probably ready by this point to do anything likely to bring this amateur hour to an end.
‘OK, then,’ says Geoff. ‘Off you go and get it.’
One small problem: could I borrow a couple of quid? (Do you see what I did there? Again?)
So I buy the record, with Geoff’s money, and it gets piped through speakers from the control room into the studio, and the band busks along with it until they’ve got it down right. The bassist in particular, I’m driven to observe, seems to know what he’s doing. He’s called John Paul Jones and he will later have a certain amount of success in a beat combo called Led Zeppelin. Pretty quickly we have an acceptable version of the song ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’. For the B-side we knock out Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town’, a number we all knew anyway. And there it is.
My first single.
I’m not sure how the people at Decca must have felt when this recording was first played back to them. They were banking on getting a piece of chart-ready pop to throw onto the airwaves, and instead they got a fairly raw version of an old blues standard with a slightly saucy (in fact, downright lecherous) lyric. Still, however upset they were, it didn’t stop them releasing it, just over a month later, on 16 October 1964.
Pretty thrilling for me, obviously, to see the navy-blue Decca label printed up with my name on it. Equally thrilling for the press, I’m sure, to receive their copies of the record along with a press release in the form of a Q&A, bringing them up to speed on my ‘Real Name’ (Roderick David Stewart), a revelation of the thing I was ‘Not Very Fond Of’ (I put ‘Scotland’, amazingly enough – must have been the aftermath of that Dundee experience in tartan with Long John) and my ‘Dislikes’ (‘Plonkers’ – I’ll stand by that).
Note, though, my ‘Ambition’: ‘To sing with the Count Basie Orchestra’. Even then I seem to have been taking the broader view.
This package may not have been enough to inspire coverage in the national press, but it did tweak my local paper, the ever-loyal Hampstead & Highgate Express, to print an interview with me. In the accompanying photograph I am in the Wellington Inn, on the Archway Road, with a glass of bitter to hand, and wearing a tartan scarf, a pair of trousers in a rather fetching blue and white stripe, and a pair of high-heeled boots. I told the paper’s readers, ‘I’ll stay on the bandwagon as long as it’s there,’ and added, ‘Sure, I’m in it for the money.’
This bravado was clearly the cue for the single to die a swift and brutal death. Which it most certainly did, although not before either the Decca promotions department or Rowlands and Wright had managed to blag me a slot on Ready Steady Go!, ITV’s hip and happening Friday-night pop music show.
That was, potentially, a pretty big break. In a Britain which had only just acquired a third television channel, Ready Steady Go! had immense powers of communication. You could be sure that virtually the entire record-buying public would be tuned in. ‘The weekend starts here,’ was the show’s opening statement. If you played it right, your record sales started here, too.
So off I go to Rediffusion Studios in Kingsway. Nervous? Obviously, although I have done my best to take the edge off those nerves by stopping at a pub on the way to fortify myself with Scotch and orange juice. The producers decide that I should appear alone, on a primitive gantry, with an electric guitar slung around my neck – despite the fact that the guitar you hear on the record is an acoustic, and despite the fact that it wasn’t played by me in any case. But that’s showbusiness.
I have brought with me a bag containing a faintly beatnik-looking black round-neck jumper, and some altogether more voguish grey hipster trousers and a webbing belt – a good look, I feel able to tell myself, as I examine the effect of this outfit in the dressing-room mirror. At the appointed hour, I am led from the green room to my position on the set, where there is a brief but agonising wait until the floor manager gets the word through his headphones and waves me on. At which point, as I step forward, I catch one foot behind the other and literally stumble into the nation’s sight.
Terrible. The next three minutes pass in a blur of mortification, during which I can only comfort myself that I didn’t fall flat on my face, which would have been far worse.
At the end, I take the customary bow before the generously applauding studio audience, and then, as I return to the upright position, bring my hand up to steady the hair, which, heavy with lacquer, was always in danger of coming to grief during the bow recovery phase.
Incidentally, warming up the audience in the studio that night: Paul Raven, whom you – and, for that matter, the relevant authorities – will know better as Paul Gadd, aka Gary Glitter. Paul/Gary and I would bump into each other a fair bit in the early 1970s, when he was stomping around in shiny suits and having huge hits, and when neither I nor anyone I knew would have predicted a future for him in a Vietnamese jail. In fact, he seemed like a perfectly nice bloke. I particularly remember a party in Windsor when he fell in the swimming pool and became separated from his wig, which floated away like some sort of upturned duck. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.
After the recording at Rediffusion, I go to a pub in Soho to have a few drinks and to bask in the sensation of being ‘that person who was just on the telly’ – an enjoyable if slightly deluded state, in which it becomes impossible for you to think that there is anyone in the room who doesn’t know. Or anyone in Britain, in fact. And a bloke that I’ve seen around a fair bit but never spoken to comes over. He has back-combed hair a bit like mine and he has a big nose a lot like mine, and there is an immediate sense of kinship.
Him: ‘Hello, face.’
Me: ‘Hello, face.’
(In those days you were a ‘face’ if you were a fashionable type or a ‘mover’ on the scene.) And then we fall to talking, and I tell him where I’ve just been and about my stumble onto the set of Ready Steady Go!, and we have a bloody good laugh about it and order another round of drinks. And that is the start of my still-firm friendship with Ronnie Wood.
It was, by some stretch, the most lasting thing to come out of that night. Boldly defying the odds, my big solo TV appearance did not send ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ crashing into the charts. Converting the single into a hit proved beyond the powers even of Ready Steady Go! It didn’t exactly help that the Yardbirds released a version of the same song at exactly the same time.
Mind you, the Yardbirds’ version only got to number fory-nine in the British chart. And, as the old sporting saying goes, first is first, forty-ninth is nowhere.
Blame the song choice. Whose idea was that anyway?
DIGRESSION
In which our hero owns up to a habit most shocking and time-consuming.
In December 2010, I reached a major career milestone. I appeared on the cover of Model Railroader magazine for the second time. Getting on the front of Rolling Stone had nothing on this.
In 2007, when Model Railroader first ran a feature on the layout that I am building on the top floor of my house in Los Angeles, the reaction I got was extraordinary. People were coming up to me all over the place and saying, ‘Well done, Rod. I’ve been a closet model railroader for years and now there’s a rock star doing it who’s not afraid to admit it.’
