Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  I, meanwhile, seemed to have created a small pot of lightly bubbling resentment by not responding with particular enthusiasm to the task of humping the band’s gear in and out of venues. When we arrived at a venue, for example, it was sort of understood that you would pick up a piece of equipment as you left the van. However, I would often be in such a hurry to get to a mirror to sort out my barnet that I would accidentally omit to grab an amplifier or a speaker cab along the way. I would say now, in my defence, that this was not untypical singers’ behaviour. Singers reason that they need nothing more cumbersome than a microphone and a microphone stand in order to go about their business, and rarely consider that they were put on this earth to hump someone else’s organ, as it were. However, my perfectly standard behaviour in this regard seems to have infuriated everyone in Steampacket, and especially Auger.

  But then Auger was almost permanently in a snit because pretty much the entire running of the band had fallen to him – including being the driver. There were two vans, one for the gear and one for the musicians, but only Auger and the roadie had driving licences, so Auger ended up providing the band with a taxi service. He lived out west in Richmond, and on gig days he would have to drive across to Vauxhall, in south London, to pick up Julie, then come north over the river to collect Long John and then head up to Archway for me. And at the end of the night, perhaps frazzled by the combination of a gig and a long drive back from, say, Stockport, he had to repeat the whole pan-metropolitan process in reverse. It was probably adding about an hour and a half to the length of his working day. Auger was also responsible for collecting the money from the club managers after the shows and for seeing that everyone got paid. Essentially, then, he was acting as organist cum chauffeur cum tour manager. It’s amazing that nobody asked him if he would mind cleaning their windows at the same time.

  As for Julie, she was the junior member of the band and, of course, the sole woman present, and she had to fight her corner – which she did with some style. There was a certain amount of rivalry between us over material and who was going to sing what. I knew that she wanted to have ‘In the Midnight Hour’, but so did I and I hogged it. We did manage to share Mary Wells’ ‘My Guy’, which we sang as a duet, and generally a perfectly amicable peace reigned. However, in the dressing room before a show at the Klooks Kleek Club in West Hampstead one night, in a fit of I don’t know what, I said something unpardonably rude to her about her legs. Quite rightly incensed, Julie did a lot of shouting and an equal amount of flailing and a pint glass got lobbed in my direction – breaking on the floor, as it happened, rather than on me, although I would have deserved it. And then, with the tension between us still crackling, we went out on the stage and sang perhaps the least sincere version of ‘My Guy’ ever witnessed. Ah, showbusiness.

  It all finally boiled to an end in the summer of 1966 when the band was offered a tempting four-week residency at a club called La Papagayo in St Tropez. Auger must have been over the moon at the prospect. Not only was he not going to have to drop off anyone in Vauxhall for a whole month, but he was finally going to get a holiday. And in the south of France, to boot. I think Long John really fancied the idea as well. The composer Leslie Bricusse and Lionel Bart were going to be in the area at the same time, and John was no doubt envisaging a month of yacht-borne jollity.

  A meeting was held, at which neither I nor my management was present. I don’t know what my management’s excuse was, but I think I may have skipped it. Big tactical error there, for it emerged in the course of this meeting that the only thing that wasn’t tempting about the St Tropez deal was the fee, which was tiny. In fact it was hardly worth going at the rate that was being offered.

  I like to imagine a silence falling around the table at this point in the meeting, and a certain amount of tapping of pencils occurring as everyone wrestles with their consciences and the images in their minds of the clear blue Mediterranean Sea in the gorgeous sunlight. And then someone (I bet it was Auger, although frankly it could have been any of them) says, ‘You know, there is a way that we could make this work . . . but it would involve leaving a member of the band behind.’

  And then everyone else pipes up and says, ‘Oh, no, no, that’s unthinkable. No, no, we couldn’t possibly do that . . . could we?’

  Guess which member they chose.

  Bastards.

  Sold me up the river for a few hours on a sunbed. Still, they got their comeuppance. By all accounts the St Tropez residency was a disaster. Long John became distracted by the availability of cheap, good-quality French wine and was not always, shall we say, in a position to give of his best. In fact, sometimes he went AWOL altogether. When they came back, Steampacket were no more.

  I, meanwhile, like a spurned lover jumping into the next available bed, signed straight up with a band called Shotgun Express, with the organist Peter Bardens and Beryl Marsden, a gutsy singer from Liverpool. More cover versions, more revue-style staging, and one wince-inducing set of publicity shots in which Shotgun Express posed with (guess what?) shotguns. It was Steampacket all over again, except that, lacking an authority figure like Auger, there was an added element of organisational chaos – band members forgetting to turn up, or going to the wrong club on the wrong night, or being so late that club owners docked half the fee, that kind of thing. I don’t have especially happy memories of those months – and, incredibly, there were at least eight of them, going through to February 1967. Was I going to be stuck doing ‘Knock on Wood’ for eternity?

  By the way, the drummer in Shotgun Express was Mick Fleetwood and the guitarist was Peter Green. I think it’s safe to say that their later band, Fleetwood Mac, worked out better for them.

  During this period I also found time to record not just one but two further solo singles that nobody wanted to listen to. This time the label was Columbia Records, Decca having somehow decided they could afford to pass on their contractual option of a second recording from me after the ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ adventure. So, my second solo single, emerging to a very muted fanfare in November 1965, was ‘The Day Will Come’, a number picked for me by the record company – like a slightly watered-down version of Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’, which had just been a hit, with a thumping beat and a big 1960s orchestral setting. On the B-side was a ballad called ‘Why Does It Go On?’ Now, there’s a title which was a hostage to fortune, if ever there was one.

  Then, in the spring of 1966, Columbia tried again, this time with a recording of the dance-floor number ‘Shake’. I went more for the grab-you-by-the-neck, force-you-up-against-the-wall Otis Redding version of the vocal than the gentler Sam Cooke take on it, but either way I might as well have dropped it down a mineshaft for all the impression it made on the record-buying public.

  Still, amid these prolonged fumblings, it was becoming pretty apparent to me what the missing ingredient was: original material. Turning out an inch-perfect Wilson Pickett cover on a wet night in Derby was one thing. If I was going to get anywhere, I was going to need to write some songs.

  CHAPTER 7

  In which our hero meets a guitarist of no small renown, accidentally invents heavy rock, tours America for the first time and declines the opportunity to have his penis commemorated in statue form.

  THE CROMWELLIAN WAS, as the big sign attached to the iron railings outside informed you, a ‘Cocktail Bar & Discotheque’, located in a classic white nineteenth-century terrace in the Cromwell Road, London. In the mid 1960s it was among the most ‘in’ hang-outs for musicians and one of the places where Swinging London went to swing – or, more specifically, to eat, drink and dance, as well as gamble in the small casino on the top floor. It was where, in 1966, down in the basement, I watched a recently flown-in guitarist called Jimi Hendrix – or Jimmy, as we were then allowed to call him. (No string-chewing or guitar-burning in his act at that stage, but already, clearly, one hell of a player and set to scare the life out of anyone in England who played a guitar.) And it was where, in Janua
ry 1967, in the slightly bleary early hours, I had my first formal encounter with someone else who was no slouch on the guitar: Jeff Beck.

  The conversation opened roughly as follows:

  Me: ‘Are you a taxi driver?’

  Him: ‘No, I’m a guitarist. Are you a bouncer?’

  Me: ‘No, I’m a singer.’

  Of course, we knew each other by sight. Jeff had seen me sing with Steampacket and liked my voice. And I would have to have spent the 1960s locked in somebody’s garage not to know who Jeff was. He had been in The Yardbirds and was spoken of in awe among musicians as a hot guitarist – hotter than Clapton, many felt, including me. But The Yardbirds had brought in Jimmy Page, who could play guitar a bit himself, and after the inevitable tensions between Page and Beck – two virtuosos fighting for space – and a fair bit of glaring at each other across a smouldering stage, Jeff had decided to leave. Now he was looking to form a group of his own and he wondered if I wanted to talk about it. We arranged to meet the following afternoon in quieter and more sober circumstances at the Imperial War Museum. In retrospect it was a fairly appropriate location, given some of the battles that would later ensue.

  I’ve heard it said that I hated Jeff Beck, but that wasn’t true at any stage in the two and a half years that we were in a band together, nor since. Clearly, though, there were phases where the two of us struggled to enjoy each other’s company, and certainly to relax with one another. The Jeff Beck I met at the Cromwellian was a serious, slightly self-conscious, sometimes rather abrupt figure. He could be aloof – but then he was already a star when I met him, so maybe that’s understandable. The band we were about to form, though ostensibly his band, would cast us as twin front-men, so there was always the scope for skirmishes between us. But we certainly respected each other. I respected him for his playing, and he respected me for my voice, and we knew that when the two of us got together and it worked, we could produce music that was pretty extraordinary.

  All that, though, lay ahead as we walked around the museum that afternoon, among the siege engines and examples of early blunderbusses, and Jeff set out these visionary ideas he had about creating a new kind of rock group, pushing it all in another direction, away from pop – Chicago blues but harder and heavier. ‘Grungy, Motown rock’ was another expression he had for it – white rock with a black soul feel to it. The job as vocalist was mine, if I fancied it. Being intrigued by the prospect – and also jobless – I very much did.

  First of all, though, Jeff had a solo single to record. His manager, Mickie Most, a wheeler-dealer who was never known to spurn a commercial opportunity and clearly had his own notion of where Jeff’s musical future lay, had found him a song called ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. Most once told Jeff, ‘All that wangy-yangy Hendrix stuff is history.’ Because Most was one of the day’s more powerful music business forces, he could say that kind of thing to Jeff without getting thumped. Anyway, ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ was at the opposite end of the spectrum from wangy-yangy: a thumpingly obvious pop song, with stupid lyrics and a big idiotic stomp-along chorus – almost the exact opposite of everything that Jeff was interested in. He hated it, and so did I. It has some of the most diabolical and cheesy lyrics you are ever likely to come across.

  And, of course, on its release in March 1967, it proved to be a monster hit, just as Most knew it would be – not so much in terms of getting into the singles chart, where it only reached number fourteen, but in terms of seeping into the culture for ever afterwards. For the next forty years it would be virtually enshrined in British law that ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ had to be played at all student dances, village hops, weddings and bar mitzvahs on pain of arrest, and also to be sung at football grounds. For Jeff, who, more than anyone I knew, genuinely couldn’t have given a toss about commercial success, releasing that song was like shooting the world’s biggest albatross. It was, as he used to say, as though someone had hung a pink toilet seat around his neck for the rest of his life.

  He had done his best to get out of singing it. Jeff took me along to the recording session, which Most was producing, and suggested to Most that, as I was the singer in the new band that Jeff was getting together, and as I had a more characterful voice than he did, maybe it would be a good idea if I recorded the lead vocal on ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. But Most, who I don’t think ever quite liked the cut of my jib, wasn’t having any of that and I ended up singing backing vocals on the chorus while Jeff did the lead. The same thing happened with the next single Jeff recorded, ‘Tallyman’ – a Graham Gouldman song, and again more commercial than anything Jeff would have chosen for himself. Jeff thought I should sing it, and again Most said no and gave the vocal to Jeff. I thought Jeff maybe could have stood up to him, but he seemed in thrall to Most and this was something we argued about.

  Against this backdrop of commercial indecision, the Jeff Beck Group came into being. Jeff’s first idea was to invite Jet Harris, once of the Shadows, to play bass, and Viv Prince, formerly of the Pretty Things, to be the drummer. This was an ambitious plan – or, you might even say, raving mad. Harris looked great – he had a big peroxide hairdo – but he was still in recovery from a terrible car accident and was known to be having some struggles with alcohol. Prince’s drumming style, meanwhile, made Keith Moon look conservative. Jeff had spoken of wanting to find ‘a hooligan’ to be the drummer, and Prince certainly fitted the description – perhaps a little too closely, though. After about half an hour of flailing away at a twelve-bar blues in a rented room above the Prince of Wales pub in Warren Street, Jeff decided that neither of those players had the feel he was looking for and promptly disinvited them.

  I think it may have been me who suggested bringing in my mate of more than two years, Ronnie Wood, who started off as the guitarist but then switched to bass, having thieved one from a West End instrument shop for the purpose. (Apparently he went back and paid for it as soon as he could afford to, bless him.) Woody was a good player but he was also an incredibly easy person to have around and it’s possible I sensed his charm might come in handy in a band shaped by Jeff’s volatility. Jeff, however, was an exacting employer and was constantly changing the band. Even Woody found himself handed his P45 on at least two occasions that I can remember, for sundry musical misdemeanours in the workplace. And Jeff got through drummers at an alarming rate. For a while the job was Micky Waller’s, my old pal from Steampacket, and for another, relatively stable phase the job was Aynsley Dunbar’s, but you never really knew, from show to show, who would be sitting behind you when you turned round.

  Is Jeff the main basis for the character of Nigel Tufnel, the guitarist in the spoof documentary This Is Spinal Tap? I can’t say for sure, beyond noting that Jeff, too, has an extensive guitar collection which no one is allowed to touch or even look at. But the writers must surely have got the idea of the ever-changing drummer from the Jeff Beck Group.

  The band’s first gig, at Finsbury Astoria in London on 3 March 1967, gave no indication that the Jeff Beck Group would ever amount to much. Indeed, it was pretty much your textbook example of a 24-carat disaster. We had been booked, far too soon, onto a package tour, supporting the Small Faces and Roy Orbison, both of whom had had big hits by this time and could pull a sizeable audience. One number into our badly under-rehearsed show, some unseen hand pulled out a plug backstage and silenced us. An act of mercy, probably, although Beck (in a way which was very Jeff) always suspected sabotage by the Small Faces, and in particular Ian McLagan, the keyboard player, because it was exactly the kind of thing he would have taken enormous delight in doing. Mac claims he wasn’t even in the venue at the time. Whatever, the power outage caused the stage manager to drop the curtain – much to the surprise of Ronnie Wood, who was standing directly underneath it at the time and was almost killed by about half a ton of falling velvet (because, let me tell you, in those days a curtain was a curtain). It was while we were backstage, getting the power restored, that I noticed I had spent the entire opening number with my flies
undone.

  We went out again, this time with my trousers on properly, but it didn’t get any less shambolic and, as a review in the Melody Maker rather gently put it, we ‘created a very poor impression’. The audience was there to see Orbison and the Small Faces, and our false start pretty effectively killed off any interest they may have mustered. Jeff’s response – as so often in a moment of doubt – was to sack the drummer, Roger Cook, which was a bit of a shame because his dad had bought him a new kit especially. Jeff’s second response was to pull the band off the tour and stick us all back in a rehearsal room until we could make a noise that was publicly acceptable. He also began inviting me and Ronnie to his flat in Surrey for long listening sessions, where, doing our best to ignore Jeff’s big, old, smelly Afghan hound called Pudding, we would spend hours just listening to music for inspiration and courage – anything from original electric bluesmen like Jimmy Reed through to Motown pop acts like the Four Tops. The idea of finding an outlet in which I could combine my love of Muddy Waters with my love of soul vocalists like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and Levi Stubbs was inspiring to me and seemed genuinely innovative.

  In due course we emerged again, re-emboldened, and set off round Britain and the usual haunts. We were guaranteed to attract a high level of public interest by the presence of Jeff – though that interest was quite often initially suspicious of me. Jeff had his fans, guitar-worshippers who would come to the shows to stand and study his fingers, and they were highly protective of Jeff and given to wondering why he was hanging out with this relatively unknown high-voiced singer. Fair play to Jeff, though: he stood up for me. Confronted in an interview with the suggestion that I was ‘too camp’ to be working with a serious rock guitarist, Beck issued the following resounding denial: ‘He’s not camp. Campish, maybe.’