Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  For me, though, this was a massive learning curve. By contrast with the tight, instrumentally dense club bands I had played with so far, there was so much air in this group; a lot of room for me as a singer, space in which I could spread my wings. And there was a guitar player that would listen to me – and I’d listen to him and we would bounce off each other, which was what made it special. It was call and response between voice and guitar; none of it worked out in advance, just done by feel. Jeff never once played over me; he always sensed when I was going to come in, sensed when I was going to extend a vocal a little bit, knew when to step back and get out of the way, and then come in blasting. And I can’t think of another band that was doing that kind of thing at the time. It felt like something new and tremendously exciting.

  However, it was obvious that, in order to progress, this band needed some distinctive, original material – and not just ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, which, being Jeff’s big hit, we were obliged to play, though we took to distancing ourselves from it by performing it with silly hand gestures, dumb smiles and overenthusiastic vocals. (Woody and I were especially lackadaisical about it. Sabotage, you might call it.) Without original material, we would surely be doomed to burn out fast (which is exactly what happened). The right kind of music for this band was hard to find, though. There was nobody out there writing made-to-fit material for a rock guitar virtuoso teamed up with a would-be soul singer. Jeff wasn’t creative in the writing area. Woody and I, drawn on by the lure of cracking the code and coming up with a massive hit, had started to compose a few things together, mostly round at his mum’s tiny council house in Orpington, in the sitting room in front of the electric fire. (Money was tight: we were allowed to switch on one bar only.) But the songs Woody and I came up with in those early times tended to owe more to simple folk music than to futuristic heavy blues.

  Our creative partnership got off to an inauspicious start. The first time we tried songwriting, Ronnie and I simply sat there one afternoon, with the fire on, each of us with a pad of yellow foolscap paper and a pencil, and waited. For some reason it didn’t occur to us to get a guitar out. We just sat and hoped for words. An hour later: nothing. Not a syllable. Ronnie opened a bottle of wine, and over the next hour we gradually drained it. Still nothing. Blank sheets in front of us. After about two and a half hours, Ronnie’s mum came in and found us both lying on our backs on the carpet in silence, next to an empty bottle, still waiting for inspiration to come. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you two aren’t going to be much of a threat to the Beatles, are you?’

  Hence, when the Jeff Beck Group album Truth came out, in the summer of 1968, it was basically a record of cover versions: Willie Dixon’s ‘You Shook Me’, Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘I Ain’t Superstitious’ – even Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River’, which was my very cheeky suggestion and on the recording of which Keith Moon bashed a timpani. Otherwise, we took old blues songs – Buddy Guy’s ‘Let Me Love You Baby’, BB King’s ‘Gambler’s Blues’ – twisted them around, musically and lyrically, made them our own and credited them to ‘Jeffrey Rod’.

  Virtually the whole thing was recorded at Abbey Road in two two-day sessions in May 1968. You didn’t hang about in those days. You went in at eleven in the morning and worked through to midnight. It was the first LP-length collection of songs that I had been involved in. I still rate that record really highly. There’s some great singing and playing on it, and it had an influence on a lot of stuff that came shortly after – particularly if you listen to Led Zeppelin. John Bonham and Jimmy Page came to see us play all the time in those early days, when they were getting the New Yardbirds together. They were trying to do the same thing that we were doing – and they managed it, and then some. Jeff retains a grudge, I think, because they took the nucleus of what we had and made it more commercial. The Jeff Beck Group could in due course have been Led Zeppelin, frankly, except for the crucial detail that they were a step ahead of us in coming up with original material.

  At the time, though, I merely noted that Truth was credited, simply, to ‘Jeff Beck’, with no mention of the ‘Group’ – for which I cursed Mickie Most, rather than Jeff. It felt odd to be the singer in a band and not even be pictured anywhere on the sleeve, but that was the situation and I just had to try and be grown up about it.

  In June 1968, we climbed aboard a BOAC plane at Heathrow and set off to tour America. At last: the promised land. Beck had been there numerous times by then, and as the star of the show was casually ensconced in luxury in the first-class cabin. But it was all new to me and Woody as we squeezed into economy and taxied creakily down the runway in the direction, finally, of the country that we had read about and talked about and thought about and dreamed about since childhood. Plus there was a trolley! And it served drinks! Free drinks! An awful lot of cheering and shouting ensued. We thought life couldn’t get much better.

  No one ever forgets their first view of Manhattan, rising into the sky ahead of them, nor their first drive up its concrete canyons. Woody and I were in ecstasy – possibly even silenced momentarily, gawping at the scale of it all. In terms of architectural grandeur, it didn’t have much in common with Orpington.

  We had been planning all along that, as soon as we had checked into the hotel, which was at around lunchtime, we would make a pilgrimage to the Apollo Theater in Harlem: the home of the musicians that we had worshipped for so long from so far away. We were pretty naïve about it. We didn’t even think it might be a dangerous place for a couple of unaccompanied white boys to go. One taxi driver ran his eye up and down us, in our swinging London finery, with our combed-up hair and highly visible jet lag, and blankly refused to take us. But another drove us up there, and probably because of the way we looked – because we were unmistakably musicians or performers of some kind – nobody was bothered about us. In fact, we felt welcome. We walked under the marquee that spread the width of the pavement, paid our entrance fees and saw an afternoon session, with Martha and the Vandellas on the top of the bill, after which we left in a state of enchantment.

  If you had told me, in our returning taxi cab that afternoon, that one day I would be back at the Apollo to sing on a bill that included Wilson Pickett, The Four Tops, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson and, indeed, Martha Reeves, I would have laughed so hard I would have paid the fare. Yet it came to pass – in 1985, for the ‘Motown Returns to the Apollo’ show, where I took the opportunity to kneel in adulation at the feet of James Brown. I was a very proud man that night, as I am sure you will understand.

  The day after my and Woody’s adventure on 125th Street, we played our opening show: the first of a four-night stint at the Fillmore East, on Second Avenue in the East Village. The promoter Bill Graham had recently converted this old theatre into a 2,700-capacity rock venue, an East Coast counterpart to the Fillmore that he was already running in San Francisco. We were due to go on after a band called Buzzy Linhart’s Seventh Sons. Backstage, Jeff began to explain an idea he’d had about joining the first two numbers together to give the show a more theatrical opening, but I wasn’t really listening to him because my attention had been drawn by an awful noise seeping through the dressing-room wall, as if cattle were being horribly tortured in an adjacent room. They weren’t, though. It was the sound of Buzzy Linhart and every single one of his Seventh Sons getting the mother and father of all boo-offs from 2,700 unimpressed New Yorkers.

  This didn’t do much to settle my nerves, which were already badly jangled by a number of factors, including the size of the venue (so much larger than the 200- to 800-capacity clubs we had been playing in Britain) and the worrying thought that I was about to perform, for the first time, in a country in which people were allowed to own guns.

  Most worrying of all, though, was the fact that, within the context of the whole ‘grungy Motown rock’ idea, I was, essentially, a white guy trying to sing like a black guy, and I was fairly sure, this being America, and specifically the Lower East Side of New York, that when the curtain went back the audien
ce would be revealed to contain some genuine black guys who might have some quite strong opinions about that kind of thing. (I was wrong on this count: the audience was almost completely made up of white, long-haired hippies.)

  So I sang the first lines of ‘I Ain’t Superstitious’ from a semi-crouching position behind the amps at the back of the stage. I wasn’t entirely hiding, you understand. I was just trying to look like I was busy doing something important and technical: changing a fuse, maybe, or fixing a plug. When the first verse passed off without a) a stage invasion by aggrieved blues purists, wanting their money and their music back, and b) noticeable gunfire, I found the courage to stand up and come forward into the lights.

  Whereupon we proceeded to blow the place apart. Absolutely destroyed it. Hammered them with colossal versions of ‘Rock Me, Baby’ and ‘You Shook Me’. The theatre went nuts. I looked across the stalls at one point and it was a churning sea of tossed hair, as far as the eye could see. I had never witnessed a reaction like it. I had certainly never been part of a band that generated a reaction like it. Encore after encore.

  And the reviews – my dear! The New York Times said, ‘They were standing and cheering for a new British pop group last night at the Fillmore East,’ and reported that ‘the British group upstaged, for one listener at least, the featured performers, the Grateful Dead of San Francisco.’

  The review further noted, ‘The group’s principal format is the interaction of Mr Beck’s wild and visionary guitar against the hoarse and insistent shouting of Rod Stewart.’

  Not sure about the ‘shouting’ there, but go on.

  ‘Their dialogues were lean and laconic, the verbal Ping-Pong of a musical Pinter play.’

  How about that? Mind you, the Pinter allusion was slightly lost on me at the time. I thought he played right back for West Ham.

  It was some gig, though. Blowing away the Grateful Dead in New York was an unimaginably good result, away from home. Even the grouchy old New Musical Express, back in England, was impressed, especially by me and Jeff. ‘The only possible description of their twofold dynamite,’ their writer said, ‘would be to suggest it’s like watching the brilliance of Jim Morrison teamed with Eric Clapton.’

  Backstage afterwards, a happy delegation from EMI Records came up to me in the green room.

  ‘Jeff!’ one of them said. ‘Fucking great show, man! And great guitar player you’ve got there.’

  Jeff looked on thunderously. For a moment, I thought he was going to deck him.

  Leaving aside the odd mix-up over who was who, America totally got the Jeff Beck Group. Audiences completely understood it – more quickly and more enthusiastically than people in Britain. We ended up touring America five times in total, staying out for two months, playing theatres and eventually massive festivals, which were the new burgeoning format for live rock. At an outdoor gig in the Poconos, we found ourselves on a bill with Jimi Hendrix, and Woody and Jeff joined him onstage for a jam. I, however, sat in the bus and sulked. It took a lot to get me to join in on a jam session. I never quite knew what I was meant to do. How’s a singer supposed to jam? Scat? I have never been comfortable with it.

  Mind you, one jam session that I did stick around for took place onstage at the Singer Bowl Music Festival in July 1969. The Singer Bowl was an open-air venue near Shea Stadium, in the borough of Queens. On the bill that time were Led Zeppelin, and while we were in the middle of a number called ‘Rice Pudding’, a perhaps over-refreshed John Bonham, Led Zep’s drummer, ambled onto the stage, grabbed hold of some drumsticks and joined in. The next minute, I look around and there’s people piling onto the stage from all corners: Jimmy Page; Robert Plant; Glenn Cornick, the bassist from Jethro Tull; Ric Lee, the drummer from Ten Years After; and Carmine Appice, the drummer from Vanilla Fudge, who were due on after us. So suddenly we’ve got four drummers, two guitarists, two bassists and two vocalists and we’re playing a version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ which only ends when Bonham performs a striptease, thereby earning himself an arrest for indecent exposure. Heady days.

  The other thing I remember about that Singer Bowl show was that the Edwin Hawkins Singers were on the bill. They were the gospel group that had the big late-1960s hit with ‘Oh Happy Day!’. Woody and I thought we would go up beside the stage and have a listen to them. The choir seemed to be about sixty-people strong. There were probably only about twenty of them before they had the hit, but now there were sixty. And as Woody and I looked across from the side we noticed that two of the guys in the back row, on the podium, weren’t singing at all but were in the middle of a card game. We wondered whether we should inform Edwin Hawkins that he was carrying passengers, but somehow the opportunity never arose.

  The second Beck Group album, Beck-Ola (you’ll need to be aware of the jukebox company Rock-Ola to get the pun), had been released the month before. It was recorded over a positively leisurely six days this time, but it still found us lagging behind the contemporary way of things by supplementing our own new material with covers (not one but two Elvis Presley hits, for heaven’s sake: ‘All Shook Up’ and the aforementioned ‘Jailhouse Rock’). Woody and I, along with Jeff, came up with a song called ‘Spanish Boots’ for which I wrote the lyrics – a load of old nonsense about monasteries and tapestries and putting your boots on. I cringe to think of it now. I mostly remember the sessions for a series of confrontations between Mickie Most, who was producing it, and an increasingly moody and reluctant Jeff.

  Still, even this slightly disappointing follow-up made number fifteen in the Billboard album chart. Yet somehow, despite the constant touring and the record making, money remained extremely scarce. The band members were badly treated by Beck’s management: Most and Peter Grant, who would later manage Led Zeppelin, and this accountant they had called Derek Nibb, which is a superb name for a pen-pusher, now I come to think of it. Ronnie and I would go up to Nibb’s office in London to get our wages and arrive at ten in the morning, and he would sometimes keep us sitting around and waiting until the afternoon before he paid us – just for the fun of it, as far as I could make out. The pair of us were always plotting dark acts of vengeance on Nibb and his office, but we never got round to them.

  Jeff was the star, so when we were in New York he stayed at the Waldorf Astoria on posh Park Avenue, while Woody and I would be installed a little way across town in the much cheaper Gorham Hotel. But that was OK. It was a rock ’n’ roll haunt at the time and you would always run into bands there: Cream, Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After. Janis Joplin, who was by no means a shy or retiring kind of woman, was always chasing Ronnie and me around the place, trying to shag one or the other of us, though without success. We were terrified of her and would hide behind the pot plant in the lobby until she had gone past.

  Six years later, in 1974, when we were on tour with the Faces, Ronnie and I went back to the Gorham for a visit. We were staying in more gracious circumstances at the Plaza by that time, but we thought we would pop in and have a look at the old place. And, just for a laugh, Ronnie asked at the desk if there was any mail for us. And then we stood there sniggering while the receptionist dutifully went away . . . and came back with a postcard, sent to me at the hotel six years earlier by my girlfriend of all those years ago, Sarah Troupe. Extraordinary.

  The American girls that I met on those first trips to America – the ones who came to the shows and then hung about with us backstage afterwards – struck me as more friendly, more open and more up for a laugh than girls in England, but not necessarily more promiscuous. They needed to be charmed and persuaded, though an English accent seemed to help. The problem was, the budgets for those Beck tours often only ran to a twin room for Ronnie and me, which could have been restrictive, from the point of view of entertaining female company. But we were ingenious enough not to let it become so. We created a modicum of privacy for each other by building a wall between the two beds out of suitcases and any conveniently loose hotel furniture, such as dressing tables, chairs or wardro
bes, converting the room into an ad hoc suite, or subdivided sex parlour.

  But then, in the dark, behind the screen, going about our fumbly business, the schoolboy gene would kick in and Woody would make a ridiculous noise, and I would make an even more ridiculous noise and then an escalating ‘ridiculous noise’ war would break out, culminating, frequently, in one or the other of us knocking down the barrier and burying the adjacent couple in a mound of luggage and chair legs. The extent to which our companions for the night found this as amusing as we did tended, I suppose, to vary. Frankly, in retrospect, to be a groupy attached to me or Woody on those nights, you would have needed the patience of a saint. Very often we got more pleasure out of each other than we did out of the girls.

  Another game we liked to organise was entitled ‘Wood & Stewart Operations’, for the purposes of which our shared room became a surgery and we became doctors, complete with toy stethoscopes and white gowns, ready to offer girls an examination and possibly even an operation. Many girls ran a mile in the other direction at this suggestion. Many, however, didn’t.

  Still, the availability of sexual companionship in America didn’t seem to stop us yearning for our girlfriends in England, the aforementioned Sarah Troupe and Krissy Findlay, who later became Woody’s first wife. Sarah and Krissy happened to be sharing a flat off the Fulham Road in London. Woody and I would split desperate, operator-timed, three-minute transatlantic phone calls – one of us mournfully sending our love and pleading our homesickness while the other sat by, counting off the minute and a half before grabbing the handset for their turn. The most cunning ruse of all, however, was to pull a girl who was prepared to take you home, perhaps to her parents’ house, and then, in a quiet moment, to avail yourself of the telephonic apparatus for a call to the girlfriend back in London at no cost to you personally. Devious? Perhaps. But it’s important to keep in touch.