Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  In California, Woody and I had our encounter – it was almost statutory by this time – with the fabled Plaster Casters, Cynthia Albritton and her assistants, friends of Frank Zappa who had taken it upon themselves to preserve the fellated penises of rock stars in plaster of Paris. As I recall, the approach was very businesslike. They came to our hotel, bringing with them, in a bag, autographed samples of previously cast appendages, which they solemnly put out on a table for inspection: plaster phalluses of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Burdon were the two authenticated samples offered for our approval, as I recall. And then the girls offered to ready us for casting, should we wish to be thus commemorated. Obviously it would have been a pleasure and an honour. However, Woody and I took a look at the rather challengingly splendid specimens on the table before us, considered for a moment the slightly more modest scale of our own endowments, and said, ‘Hmm. Nah, I don’t think so, thank you.’

  From my and Woody’s point of view, these adventures were very bonding and it’s not difficult to see how, as our friendship grew, and our catalogue of shared larks expanded, Jeff would have come to feel alienated by us, or excluded from our mini-gang, and possibly even slightly threatened by it. The division would sometimes be visible, even as we performed. On one side of the stage there would be Jeff, going about his serious, guitar-playing business, in jeans and an unfussy shirt; on the other there would be Woody and me, a bundle of crushed velvet and bell bottoms, big crosses round our necks, pratting about.

  Jeff, for his part, was a perfectionist. If he felt you hadn’t been quite ‘on it’ in a gig, he would have no hesitation about raising it with you afterwards in a confrontational post mortem. Of course, these headmasterly scoldings only had the effect, again, of bringing out the schoolboy in me and Woody, and reinforcing our anarchic alliance.

  As I’ve said, Jeff was no ‘bread head’. Money didn’t concern him in the slightest. It was all about the music, as far as he was concerned. That’s what his mind was full of and that’s what he was determined to get right. Which is, of course, a highly admirable approach to take. But it made him a hopeless group leader. He appeared unconcerned about how the band’s financial affairs were being run and about staying on top of things on behalf of his musicians. On tour in America, for instance, daily allowances often weren’t forthcoming from the tour manager. Woody and I were so hungry in New York on one occasion that we nipped into a deli and stole ourselves some food. I don’t think Jeff should have allowed a situation like that to develop, but he didn’t seem to believe it was any of his business. I never felt he was going to put an arm around someone and check they were all right. Sometimes he would hop in his limo and leave me and Woody to call a taxi. He was in his own world.

  Other people had to step in and look after us. Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend often took pity on Woody and me, in our hours of penury, and took us out for lunches and dinners. Indeed, her largesse extended to taking us both to bed one evening, lying between us and rummaging around in our underpants for a while, although I think consciousness of Hendrix’s famously generous endowment in the trouser area, as revealed to us by the Plaster Casters, may have slightly spoiled the pleasure in it for both of us.

  In 1969, with things getting ever more fractious and beginning to spiral downwards, Jeff kicked Woody out of the band because he felt he was complaining too much, which in turn had the effect of stretching my patience with the whole project. There was no fun in it without Woody. That said, a guy called Doug Blake came in to play bass, and had what was, in retrospect, an important influence on me. Not only did Blake take to the stage, no matter how hot it was, in a frock coat and a pair of fingerless mittens, he also had a trick of flipping his bass guitar in the air and catching it again, which would in turn prompt me, slightly competitively (not wanting to be upstaged by the bassist, of all people), to throw my microphone into the air and catch it – a tiny lob the first few times, and then higher and higher as confidence grew. It was the beginning of a whole new phase for my stage act: the opening of a whole new repertoire of movements.

  Our last American tour was a short jaunt up the East Coast in the summer of 1969, taking in the Fillmore East, where it had all begun, Maryland and the Newport Jazz Festival, and with the intention to end the trip at some outdoor event or other in upstate New York in August. On the eve of that last show the band was billeted in a hotel at JFK airport, the plan being to hop over to the event and back and fly out to London on the same night. But then the call came through. The gig wouldn’t be happening. Jeff had already flown out on the 5.30 p.m. flight that afternoon. Apparently he had got wind from somewhere of a rumour, which turned out to be false, that his missus was having an affair with the gardener, so he was quite keen to go home.

  The name of that festival we didn’t play: Woodstock.

  Ah, well. Seen one outdoor festival, you’ve seen them all.

  * * *

  In 1983, I bumped into Jeff in Los Angeles when he was doing some shows with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, and without any particular agenda really, and almost just for the hell of it, we went into a studio for a day to see what would happen. At Jeff’s suggestion, we recorded a version of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready’, the vocal on which came out rather nicely, if I may say so myself, and we had a minor hit with it as a single.

  I then asked Jeff to play a solo on the track ‘Infatuation’ for my Camouflage album, which came out in 1984. And on the back of that, we asked Jeff to come out on tour with us. The idea was that he would appear in the middle of the set and play an instrumental while I took a breather offstage and put my hair back in place. And then I would come back on and we would do ‘Rock My Plimsoul’ and ‘I Ain’t Superstitious’ from the Beck Group days, and then Jeff would stay on for ‘Infatuation’, ‘People Get Ready’ and a couple of others. The problem with this, from the outset, was that it all too obviously cast Jeff in a supporting role, which he was pretty much guaranteed to hate, however handsomely remunerated. The tour was set for seventy dates over four months. Behind the scenes, a lot of people were muttering and saying, ‘This is doomed – he won’t last two shows.’ But they were all wrong. He lasted three. And then he left, saying something about how the audience was all housewives, which was a little bit rude of the old scamp.

  Some fifteen years later, in 2009, with little or no contact in the interim, I got a call saying that Jeff was doing a show at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles and that he would love me to come down and maybe sing something. I went along to the soundcheck and we ran through ‘People Get Ready’. And then, that night, he started the song and I stepped out and sang it, and it was really fucking great, and by the end Jeff, bless him, was in tears and we gave each other a big old hug.

  And afterwards, because it had felt good, we talked about trying to do a blues album together – a contemporary blues album. We talked about a few songs and even went through a few keys to set them in. And then Jeff went away and made some demos, and I didn’t like any of them. And I went away and made some demos, and Jeff didn’t like any of those. All this was happening while I was preparing to sign a new record deal with Universal, who were less than enthusiastic about the idea of a contemporary blues album and wanted me to commit instead to a country album, a Christmas album and an album of new songs. Jeff felt he’d wasted his time. We haven’t spoken since. I sent him an email saying, ‘Let’s go back to the drawing board. Keep the faith.’ But I heard nothing back. I sent him another email at Christmas in 2011, wishing him and his family well. Again, nothing. It seems when Jeff gets the hump, he gets the hump. Maybe we’re too headstrong now to work together, in any case. Which is a shame because there’s nothing like it – Beck’s guitar and my voice.

  However, I’m glad we didn’t play Woodstock. Woodstock made quite a few people’s reputations, but at the same time it rather set them in stone. It was hard to slip away from your image as ‘an act that appeared at Woodstock’.

  And that would have been the worst moment for me t
o get typecast because things had just started opening up interestingly. After a Jeff Beck Group show in Los Angeles, in the lobby of the Hyatt International Hotel, Lou Reizner, the head of Mercury Records for Europe, had approached me. And Reizner had said, ‘Hey, Jeff, fucking great show, man.’

  Actually he didn’t. But he did ask me if I would be interested in signing a deal for a solo album. I said I would. My asking price? £1,300: the cost of a brand-new, yellow, twin-seater Marcos sports car.

  DIGRESSION

  Another digression, in which our hero recounts his love of the automobile, recalls some of his adventures behind the wheel and remembers the time he helped someone steal his own Porsche.

  The truth about me and cars is that, mechanically speaking, I don’t really know one end from the other. They keep asking me to go on Top Gear, but I’m worried they’re going to start talking to me about camshafts and drivetrains and using words like ‘torque’, at which point I’d be lost.

  I’ve always loved cars, though: driving them, the look of them, the messages they send, the way they make you feel. And there were very few points in the formative years of my career where the desire to own a particular car wasn’t a major motivating factor. Sometimes it was the motivating factor. That was the ethos I grew up with: work hard, save up, buy the car you wanted. So I did.

  As I’ve already mentioned, the whole time I was with Long John in the Hoochie Coochie Men, I was saving for an MG Midget – the first car I really had my heart set on. This was 1964, when I was nineteen. Price new: £430. I was stashing cash away in a box in the kitchen when I came home from gigs, and I had got up to £360, tantalisingly close to the target, when I got the box down from the top of the cupboard one day and found it was empty. It turned out my dad had used the money to settle a bill from the tax man. Inevitably I was pretty upset and angry about it. He could have asked. At the same time, I could see that it was somewhat irrelevant for me to be saving for a car while my dad was struggling to pay important bills. At least I had proved to Dad that I could earn some useful money. He had been through a period of wondering if I ever would.

  So the MG Midget plan went to the wall, and it wasn’t until 1967, when I was with the Jeff Beck Group, that I felt flush enough to get my first car: a second-hand Mini Traveller with the old basket-weave-type panelling on the side and sliding rear windows. This was much to the relief of Pete Saunders, one of Jeff’s roadies, who had the job of driving me and the similarly car-free Ronnie Wood all over London, and was growing tired of it. If Pete wasn’t available after gigs, a tactic of Ronnie’s and mine was to find girls in the audience who would give us a lift home. But mostly the taxi duties fell to Pete, who was so keen to be shorn of them that when I told him I hadn’t yet passed the driving test (I had only had lessons up to that point), he volunteered to take it for me.

  In the days before photographic licences, this was a fairly simple deception to pull off. So, one morning, Pete set off to the test centre, signed in as Mr Roderick Stewart of Highgate and took my test. And I passed, I’m pleased to say. To this day I have never taken a driving test in Britain. (Note to the authorities: I took a driving test in California, upon my emigration to America in 1975, which in turn qualifies me to drive in Britain. I’m completely legal now, is what I’m saying.)

  So I bought the Mini, and Pete was happy, and so was I – extremely happy. There’s nothing like the feeling of owning your first car. It spells freedom. For me, in the ranks of the great breakthroughs of growing up, car ownership is right at the top. Forget drinking and shagging. They’re great, but driving makes everything available. So now I could head down to Marble Arch and pick up Sarah Troupe from her rather fancy apartment and take her out for the evening. And, later, drive home drunk. (Shocking to relate, but we did an awful lot of drunk driving in those days – and, worse still, thought almost nothing of it. Inconceivable now.)

  I used to look after that Mini so well. I put black paint on its tyres and attached a little GB sticker to the back to cover up a small patch of rust. And I wired two enormous speakers to the radio and stood them on the back seat, where they remained perfectly happily until you put your foot on the brake and the whole lot slid onto the floor, forcing you to reach round and stuff them back again. Today’s children would be baffled, but getting audible music of any kind into a car in the 1960s and early 1970s was a Herculean struggle: a constant battle with portable cassette players that wouldn’t play loudly enough and tape machines that jumped and skipped when you went over bumps and chewed your music to pieces. A nightmare.

  Of course, I realised in due course that, even with big speakers on its back seat, a Mini Traveller wasn’t exactly a four-wheel babe-magnet. So I took a big step up with my next car and bought, circa 1968, a white Triumph Spitfire: a proper twin-seat sports car, with fake mag alloy wheels, go-faster stripes down the side and a GT oil sticker on the back. I trimmed it out inside by taking a manky old fox-fur coat and cutting it up to fit across the transmission hump and sticking squares of fur on the floor for mats. Beautiful. It was like sitting inside a taxidermist’s workshop.

  Woody had an old Lotus at this time, and we thought we were the business, driving around together. If I had a girl with me, I would pull the choke out at traffic lights, flood the engine a bit, then bung the choke back in when the lights changed and leave everyone standing. Mind you, one time I tried to do this I revved the car so hard that one of the fake alloys sprang off and rolled away into the gutter. There are very few things as humiliating as having to get out at the lights, pick your fake mag alloy up and put it in the back of the car.

  Me and my mate Ewan Dawson, who shared my love of cars and their effects, worked out pretty quickly that there was no point driving to the pub in a car like a Triumph Spitfire if you were going to park it round the corner where nobody could see you get out of it. That entirely defeated the object. There was one pub down the Bayswater Road where the quality of the female clientele was exceptionally high, and Ewan and I would drive round and round the neighbouring streets for as long as it took until someone moved off so that we could park right outside. Some nights we started at six and didn’t get parked until eight-thirty. But it was worth it, because then we could make a proper show of getting out, going into the pub, coming outside again with a pint and drinking it leaning against the car. Terrible poseurs, yes. But these things were important. And why else would you own a Triumph Spitfire?

  My next car was a Marcos, bought in 1969 – and now I really was beginning to get into the big time. On tour with the Jeff Beck Group I carried the brochure for that car all over America, looking at it every night, longing for it. And so I fixed my solo deal with Mercury Records at the cost price of a new one: £1,300. It was a kit car, essentially, though I bought mine ready-made, not having the remotest inclination to fool around with spanners.

  I chose yellow with a white stripe up the middle: Jack the Lad colours. This was a car that you really had to lie down in – a proper shoulder-blades-to-the-tarmac kind of sports car. And shagging inside it would have been an absolute impossibility. Indeed, even preliminary groping was fraught with complexity on account of the height of the transmission hump between the two seats. It didn’t really go very fast: I think it had a 1600cc Ford Cortina engine in it, which wasn’t likely to blow your hair off. And mine had a leaky sunroof, so water would drip onto my suit when it rained. But it did look the bollocks – absolutely eye-catching.

  I traded it in for another Marcos eventually: a 2500 Ford V6, in silver grey. They were all the go in those days. Andy Fairweather Low, the singer with Amen Corner, had a purple one, as I recall. And then, in an epochal moment, around the spring of 1971, with the Faces doing well, and money coming in from my first solo albums, I lashed out on my first Lamborghini: a Miura S, with big air intakes on the bonnet and huge bug-eyed headlamps, and switches overhead, like in the cockpit of a plane. It was the beginning of long and expensive love affair with the brand.

  This Miura was a co
nsiderable investment: £6,500. Bear in mind that the first house I had just bought, in Muswell Hill, had only cost me £5,000. So, for a while there, my car was worth more than my house. And there was no off-road parking, so I had to leave it on the street. Small wonder I couldn’t sleep at night. If there was so much as a bump in the night I’d be up and at the window, checking the car. I kept it covered in plastic and even went so far as to put little red plastic cones around it, so that no one could park too close and put a dink in it.

  Don’t bother to ask me how it handled in the wet. I never took it out if it was raining. It was far too expensive for that.

  The Miura had only been launched in 1966, so it was a pretty prestigious car to have with a bit of a lad inside. However, it gave me more problems than every other vehicle I had owned combined. You needed leg muscles of steel to get the clutch down, and it was constantly over-heating. When Ewan and I planned trips, we had to factor in time for sitting at the side of the road, waiting for the engine to cool down. I loved the attention, though. And I loved the feeling that owning the car gave me: this is what I worked for, this is mine.

  Soon after this I acquired a white Rolls-Royce, just for the heck of it. It was while driving this car down Tavistock Hill one Sunday evening in 1971 that I heard on the radio that ‘Maggie May’ had gone to number one. At which point I turned round and went all the way back to my mum and dad’s house, 24 Kenwood Road, and gave them both a big hug to celebrate. Note how, before ‘Maggie May’ even, I had the money for a Roller and a Lambo. It shows you how much I saved up.