by Rod Stewart
In the mid 1970s, when I had moved into my first really big house, in Windsor, I bought the Lamborghini Espada, which was a four-seater and had an eight-track cartridge player, and there were two or three further Miuras after that. Jeff Beck would always sneer at my Lambos and Ferraris. His taste was for hot rods, which he would build and rebuild himself, in proper grease-monkey style. I always found them rather ugly, though, with those stupid wheels on the back, and the fat exhaust pipes and lightning stripes. Give me a Lambo, any day.
When I moved to America in 1975, I thought about buying a Corvette but ended up getting a Shelby Cobra. Now, that was a maniac’s car. I couldn’t keep it on the road. I had to put big bags of sand in the boot to stop it sliding into buildings.
I was rather relieved to go back to Lamborghini with the Countach; a big, slabby, angular thing, with scissor doors that lifted up and then out, I had a couple of those to keep me going through the mid to late 1980s, and drove them like a fair old idiot.
Astonishingly, though, I’ve only had a couple of proper accidents, both in Los Angeles. The first took place in a grey Lamborghini Miura on Sunset Boulevard in the early hours of one morning in 1982. Alana was in the car. We were, as I recall, stoned out of our tiny minds. Somewhere near the point where Tower Records used to be, somebody turned across me in a pick-up truck. The Lambo basically slid right under it, back as far as its roof, so that the view out of my windscreen was entirely filled by the underside of this truck.
The driver of the pick-up truck got out and I began to panic slightly because he was enormous – a mountain of a man with a long, bushy beard, like one of the guys out of ZZ Top. Maybe he was one of the guys out of ZZ Top. Anyway, whoever he was – joy of joys – I realised he was stoned. And he said, ‘I think we’d both better get out of here quick, don’t you?’ I said, ‘You’re absolutely right, my friend. See you later.’ So we extracted our cars and went our separate ways. Extraordinarily, the Lambo had suffered only minor denting.
The second accident occurred when, driving like a madman through the hills, I took a Lambo up an embankment and got stuck under the wire around a tennis court. That’s a very Beverly Hills kind of accident. I had to reverse the car back, and there was this terrible teeth-edge noise as the wire left a perfect trail of scratches down the bonnet.
Incredibly, I’ve only been car-jacked once. This, too, was on Sunset Boulevard, in April 1982. I part owned an empty building that was going to be turned into a restaurant – although the project never came together – and in the meantime I was using the place as a lock-up for storage. I drove down there at ten one morning in a black Porsche Turbo Carrera. With me was Kimberly, my eldest child, who was then only two.
I parked outside, let us both in and, leaving the front door to the building ajar, set off down the corridor to the room where my stuff was. As I stood unlocking that second door, the front door was pushed open and a figure came in. He was just a silhouette, because of the sunlight behind him, but I could see he was pointing a gun. When he got closer, I noticed he was sweating and shaking. He was saying, ‘Gimme the keys, gimme the keys. Back up against the wall and gimme the keys.’
So, obviously, I waited until he was near enough and then, using a signature kung fu move taught to me by the masters in Peking in 1972 . . .
Oh, all right. I handed him the keys immediately, and also my wallet, saying, in as light a tone of voice as I could muster while thinking of the safety of my precious two-year-old daughter, ‘Here you go, mate, no problem here, we’re backing up, take the keys and the wallet, you go and have a good time.’ And he grabbed the stuff out of my hand and ran back out the door.
Huge relief descended – although it suddenly occurred to me that it was terribly silent outside. No engine noise. No sound of a stolen Porsche driving off. A minute later, our friend with the gun returned.
‘I can’t start it.’
Well, fair play: some of those Porsches are tricky if you don’t know how. It’s not just a key-in-the-ignition job. You have to depress the clutch and press the start button.
So out I went at gunpoint to help this man start my Porsche so he could steal it. This little part of the drama was witnessed by someone in a hairdresser’s opposite, who called the police. They picked the guy up about eight hours later and found my Porsche about three months after that, stripped of absolutely everything.
The Porsche was a mild aberration, though. Mostly I’ve stuck with Italian cars, for the beauty of them. In 2002 I bought an Enzo Ferrari to use in England. I have always enjoyed the driving experience more in England than in America. I especially love driving around London, where, incidentally, I can find almost any place you care to name, as long as I start from St John’s Wood. But I had to get rid of the Enzo. Drawing attention to yourself is one thing, but that car was ridiculous. Only 400 of them were ever made, and every time you came back to it there would be a crowd gathered round it and you were forever having to clear frenzied car lovers out of the way just to get back into the driving seat.
I was better off with the Ferrari Testarossa and the red Lamborghini Diablo, and in 2009 I bought myself a pale-blue Murciélago – still in love with the marque, still drawn to the pleasures a smart car can bring. But I’m a very much calmer kind of driver these days, and I can remember exactly the moment when that calming down happened. It was on holiday in Spain with Penny in 2004 and I was hurtling us down a mountain in a Ferrari F50 – showing off, frankly. As we took a blind corner, I was confronted by the nightmare scenario: a lorry coming the other way in the middle of the road. I somehow found a gap and we slipped through, just grazing the wing mirror. But it felt like a warning.
As you get older, you don’t feel as precise with your driving as you once were. These days, if it’s a tight spot, I have no qualms at all about getting out and leaving Penny to park it. She’s better at that than I am. Altogether I don’t drive as much as I used to, nor as fast. It dawned on me eventually: I’ve got a lot to lose. Too much to lose.
CHAPTER 8
In which our hero finally knuckles down and releases some rather fine recordings and then manfully weathers the consequent storm of praise and money. But not before a drummer has been rudely cast out on the street and a song called ‘Maggie May’ has almost been thrown away for not being up to much.
THE ALBUMS I made for Mercury Records between 1969 and 1974 were my coming of age. They represented the first occasions I took the talent I had, and found a channel for it that felt absolutely right. They were the point at which I stopped mucking about and finally stood up as a singer, and also as a songwriter. And they’re on sale in the foyer during the intermission, ladies and gentlemen, so do avail yourselves if you haven’t already.
Within the record industry towards the end of 1969 there was still, I think, by and large, a sense that I had something to offer. At the same time, a few people started to have creeping doubts, and you could hardly blame them. I was twenty-four, going on twenty-five – and even Paul McCartney had said he would pack it in if he hadn’t made it by the age of twenty. I had been knocking around for the best part of seven years. The Beatles had come and, to all intents and purposes, gone in that time. The Rolling Stones, whom I had peered at curiously in smoky pub backrooms and then supported at the London Palladium, had risen up and marched off in search of global domination. Every band I had been in had crumbled, for one reason or another. I had had singles out with major labels, sung on television in the biggest outlets of the day, and died a magnificent death with my boots on every time. Decca Records had recently declared that, although they liked my voice, they weren’t sure that I was ‘current’. With these various unsightly stains and pockmarks on my CV, there would have been justifiable scepticism about whether I would ever properly amount to anything. To this extent, I had to reckon, at the back of my mind, that the offer from Mercury Records to go into a studio and make an album of my own was a last shot at the big time. Screw this up and who knows? It would probably be cruise sh
ips for ever after.
However, I wasn’t able to hurry into anything. Nine months passed between Lou Reizner signing me, in 1968, and me going into the studio to begin work, because I was still busy with the Jeff Beck Group. The first Mercury album was eventually recorded in a small window just before what would prove to be the band’s final tour of America. And in I went, with the instruction to compile, sing and produce an entire long-playing record. Incredible, really, that I would be entrusted with a project as broad as that. I was so naïve about the process; yet I seemed to go into it nervelessly, instinctively, which I guess you need to be naïve to do. I was still confident in my voice; confident that I knew, not just how to sing a song, but how to occupy it, make it my own. That confidence had grown through those years of singing with Long John’s bands – with the Hoochie Coochie Men and Steampacket – and had crystallised in the Jeff Beck Group. I think I now understood that when I sang a song it didn’t come out sounding like a copy of something that had come before. I was blessed with distinctiveness. The voice had its own character, and it was a character – as I knew from taking it onstage so much – that spoke directly to people. With that first album I was out, above all, to prove myself as a singer. As for the production of the record – well, we’d just have to see, wouldn’t we? I had sat there while Mickie Most produced the Jeff Beck Group, seen him, during the recording of the Beck-Ola album, say vague things like, ‘Can we try something with the bass?’ and thought to myself, in a callow, twenty-something kind of way, ‘How hard is that job, really?’
Anyway, I wasn’t going to be entirely alone. Lou Reizner was going to be along in a hand-holding role. Indeed, Reizner is credited as co-producer on my first two albums for the label. But I don’t remember him doing all that much in terms of directing the music. He had a collection of classic Rolls-Royces and would casually turn up at the studio in one of them. He was one of the sweetest men on earth, but he wasn’t exactly a roll-your-shirtsleeves-up type of producer. And he certainly didn’t do much on the second album: for a fair amount of the time that we were in the studio, Reizner was over in America, attending his brother’s wedding. But even on the first album my recollection is that he essentially sat to one side and simply supervised. Maybe if the whole thing had started going pear-shaped, he would have intervened. But it didn’t, and as a result I think of both those albums as having been produced by me.
Handed the task of assembling a band of suitable musicians, I mostly got my mates in: Ronnie Wood, obviously, for bass and guitar, Ian McLagan from the Small Faces for piano and organ. Mac was a scruffy art student who had been on the scene since the early days of going to Eel Pie Island and was a handy player. And I brought in Micky Waller, who was in Steampacket and who had briefly taken his turn in the revolving door for drummers in the Jeff Beck Group.
Micky was the only person I knew who could somehow hold down a regular job as a session drummer without ever seeming to be in possession of a drum kit. He would turn up at the studio with a fag in his hand, his dog (Zak, a boxer) and a tuning key and nothing else. (It’s Zak, incidentally, who can be heard barking on ‘Sweet Little Rock ’N’ Roller’ on the Smiler album.) Drums would have to be rustled up for him – begged off a band down the hall or borrowed from a local music shop. This was still happening two whole albums later, in 1971, when we recorded ‘Maggie May’. On the afternoon that song was taped, we had managed to find Micky some drums, but no cymbals. All the cymbal crashes had to be overdubbed another day, when cymbals were finally available. Would Elvis have put up with that? I somehow doubt it.
But Micky was worth it. He was a great drummer, the sole licensed purveyor of the ‘Waller wallop’ as it used to be called. He was also more than commonly vulnerable to a wind-up – and it’s always good to have someone like that in on a session, for general mood-enhancing purposes in times of duress. One day I sent Micky into the sound room to record a tambourine part, and then told him over the talkback that it wasn’t sounding quite right.
‘Maybe we should try another room, Micky,’ I said. ‘For the ambience.’
So, long extension leads were found and the microphone was set up downstairs in reception. Another ‘take’ ensued, with a slightly confused receptionist looking on.
‘Nah, still not quite right, Micky,’ I said. ‘What about trying it out in the street?’
So there’s Micky Waller on the pavement on Lansdowne Road in Holland Park, headphones on, bashing a tambourine in front of a microphone while pedestrians step round him and the traffic goes by. He never twigged until we called him back in and he found us rolling on the floor with laughter.
After the Jeff Beck Group, Micky had joined a band called Steamhammer, whom I had been to see at the Marquee, and I had been really impressed by that group’s guitarists, Martin Pugh and Martin Quittenton, so I got them in to play on the album. It was a tight little unit, all in all.
That first record took a week and a half to make, partly in the studio at Lansdowne Road and partly at Olympic Studios in Barnes, in south-west London. Lansdowne Road wasn’t the most sumptuous of recording facilities. In fact it was a bit dull and shabby. But it had been good enough for Lonnie Donegan in years gone by, so it was good enough for me. When we were recording, I liked to be in the sound room with the band, walking around with a microphone in hand, so that I could look them in the eye, interact with them – perform with them, basically. I think it slightly startled the engineer, who was more used to having the singer isolated behind screens, or in an entirely separate vocal booth. I remember hearing how Frank Sinatra had once been parked by an engineer behind a screen in a recording studio and he had made them take it down. In order to sing, he needed to feel the sound of the orchestra hit him in the chest. I guess this was my own version of that.
I was at liberty to choose the material that I wanted to record. I went straight for some old favourites: ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’, the traditional folk song from that first Bob Dylan album that I had been fixated on in 1962; and Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. I think I wanted to show that, despite the recent heavier tendencies witnessed in the Jeff Beck Group, I was still a folkie at heart. Those were songs I had been singing for years. At the same time, I chose to cover the Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’. I say ‘chose’ – it was entirely an accident. Originally, we were starting to work up a version of Little Richard’s ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, but for no particular reason I started singing ‘Street Fighting Man’ over the top of it, and we took it from there. In retrospect, though, there was a point to it. I loved that Stones’ song to bits, but it always frustrated me that you couldn’t hear the words better. The lyrics are brilliant, but they get chewed up a bit in the noise. It was nice to do an arrangement of the song that brought the words to the front. And was sung by a proper singer. (Only joking.)
And then there was ‘Handbags and Gladrags’, a song which was to become a real item for me. A year earlier, in 1968, when Immediate Records had decided to become the latest in the line of record companies to fail to have a hit single with me, they had packed me off to see Mike d’Abo, who was the singer with Manfred Mann and a very smart musician and composer. Mike had been to Harrow and Cambridge, so probably thought of me as some terrible kind of oik. He had already written ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ by then, and I was obsessed with it. It had this fabulous, melancholy melody. Whenever I was round his house, near Marble Arch, I would ask him to play it for me. In fact, I think he got slightly fed up with me asking. The problem was, he had already promised the number to Chris Farlowe, another Immediate act, and so for the single I ended up getting fobbed off with a much less imposing ballad called ‘Little Miss Understood’. During the ensuing recording for that Immediate release, Mike, who did the production, put my back up by asking me if I would mind clearing my throat to get rid of the frog in it. I had to say, ‘Oi, that isn’t a frog. That’s my voice.’ ‘Little Miss Understood’, true to form, crashed and burned in a raging storm of indifference from the
radio stations.
Anyway, I now got my chance to record ‘Handbags’ and to do it the way I wanted, and Mike agreed to help. We transposed the song from G up to B flat to better suit the relative height of my range. I was determined that there should be woodwind on it because that was what I had always heard around the song in my head, so the night before the session Mike worked until four in the morning scoring some woodwind parts.
To the intense irritation of Mike, when I came to record the vocal I changed the big line at the end of the chorus. As Mike wrote it, the line was:
‘The handbags and the gladrags that your granddad had to sweat so you could buy.’
I changed that to:
‘The handbags and the gladrags that your poor old granddad had to sweat to buy.’
It was a little shift, but the sort of thing that would drive you nuts if you were the writer. I just liked the reference to ‘poor old granddad’ and found it easier to sing that way.
And then there were my own songs – four of them: ‘Blind Prayer’, ‘Cindy’s Lament’, ‘I Wouldn’t Ever Change a Thing’ and ‘An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down’. I wasn’t a conventional songwriter by any means and I had an unconventional method of going about it. I had ideas for riffs and chord progressions in my head and I would explain them to the band and get the band playing them in the studio and shape the music that way. And then we would record the band and I would take the tape away and play it over and over until I had a melody and some lyrics for it.
But, Christ, I found writing lyrics so hard. I liked narrative in a song. The best aspect of the blues, the best aspect of Dylan – for me, in both cases, it was the storytelling. But when it came to writing those stories for myself, I would rather have done almost anything else. Even the prospect of slamming my fingers repeatedly in a filing cabinet would have seemed marginally preferable to sitting down and coming up with some verses and a chorus.
