*1. “I sincerely thought I was so complete”*In 1971, at 26, Rod Stewart thought he was an old man. He’d been working as a musician since his late teens. In the preceding three and a half years, he sang on six albums alone and he hadn’t attained the success he craved. As Stewart mentions in Rod, his 2012 autobiography, no one intended for rock’n’roll to be a career; Paul McCartney said he’d give up music if he hadn’t hit big by 20. All around Stewart, his peers—the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin—had become global icons. And 27 literally felt like death, because in the previous 18 months, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Janis Joplin had died at that age.
By almost anyone else’s standards, Stewart was doing very well. He had a solo record deal while singing for the Faces, the most hyped band in the UK. He owned a home in London and a brand-new Marcos GT two-seater. The unabating bacchanal of the rock’n’roll lifestyle suited his appetites. It wasn’t sufficient. He wanted to be a star.
Every Picture Tells a Story, Stewart’s third solo album, made him one. It’s the LP that launched him into a rarefied stratosphere of celebrity, the kind accompanied by wild rumors that sound like they were spread by the Marquis de Sade. But the opening six-minute title track doesn’t convey confidence, purpose, or craft—at least at first. Emphatic strums of G chords spangle up and down, in, through, and out the rich, hollow wood of a 12-string acoustic guitar. The winding melody lasts for a dozen seconds; the pluck of a string hangs there for a few more. Then the drums crash and a bold rasp shouts forth: “Spent some time feelin’ inferior, standin’ in front of my mirror.” Stewart sings the line declaratively, setting the scene and framing the perspective of an insecure young man. “Combed my hair in a thousand ways,” he continues, “but I came out looking just the same.”
The musicians—Ron Wood on bass, electric, and acoustic 12-string guitar; fellow Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan on organ; pianist Pete Sears; and drummer Mick Waller—seem as if they’re learning the song while they’re playing it. Nothing is in lockstep. Stewart foregrounds the acoustic guitar so that it punches through the speaker. “Every Picture Tells a Story” is in 4/4 time, but Waller bashes off-beat during the moments Stewart isn’t singing, a disorienting force that mirrors the inexperience and uncertainty of the narrator.
Our “hero” is a working-class lad whose father urges him to see the world. In three verses he sets off for Paris, Rome, and the “Peking ferry.” He gets arrested as a passerby at a protest in the first city, ends up a stinking vagabond in the second, and on his third sojourn has a magical night with a mysterious woman (more on that later).
It’s also fair to surmise that the narrator is Stewart. In the final verse, he presumably returns home while contemplating his adventures. In the first half, Stewart looks to the past, bemoaning his childishness and the women who spurned him. But in the second, he summarizes his state of mind, adopting a stance that will guide his future:
I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley, or Keats*'Cause it's all been said beforeMake the best out of the bad, just laugh it offYou didn't have to come here anyway*
Rod Stewart has arrived. He’s no wordsmith, but he’s fluent in common sense and good cheer. He’s in love with tradition, but not reliant on it. He’s an imp and a carouser unruffled by judgment and self-pity, a sentimentalist suspicious of nostalgia. And there’s something funny about a singer-songwriter reflecting on the travails of his life, as if he’s viewing it all from the vantage point of a wizened elder, when he’s only 26 years old.
The band seems to eventually figure out the song. They merge into a steady rhythm while Maggie Bell and Stewart sing the refrain, a smirking rhetorical question, soon accompanied by a chorus of others: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
It’s 1968 and Rod Stewart is 23 years old. As a teenager he was a talented soccer player who dropped out of school to go pro, but wasn’t quite talented enough to make the cut. He sought something more lucrative, so he opted for a career as a musician.
Even though he looked like, as Lester Bangs eloquently put it, “a horse with a rooster’s ratcombed haystack,” people in the UK music biz kept trying to make Stewart a success, to no avail. Between 1964 and 1967 Stewart was a member of, in order, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, Long John Baldry and the All Stars, Steampacket, and Shotgun Express with Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green, the last of which Stewart writes, “I don’t have especially happy memories of those months—and incredibly, there were at least eight of them.”
In all of these setups, Stewart was singing blues and R&B covers, just like he was in his fledgling solo career. His first single was for Decca, a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl,” and the label secured a performance on ITV’s musical variety show Ready Steady Go! It was awkward and unremarkable, so he headed to a pub in Soho to drink away his shame where a man approached him, sharing a striking physical and sartorial resemblance. They got sloshed and laughed about Stewart’s appearance on Ready Steady Go!, and thus began his lifelong friendship with Ron Wood, his most esteemed collaborator.
Flailing between projects, Stewart did have a minor brush with fame as the subject of a TV documentary about the mid-’60s mod scene, whereby he earned the title of “Rod the Mod.” Because he had public recognition and experience singing blues, he was a natural choice to become the frontman of a new group formed by Jeff Beck, one of the UK’s most famous guitarists, who’d recently been kicked out of the Yardbirds. Stewart persuaded Beck to hire Wood on bass and the first incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group was born. Credited to Beck only, their first album, Truth, came out in 1968.
Beck was a legendary guitarist in both the UK and U.S., so Truth reached No. 15 on the Billboard albums chart more or less automatically, and thanks to a successful stateside tour Stewart gained his first exposure to American audiences. Today, Truth is regarded as a progenitor of the supergroup stadium rock of the ’70s, where the length of solos and the heaviness of riffs and rhythms parallel the imperiousness and arrogance of the band. But crucially for Stewart, the album showcased his first songwriting efforts (alongside Beck) and provided a template for his earliest solo LPs: A few originals surrounded by covers.
Every Picture Tells a Story sticks to this formula—of its eight tracks, only three are originals. Stewart’s talent for interpretation is evident on “Seems Like a Long Time,” first written by Theodore Anderson for the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, whose construction leans on vocal harmonies and wah-wah guitar for a soft-rock, AM radio effect. Stewart slows the tempo to a crawl and transforms it into the bleary gospel song it always should have been.
“Seems Like a Long Time” is representative of something true of all Stewart’s output in the early ’70s—it sounds a lot like the Rolling Stones. And the equivalence is understandable, since no other outfit was compared to or pitted against the Stones more often than Stewart’s next band, the Faces.
In October of 1970, the Faces performed to an adoring audience of 3,500 people at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. As he wrote in his 1981 prankster quasi-fictional pop bio, Rod Stewart, Lester Bangs was at this show, which he praises as “a party.” At the end, the members wrapped their arms around each other and Stewart yelled into the microphone: “If you ask for one encore, you’re gonna have to take at least five!”
The Jeff Beck Group with Stewart and Wood lasted only 18 months, and once guitarist and lead songwriter Steve Marriott left the Small Faces, the band quickly pulled in Wood as a replacement. Stewart would sit upstairs in the rehearsal space listening to his friend’s new group, wondering when they would plead with him to join. For a while, the Small Faces weren’t interested, out of fear that a lead singer would overshadow them. But after a few jams with Stewart, everyone assented that his brambly crooning fit perfectly with their ramshackle approach.
The ’60s were over, and out of its ashes emerged indulgence, whether through the symphonic overtures of progressive rock, the narcissism of the singer-songwriter movement, or the lordly debauchery of hard rock. In each scenario, the connection between the artist and the fans grew distant.
The Faces were the earthbound corrective. Their live show had no pomp and circumstance, just five guys whose palpable joy exceeded everything but their bar tab. Night to night, the band were a sloppy mess, but if they weren’t overserved, they could turn an arena show into a packed basement. No group in the early ’70s was as endearing as the Faces, because the only approximation of the warmth they exuded is the sensation you get when you’re having a ball with your best friends.
