As you may have heard by now, Rod Stewart confirmed last week that all the surviving members of his old band, the Faces (including current Rolling Stone Ron Wood and former Who drummer Kenny Jones), are planning to reunite for at least a tour next summer.

Could this be a case of Rod redeeming himself? Well, perhaps. I did mention in an earlier post that the best thing Rod could do at this point in his career was record a quick album with Wood and a tight rhythm and horn section. This is probably the next best thing to that. It sounds, too, from Rod ’s quotes that he’s quite into this reunion idea; maybe he was even the driving force behind it.

But before you or I get too vibed about this, I do think it is necessary to temper everyone’s excitement. After all, the man is now in his 60s, more than 30 years past the last Faces recordings and tours. What will be heard in 2009 is simply not going to be more than a good approximation of what occurred in the early 1970s. While Rod can still hit the notes with the same regularity as his did back then, the tone, the texture, the feel and the soul are not going to be the same. The voice is there, but it’s changed, no buts about it. Anyone interested in seeing the outcome of this possible reunion has to — like most band reunions — hope for the best but expect much less. Better to be pleasantly surprised by what happens than to feel that what you’ve just experienced was yet another sad coda to a historic band and a waste of money.

A second point that needs to be considered is that, while Rod seems to be genuinely excited about this reunion, he has been genuinely excited about lots of other things in his musical career that haven’t turned out to be what we, as fans, wished for. In the last couple of decades we’ve heard very good things about albums like A Spanner in the Works or When We Were the New Boys, and while they may have been the most solid works he’s laid down in the studio during that period, they were far from the “returns to form”
that many Rod fans may have built them up to be.

Additionally, Rod seems to have rarely been one to complain about turns taken in his career. The bad taste that many fans of Rod’s work during the first decade-or-so of his career currently have is often built upon the notion of him having “sold out”. Unlike someone like Elvis Costello or David Bowie, who often changed the sounds of their recordings in a way that didn’t seem to always reflect popular trends (and especially in Bowie’s case, may have set some), Rod Stewart is seen as gravitating towards the middle of the road. Worst of all to some people, Rod seems to actually enjoy what he’s doing, even if it means the umpteenth packaging of The Great American Songbook.

But is that really Rod’s “fault”? No it’s not. Doing what he does gives him pleasure, and still gets him enormous crowds to this day, especially in Europe and South America. He (like all other rockers of the ’60s and ’70s) may no longer be able to chart singles on the Hot 100 , but his last batch of albums have charted as high in Billboard as any other period in his career. So, he must feel he’s doing something “right.”

In a way, the problem is with us: the fans. We feel we “own” Rod. This is something unique in the world of entertainment. We may buy the jersey of a sports hero, but often we’re just rooting for laundry and statistics. We may see all the movies of an actor or director, but with the exception of certain iconic stars, we don’t normally track down everything about them, including “bootleg” copies of audition tapes or foreign printings of their films. In music, however, I would guess that there are many more instances of people feeling-through the music-that they have not just a personal bond with the singer or band, but that we are “robbed” in a way when the artist goes in a direction we don’t like, or makes a what we consider to be a subpar record with material that doesn’t to their strengths. This definitely plays to the emotional power and intensity of music, and the interrelationship with fan to both the music, and ultimately its creator.

In a way, this promised Faces reunion is another test for those who adhere strictly to the belief that there is a distinct “classic” period in Rod Stewart’s career that he simply moved away from. For the “classic” fans, his forays into mainstream pop, disco, adult contemporary stylings and balladeering is really an abandonment of what he should be doing, rather than a natural career progression. What most of the “classic” fans-the ones who never got to experience “classic” Rod firsthand, live or on record release day-need to do at this moment is pull the reigns back on both their excitement and/or judgment at this news. It’s still a few months to go before this tour is supposedly going to take place. Tours fall through all the time, and quite a few propsed ones for 2009 will never happen just because of the current state of the global economy. But if it does go off without a hitch, you have to realize, no matter how hard it may be to convince yourself, that these shows will not contain a magic elixer to transform a senior citizen into a 23-year-old, and make him sing with the same fire and intensity you wish he could again.

If you can set both your fanasties and prejudices aside, and leave it at that, Summer of 2009 may bring you an hour or two of enjoyable live entertainment from The Faces. And then, if Rod goes straight back to making the kind of music “everyone at work can enjoy”, don’t get angry. After all, we can own the albums, but we can’t own the Mod.

The Faces – Stay With Me

The Faces – Rock Me

In “Broken Arrow,” like many of his performances discussed in this series, Rod once again gingerly walks the tightrope of his most obvious vocal impulses of this period — screaming and whispering — without tipping over the edge. In the original Rolling Stone review for Vagabond Heart, Don McCleese states that Rod “doesn’t quite connect” with the song, but I don’t agree. I think McCleese probably got sidetracked by two things about the recording — things that in my opinion actually show the strengths of Rod’s performance.

First of all, even with a rather generic power-ballad production that almost urges him to take it over the top, Stewart remains rather restrained, preferring to focus his emotions on providing the words with appropriate inflection, rather than just belting them. Notice for instance in the last chorus: how he delivers the steady rhythm of notes down the scale on the words “bottle of rain,” almost like the steady rhythm of rain itself. Likewise, the similar metaphor of “moving across the water” actually purveys a sense of motion. More than the arrangement, it is Rod’s vocal prowess here that makes the song his own.

That gets us to the second thing that I think critics have gotten sidetracked on regarding the song, and that’s the composer, Robbie Robertson. When Steve Pond reviewed Robertson’s self titled 1987 album-his first album since he had left The Band more than a decade before-he stated “Robbie Robertson’s voice is the only voice for these songs.” In 1991, the critical re-mythologizing of Robbie Robertson was still in effect (and would last through Robertson’s Storyville album that same year, before the reins were pulled back a little), and any performance that Stewart was going to give a Robertson song would then be critically held up to a version that already had its “perfect” voice. How could Rod win?

In fact, I’m surprised, given the ego-stroking he had been receiving, that Robertson even let Stewart record his song, given both Stewart’s less than stellar critical reputation, as well as the simple fact that Robertson is just a major dick. In fact, if you look up “major dick” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, I believe it has a picture of Robbie Robertson giving the finger to Levon Helm with one hand while calling in reservations at Nobu with the other. I imagine that if Stewart actually went to see Robertson in person about the song, it probably went something like this:

Rod Stewart: Hey Robbie, I…
Robbie Robertson: No.
RS: What?
RR: You can’t cover “Broken Arrow.”
RS: Why not?
RR: Because you’re Rod Stewart.
RS: What’s that got to do with it?
RR: You’ll ruin it. Haven’t you seen my reviews? People not only love my songwriting; they’ve finally come around and realized that I’m the only one who should have been singing my songs all along.
RS: Oh come on. I’ll put it out as a single. You’ll make lots of money.
RR: Will money pay for the embarrassment? What’ll I tell Marty Scorsese? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got courtside seats for the Knicks game.
RS: Oh, a sports fan? I happen to own my own football team…that’s soccer for you on this side of the pond.
RR: Well, what of it?
RS: Well, I also play for them sometimes….
[Rod turns away from Robbie, then flips, and launches an exquisite bicycle kick...right into Robertson's balls]
RS: How’s about that?
RR: (writhing in pain): Yeah…you make an excellent point…I look forward to hearing your version.

So to sum up: Stewart’s performance on “Broken Arrow” is really good. Stewart’s soccer skills: Probably quite good. Robbie Robertson’s balls: hopefully quite sore. See you next week!

I actually have this on cassingle (or at least I had it). I ran out and bought it after I saw Rod debut the single in the US on an episode of Saturday Night Live. As I recall, I was immediately struck by how joyous he seemed during the performance, and how well that lifted the song up. The recorded version is a bit more subtle than the SNL one: Rod gives a restrained, straight-ahead performance that, interestingly, leans towards his more ballad-related deliveries even with the bright, fast-paced tempo of the backing track. Stewart’s focus here is on softer tones, the enunciation of (and sometimes lingering on) each syllable, with no real vocal gymnastics or improvisation — which are hallmarks of his “rocker” vocals. He really only deals out louder expressions in the song’s final minute, during the final repetition of the chorus. All in all, it’s a solid song with a fitting vocal performance that Rod makes sound so easy. It was a definite “should have been” hit, but peaked at only #52 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Two notes re: Rod and this album that may interest only me. At the time that Spanner came out, Stewart gave an interview in which he said that while he had a Petty composition and a Dylan cover (”Sweetheart Like You”) on the album, he really wasn’t a Petty fan, and preferred Tom Waits as a composer to Dylan, because Waits songs were better songs for singers (Stewart covers Waits’ “Hang on St. Christopher” on Spanner). I thought this was a really striking comment, as well as an odd thing to do when one’s first single had just been released: it was basically like saying “Yeah, Petty…he’s no great shakes, really. But I thought I’d throw him a bone and accept the song he brought me. Whatever….By the way, it’s the first single, check it out!”

The second thing that strikes me is the title of the album itself. Since spanner is slang for wrench, the title translates to “a wrench in the works,” that is, things screwing up — not a good thing, indeed. Of course, the title has a double meaning, as spanner also refers positively to a career-spanning work. And it’s true that the album, more than his works from the preceding 15 years or so, incorporates sounds associated with other parts of his recording career, such as his arrangement of the Gaelic traditional “Purple Heather” (which will likely be covered in a future week), and R&B tribute “Muddy, Sam and Otis”. Of course, while it’s used as a pun, the term spanner and its slang association within the album title simply cannot be escaped, which makes its use all the more curious.

The academic in me feels like Rod’s sending a message to most music critics, saying, “You want me to sing stuff like you like? Fine, here’s a few tunes. But, sorry, don’t expect this to be a ‘return to form’ — it’s just a wrench I’m throwing into the works of what I really want to do with my career.” Considering the trajectory his recordings have taken in the years since Spanner, my suspicions might be true: after this album, and the slicker (but also somewhat nostalgic) When We Were the New Boys, Stewart returned to more straightforward pop, and then moved on to mainly recording standards from the “Great American Songbook,” with three albums of “traditionals,” and one of MOR classic rock.

Join me again next week, when Rod gets some help from another gentleman who, like both Stewart and Petty, is a fellow Rock & Roll Hall of Famer.

Written and produced by Prince disciples Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis III, “If We Fall in Love Tonight” is a lovely modern R&B ballad featuring great backing vocals and a nice “storyline” involving the reconvening or re-strengthening of a old or longtime love affair. Both the subject matter and the arrangement plays off the strengths of Rod’s softer side. More importantly, Jam and Lewis are able to coax a subtle, striking performance out of Rod: he is able to go through the entirety of the song without falling into the “whisper” technique of substituting volume for emotion that (as I have previously mentioned) permeates too many of his ballad performances from the 1980s onward.

Here, Rod wears his heart on his sleeve: there are few vocal trills or moments where he plays with or strays from the tune’s basic construction. Instead, his voice sinks into phrases, almost speaking some words, while elongating some syllables just a bit to give them an extra emotional punch. Consider, for instance, the fact that Rod is able to turn the phrase “I’m so ready to love you down” and not have it seem at all cringe-worthy speaks volumes about the quality of both the song and the performance. Once again, Rod’s vocal stylings can genuinely be said to emulate his greatest of heroes, Sam Cooke. In other words, this song is the exact opposite of everything that is “Love Touch.” (And to those of you who are now thinking “Hey! I like ‘Love Touch’!”, let me just say: I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.)

That Jam and Lewis are able to achieve this with their vocal arrangement and production is not surprising: their greatest success over the years has been with Janet Jackson, a woman blessed with an incredible musical pedigree, but, in all honesty, limited vocal talents. Regardless, Jam and Lewis have been able to coax many a great performance out of her given these limitations, perhaps the best example being a ballad similar to Rod’s — “Come Back to Me,” from Rhythm Nation 1814.

But back to Rod: “If We Fall in Love Tonight,” both the single and the album, was something of a turning point for Rod’s career — it represents his jump into full-fledged Adult Contemporary status. While the song only peaked at #54 on the Billboard Singles (Hot 100) Chart (his second to last appearance to date there), it was his biggest hit in three years on the Adult Contemporary Chart (#4), and by peaking at #25, it is his highest charter all time on the Adult Top 40 chart (sort of a cross between Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary).

Exec: So what’s the pitch?
Producer: Okay, Martin Short is this bumbling dude, okay? And somehow, he gets stuck with this needle, only the needle has Dennis Quaid in a tiny spaceship in it, ’cause he’s been shrunk down as part of this government experiment. Now Dennis Quaid is inside of Martin Short, and now the bad guys who want to…
Exec: Hold on. Hold on!…You had me at “Martin Short gets stuck with a needle”! Now, all we need is a happening song. Something to push the soundtrack tie-in and get the kids into the theaters.
Producer: I was thinking of having Rod Stewart do a new version of a Sam Cooke song that he originally covered fourteen years ago.
Exec: Son…..you’re a money-making machine!

They bow. Fin.

At that, good friends, must be the sequence of events that ended with Rod covering his own 1972 version of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” for the movie Innerspace. It has to be. Doesn’t it?

And yet, it’s an admirable performance, if not one that was made easier by having a personal blueprint to follow (in the middle of the new version, he even incorporates the same “I don’t know” ad-lib that appeared in the fadeout of his first version). It’s not quite as good as the earlier version, but is still performed much, much better than anything on Still the Same…., his rock covers album from 2006, which was as paint-by-numbers as you can get.

And this is probably what makes it the most amazing: That, considering Rod’s track record for the past quarter-century, it’s so easy to imagine him going through the motions. But he doesn’t. I thought about it, and the best parallel example I came up with was Sean Connery returning as Bond for a one-off in Never Say Never Again, itself a remake of a Bond film he’d made 18 years before, Thunderball. He could have embarrassed himself quite easily, what with the inescapable comparisons to the earlier film, and his advanced age. But you know what? He did all right. And that’s the same thing with Rod. He could have just taken the paycheck and been done with it, not giving a crap about whether or not he actually turned in a decent performance. But listening to the song, you’ve got to say he did more.

First of all, while he uses the old version as a blueprint, he doesn’t copy it. The 1972 version goes Verse 1, Verse 2, Solo, Verse 3, Chorus, Chorus, Fadeout on Verse 4 (which is a repeat of the last two lines of Verse 1 and the first two of Verse 2). The 1987 version goes Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 3 (with the last line actually the last line from Verse 2), Chorus, Chorus, Solo, Verse 2, Chorus, Chorus, and further vamping over the an instrumental repeat of the chorus. Whether these changes were the work of Rod or (more likely) the track’s producer doesn’t really matter, as much as the fact that Rod went along with it, rather than keeping consistent with the previous version.

More importantly, he seems to be having fun, and is into it — perhaps (gasp!) even more than he was in 1972: He runs up and down the notes in his delivery, especially the second verse; gives a wink and a nod to Sinatra with the way he delivers the line “that chick’s moving up and back”; and gives some extra “yeah”s and “woo”s for good measure. Nothing, it seems, brings out Rod’s pleasure in the studio more than Sam Cooke. If he had any sense, he’d get Ron Wood, Booker T and the MG’s, the Memphis Horns, meet at Keef’s home studio for a couple of days, and knock out an album of live takes of Cooke songs (sort of like Paul McCartney’s Run Devil Run, but with a singular purpose and focus). Of course, as we have learned from the last quarter-century of Rodness, the man has no sense. So, please, stop salivating, and forget what I just wrote, okay?

* * * * *

Special bonus: Go here if you want to see the video for the song (sorry, no embedding with this clip), which proves that, even when putting in a good vocal performance, Rod’s not above wearing a shiny suit, ogling female buttocks, or getting down with Martin Short.

It seems that Rod has done most of that work (over the past quarter century, anyway) when working with a decent collaborator; one who not only knows his strengths, but refuses to let him get away with not using them. One such person is Jeff Beck, who employed Mr. Stewart as the lead singer of The Jeff Beck Group for a brief period of time in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In 1985, Jeff re-teamed with Rod for a cover of the Curtis Mayfield classic “People Get Ready.” The slick, generically mid-’80s production aside (the blame for which must be given to producer Nile Rodgers, from whom I would have expected better things), this is a very good performance, especially on Rod’s part. In fact, while the dominant part of Beck’s playing is merely a slight variation on the song’s main “riff,” Rod plays with his “instrument” in a lovely, understated way which is almost totally absent nowadays.

For example, check out Rod’s use of chordal singing on the second verse (”coast to coast,” and “there’s room for all“), and especially throughout the third verse and onward, where he abandons the normal note of the associated chord — what would be sung if the song were sung “straight” — and instead transposes. It’s pretty standard practice in the improv-heavy world of jazz vocalization (and, it should be noted, Jeff Beck has gone through his jazzy periods), but only pop vocalists with great pitch tend to do it with any regularity. Elton John’s one of them. Rod’s another, though as can be expected, he doesn’t tend to do it much anymore — and when he does, he does it because he can, not because he’s into the song (or his performance).

Well, here he’s into it. I talked about his lazy “whisper-scream” technique in my prologue to this series. Some people have criticized Rod’s singing here as mainly a continuation of this style: the lazy, sleazy, ’80s Rod. I don’t agree. His two back-to back yells between 3:26 and 3:30, as well as one more at 4:06, are not Rod being loud to express emotion — this is the sound of him actually emoting to express emotion. And this makes the song much better: the song’s coda is as good, if not better, than everything before it, as Rod’s voice literally pushes Beck into his best playing in the song (and arguably his best playing on the whole dreary Flash album).

Later in this series, we’ll see at least one example of Rod later taking his game up to a higher level by working with another legendary (though sometimes underrated) guitar legend, namely The Band’s Robbie Robertson. But for next time, I’m sticking with another reworking of a soul classic, as Rod gets ready to cover himself, covering Sam.

I know, I know….but I assure you, it’s not going to be that bad. Of course, we must begin by addressing this very issue which makes actual music fans (read: people who didn’t buy any volumes of The Great American Songbook) retch in a Pavlovian manner whenever they hear about Rod the Mod.

Like many artists, Rod Stewart has gone through many “periods.” Much like Picasso had his Cubist and Blue periods, Dylan had his Electric and Christian periods, and Woody Allen had periods highly influenced by the Marx Brothers and Ingmar Bergman, so has Rod had multiple periods: specifically Awesome (pre-1976), Okay (1976-1981), and Crap (post-1981). This series will be panning the later of these periods, like a miner in rugged, rocky terrain, looking for those few choice nuggets that can actually be listened to repeatedly and cause the Rod fan to experience a unique combination of pleasure at the recording, and anger at the wasted talent.

As you can tell from the distinctly defined periods, this progression from legend to loser was not an immediate fall off a cliff. Rather, it was a constant breakdown, fueled by a combination of laziness, and the excesses of too much quality booze and too much easy, young blonde pussy. The simple fact is, once Rod had made it, and saw that he didn’t need to give it his all to keep making money (and getting young blonde pussy), why bother?

Thus, the sad fact is almost everything after 1981’s Blondes Have More Fun album is created with an “aw fuck it” attitude. Gone is the yearning of the young, white soul singer, having been replaced with singing by the numbers that merely tries to replicate the yearning of the young man. In this later period, Rod’s vocals almost always take the form of a type of singing I like to call “Whisper-Scream,” where there are but two basic levels to his performance: a soft, gravelly “I’m going to sing you something very personal….shhh!,” soon followed by a bombastic “This is EMOTION, baby!! ROCK WITH THE ROD!!! AAAH!” Sometimes it will go in reverse order, but usually it doesn’t waver much between these two poles.

Perhaps the most egregious example, at least from his singles over the past 25 years, takes place in 1991’s The Motown Song. Click here for the very entertaining video. The “Whisper-Scream” is in play here big time, with the soft portions falling beneath the sound levels of the background vocals, and the hard parts…..damn. That’s literally all I can say. And it’s a shame, because it’s a good enough song to overcome the slick production and Rod’s paint by numbers vocal approach. Imagine if Rod gave a damn, and his producer actually tried to make a song about Motown sound a bit more like…oh, I don’t know….Motown?

So what conclusions should be taken from this little intro rant? Like most lists, this upcoming one has three parts:

1. Rod’s put out some really, REALLY, bad music over the last quarter-century.
2. The old Rod, the one who guys like us who write these blogs know and love? He’s never coming back. Never. At least not for a whole album. Not as long as he can still put out lazy covers and keep having both the finest single malt, and the ability to trade in his 31-year old blonde wife every ten years for a new, 21-year old model.
3. Even with these two facts, if you (dare) go through his catalog, you can find some gems that occasionally spring forth from his Crap period.

Therefore, it is with a sound mind and a fortified stomach that I have taken it upon myself to venture forward through the forests of dross, finding the small bits of Rod post-1981 that go beyond “Hey, that’s not too bad”–but crank your mental amps up to “Hey, this is actually good!” I know, it seems shocking, but now that you’ve read this far, you are tantalized about what you might hear next, aren’t you?

How long will this series go on? Who knows: as long as there are good late-period Rod Stewart songs waiting to be discovered, I shall continue to seek them….In other words, probably somewhere between five and ten posts.

So, join me again soon for the first musical example in my attempt to try “Redeeming Rod.”