By the late ’60s, the world was beginning to beat a path to Rod Stewart’s door. After kicking around for most of the decade in bands such as the Ray Davies Quartet (later known as the Kinks), Steampacket (whose members included Long John Baldry, Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger, and Micky Waller), and Shotgun Express (which included Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green), Stewart was hot. He joined the Jeff Beck Group, and they recorded two pivotal albums, Truth and Beck-Ola, before breaking up at the end of 1969. It was in the Jeff Beck Group that Stewart first worked with Ron Wood.
Stewart got an offer to sing with the hard rock band Cactus, but he and Wood opted to join three members of the Small Faces, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and Kenney Jones. The renamed band was simply called Faces. Never one to put all of his eggs in one basket, Stewart also signed a deal with Mercury Records as a solo artist. His first solo album was called An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down. In the U.S., the album was re-titled The Rod Stewart Album, and released in November 1969 by Mercury. (more…)
The Georgia Satellites shot to the top of the charts in the fall of 1986 with “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” a jokey little play on Southern morality that sounded nothing like anything else on the radio at the time. Real drums, no keyboard player, and a sound that wasn’t so much produced as it was simply recorded. With their bad hair, crooked teeth, and dirty clothes, they looked more like beer-swilling rednecks than rock stars; in the age when physical imperfections were beginning to be sanded out of the music business by MTV, the Sats were exceptions to just about every commonly accepted rule of fame. Their debut album, the simply titled Georgia Satellites, was a reminder of what rock & roll was supposed to be: loud, rude, and sloppy. They covered Terry Anderson’s “Battleship Chains,” one of those musician’s favorites that was later recorded by Warren Zevon and The Replacements, among others. They tore the shit out of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story.” Overall, they channeled their rock heroes (a group that includes the Stones, the Faces, the Beatles, and Jerry Lee Lewis) without simply aping them. What they didn’t do was record another hit single. “Hands to Yourself,” great as it was, pigeonholed the band as something of a novelty act, and they receded from the public eye almost as quickly as they’d entered it. (Thus proving the rock & roll maxim that you can’t yodel in a song and have a long career:unless you have a 
