177. Rod Stewart, "Every Picture Tells a Story"

 


I've never known quite what to make of Rod Stewart.  When I was growing up, I knew him as a slightly embarrassing disco dude ("Do Ya Think I'm Sexy") that my friends' moms liked.  Then he easily transitioned into a crooner/balladeer and then slid effortlessly into his final form on the senior circuit doing Brill Building classics and the like (It Had to Be You: The Great American Songbook and its sequels).  Now he's a Sir and has tons of kids and does things like punching bouncers when he can't get his grandkids into a party.  An elder lager lout, perhaps.

But Rod started out as a rocker with the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces and put this out, his first solo album, when he was just 25 years old.  It's basically another Faces album, since they all appear on it, most prominently Ronnie Wood, who plays most of the guitars.  The big song was, of course, "Maggie May," the cougar paean with one of the clangiest unintentionally funny rhymes in rock ("I laughed at all of your jokes/ My love, you didn't need to coax") that was Rod's first #1 in the US and UK.  You can see why; it's an instantly catchy, hummable song, with a sweet mandolin part that lends it a certain kind of rustic charm.  "Mandolin Wind," also penned by Stewart, features a lot of the eponymous instrument, and is a pretty good song, about a farming couple nearly freezing to death.  Faux pastoralism did not originate with alt-country I guess.

There are some covers, too, as is typical for an album of the era; a competent reading of Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," really showing off the country/folk influence, with pedal steel and fiddle on the arrangement.  "That's All Right," the Elvis song, segues into "Amazing Grace," neither of which are worth spending much time with.  His cover of the Temptations' "(I Know) I'm Losing You" charted as well.

Stewart's a naturally gifted singer, with his famously smoky voice, but you feel like he could do so much more with it.  Maybe he suffers by contrast to Otis Redding from yesterday - it's not fair really to compare anyone to Otis Redding - but I feel like he could just do so much more than he does.

I really wanted to save the title track for last because it's such a weird song.  It feels like a jam session that never coalesced into a real song.  It doesn't really have a chorus, and the lines don't really rhyme.  It's kind of a travelogue, a more-or-less historically accurate rendition of Stewart's experience busking around in the 60's with some lyrics that are incredibly cringey today:

I moved right out east, yeah, listen
On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry
Sailing on my way back here
I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady
By the light of an eastern moon
Shangai Lil never used the pill
She claimed that it just ain't natural

Was this even ok in 1971?  I don't know, but fucking yikes.  Then it kinda meanders on and on and ends in kind of a breakdown with the title lyrics.  Strange song.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I guess?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more