Word: stewart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Never a Dull Moment, like its predecessors, showcases this latter aspect of Stewart's personality. It is here that he reveals the troubadour in him. The songs themselves revolve around the central theme. "True Blues" comes out of the familial problems dealt with in "Maggie May." It is the story of the wayward son returning home. Its music is more coherent, probably because it's actually the Faces! Musically, the song features the chording that Ronnie Wood's strongest talent, along with the fuzzy, percussive sound that is his most distinguishing feature. Wood is a very good guitarist, but, since...
Musically, the album is also a continuance. From the beginning of his solo career, Stewart has striven to achieve an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos within his music. He succeeded almost immediately. And to insure that success, he's kept his solo album band intact. The crudeness he achieves on record is as much studied as it is technical. And much of that crudeness stems from Mick Waller's drumming. Harsh and brazen, solid and simple, Waller is the backbone of the sound. To add to its crudity, the drums are mixed very prominently; when you hear a song...
...occasion, Stewart chooses to do a song for his solo album with the band, Faces. And I'd like to say a word here in their defence, because the band loses consistently in the inevitable comparisons of Stewart's solo music with his ensemble work. I happen to think that Stewart's solo work, while always brilliant, doesn't match the band for sheer excitement, which makes me a minority of one, because I don't know anybody who likes the band as well as Stewart, solo. What I can't understand is how people like Jon Landau...
This is a most important distinction, because it allows Rod Stewart to do the two things he does best in separate contexts, to sing rock and roll with a good band, and to write and perform songs that reveal an aspect of his character that doesn't square with the flamboyant, foppish figure he cuts as a Face...
...Wear It Well" is the sequel to "Maggie May." It emphasizes above all Stewart's commonness, the same attitude that brought "I can't quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats cause it's all been said before," on "Every Picture Tells a Story." Part of the man's appeal is the intensity of his emotion, and its closeness to each of us, but its most striking feature is its very lack of the quaint idealism that pervaded earlier love songs. (Like "Chapel of Love," or "To Know Him Is To Love Him," or anything else that Spector did before...