UPDATED 24th MARCH 2012

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REVIEW: Stewart, Nicks deliver stellar concert...

BY STEPHEN PETERSON SUN CHRONICLE STAFF

UNCASVILLE, Conn. - It resembled two shows in one as two stellar rock singer/songwriters joined together.

Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart took the stage Sunday night at the Mohegan Sun Arena, playing lengthy sets of their own material and dueting on a couple of songs as part of their "Heart & Soul Tour." Wednesday they hit the TD Garden in Boston.

Stewart's performance was one of the more elaborate to be seen, with an extensive band and eye-catching white stage where even the two drum sets and keyboard were that color. Then again, he has for decades been known as a top-notch showman. The three guitarists were dressed in Beatles-looking mod - sharp sport jackets and with short hair, for an artist who has been nicknamed "Rod the Mod."

Stewart the past few years has come out with several albums featuring covers of traditional songs, but he stuck mostly with his rock catalog.

Stewart is regarded as one of the finest white soul vocalists in rock history and did open with a cover of the O'Jay's "Love Train" before lighting up the fans with "Tonight's the Night," which in 1976 spent a record eight weeks at No. 1, eclipsing The Beatles' "Hey Jude" in the books. A sensational female violin player made her first appearance for the song.

Looking and acting anything but his age of 66, Stewart was also backed by four women singers and a three-piece horn section that featured two women dressed in bright red.

A cover of Sam Cooke's "Having a Party" put the trumpet in the spotlight.

Nicks, who opened the show, reappeared for duets with Stewart on his snappy "Passion" and "Young Turks," both hitting No. 5 on the charts in the early '80s.

Nicks, 62, is known for her harmonies, having done duets with Tom Petty and Don Henley.

The pace continued to slow for Stewart's 1977 cover of Cat Stevens' "First Cut is the Deepest," with acoustic guitar.

At the end of the eternal "Forever Young" from the late '80s, the artist sat down for a lengthy "Downtown Train," a No. 3 tune from 1989 that featured a dueling drum solo.

Following the splendid "You Wear it Well" from 1972 and "Reason to Believe" that involved a floor bass, the audience helped sing "You're In My Heart," a hit from the late '70s.

After a version of Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Rock 'n' Roller," Stewart dedicated "Rhythm of My Heart" to those serving in the military. A backup singer shook the arena a la Tina Turner with "Proud Mary."

Switching from a rust jacket to a purple suit, Stewart sang "Have I Told You Lately" that Van Morrison first did.

The arena turned into a sports stadium as Stewart, a former pro soccer player, kicked soccer balls into the crowd - reaching the upper balcony most times, during "Hot Legs" from 1978.

The mandolin, played by the violinist, was in the limelight for Stewart's signature song, the ballad "Maggie May" that is considered one of the greatest rock songs. It was the first single to go No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic.

The encore was the disco "D'Ya Think I'm Sexy," a No. 1 in 1978 that had all the musicians lined up along the front of the stage.

Nicks is scheduled to release her first album of new material in a decade, "In Your Dreams," on May 3. Her seventh album, it was co-produced by former Eurythmic David A. Stewart.

The album's first single, "Secret Love," which she wrote decades ago, has been out since February and that was among the first songs in her set.

After "If Anyone Falls in Love," Nicks told the crowd before singing "Dreams" that it probably has been in every Fleetwood Mac show. That No. 1 song is off the phenomenal 1977 Grammy-winning "Rumors" album.

Nicks' mystical "Sorcerer" led to the psychedelic "Gold Dust Woman," also from "Rumors," and which was extended as she did her trademark twirl.

The two drummers soloed to segue into Nicks' "Stand Back," a No. 5 song from 1983 that showcased some impressive bass playing. Stewart did the song in the early '90s.

"Rhiannon," Fleetwood Mac's first hit off the No. 1 and first album with Lindsey Buckingham and Nicks, continued the blend of songs.

The acoustic guitar came out for the sweet "Landslide," also from the above "Fleetwood Mac."

Another of Nicks' big solo hits, "Edge of Seventeen," from her 1982 chart-topping debut album, was also dragged out with some sizzling guitar.

The encore was "Love Is," with just a piano player and backup singers.

Nicks, whose voice was as breath-taking as ever, was also backed up by two women singers, three guitarists and two keyboardists.

Nicks and Fleetwood Mac were influenced by Stewart, who played in a short-lived group with Mac's drummer Mick Fleetwood and guitarist Peter Green.

In a career spanning five decades, Stewart has sold an estimated 250 million album and single sales and had 16 Grammy nominations. The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer finished 2010 at the top of both the touring and album charts, having played Las Vegas and a 33-date European summer tour.

A one-time grave digger who went to the same English school as Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks, Stewart has folk roots and his abrasive vocal style was influenced by Cooke and Al Jolson. He joined up with guitarist Jeff Beck - who he is working with again, relocated to America and worked with the Rolling Stones' Ron Wood in The Faces.

Nicks is a seven-time Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum, Hall of Fame inductee who has inspired many female singers.

STEPHEN PETERSON can be reached at 508-236-0377 or at [email protected].

 

 
EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY... Don't It??

Reviewed By Marcello Carlin

Track listing: Every Picture Tells A Story/Seems Like A Long Time/That’s All Right/Tomorrow Is A Long Time/Maggie May/Mandolin Wind/(I Know) I’m Losing You/Reason To Believe

One of the most bothersome things about the soundalike album boom was that, although they helped democratise music to an extent, or at least confirmed music’s residual democratisation, its performers de facto didn’t tell you anything about themselves. And one does wonder; what were – are? – these singers’ ambitions, their dreams? What did they ultimately hope to communicate to us? Did they see session singing as a job for life – don’t mock; it’s a nice earner if you can get it – or merely a way of paying the bills until they managed to say what they wanted to say to us? Every singer starts out by basing themselves on another singer’s style – for instance in this instance, Sam Cooke – but would they want to spend their best years pretending to be somebody else, or did they internally boil over with frustration at never having had their say, never being given the opportunity to tell their story?

Rod Stewart knew this quandary better than most; like Elton John, he did his time on the Top Of The Pops/Hot Hits circuit while waiting for better things to come, even when the Faces were busy constituting themselves. And his brief “nonchalant” sleevenote to his best album tells us in its own semi-cheery way that the Faces were at this time definitely his main priority, the solo work (Every Picture was his third solo album) strictly considered as a side project, a way of channelling songs and moods which didn’t quite fit in with the Faces’ intended good-time rock stampede. He got by all accounts a lousy solo deal from Mercury Records – the advance, according to Ian MacLagan, was just enough to buy a Marcos kit car – and no one, least of all the singer himself, thought that this second career was ever going to get anywhere.

Hence it’s important to understand that Every Picture was recorded for next to nothing, almost in a throwaway manner; Stewart evidently didn’t feel that the record was going to shift substantial amounts of copies, and without the pressure of the expectation of huge sales, he was effectively free to do what he wished, to pick songs and musicians as the mood took him. Of the Faces, MacLagan (on organ, with Pete Sears from Long John Baldry’s touring band taking care of piano duties) and Ronnie Wood are more or less present throughout, while Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones appear only on “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” the latter effectively a Faces performance (for contractual reasons, their presence is only suggested rather than confirmed in the sleevenote). Others include Stewart’s old Steampacket colleague, drummer Mickey Waller, Blodwyn Pig’s bassist Andy Pyle (replaced by Pentangle’s Danny Thompson on the acoustic tracks), session violinist Dick Powell and – crucially – classical guitarist and songwriter Martin Quittenton; basically, anybody he could rope in who was up for something a little different. The performances feel spontaneous, live (the occasional vocal or guitar overdub notwithstanding, this was indeed the case), unhurried and deep. It feels like eavesdropping into a roomful of friends, late into the night, the spirits gently flowing and the good humour unquenchable, swapping stories, woes and joys. The record appears ragged but is put together with a deceptive meticulousness, yet its rueful cavalier nature is best transmitted by means of the original vinyl issue; the Art Deco pastiche sleeve resembles something that might have been pulled out of a dusty charity shop rack after forty years’ residency – or perhaps one of those dirt-cheap greatest hits compilations to be found at petrol stations (again, don’t underestimate the power of niche marketing; one of the hundred best-selling American albums is the cassette-only Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits, which has amassed in excess of ten million sales over decades of truck stop and pharmacy transactions). It’s a record best listened to battered and bruised.

The lack of commercial expectations and pressures worked in the record and the singer’s favour; only three of its eight songs were composed or co-composed by Stewart himself (“Mandolin Wind,” the record’s deepest moment, is all his work) and the rest ranged from Crudup and Dylan through to Motown and Tim Hardin; a pocket history of the last twenty years or so of a certain, heartfelt strain of pop, all telegraphed through the vision of a hurt rogue. And it is this vision which is so sorely missing from the Top Of The Pops series, in that Stewart manages to cross the bridge from passive to active interpreter. The role of interpreter in popular music remains dangerously underrated; the Beatles taught us to worship the artist as creator, and music criticism has largely continued along these partially misbegotten lines, such that even the likes of Sinatra and Presley, who rarely, if ever, wrote their own material, are still looked down upon to a degree, and that most of the history of soul music is likewise bypassed in an auteurist hurry. But if in one sense it’s the song which matters, then the performer’s story matters just as much in another sense; how the personality, the very life, of the singer affects the root material and in turn how the singer as a totality affects his or her listeners. We look for alchemy, magic, revelations, and just because the singer didn’t write the song they’re singing doesn’t mean that they’re unable to access these and render them colourfully to us. Hardin’s original “Reason To Believe” is wary, resigned, trembling, confirmatory (despite or because of its rather jaunty tempo) but Stewart puts his microscope to the pain, slows everything down, magnifies it and whispers its concealed truths in our ear. He effectively re-composes the songs, as atoms might be reconstituted after a storm.

The record’s secret is given away practically at the beginning. The title track, co-written by Stewart and Wood, is one of the singer’s most euphoric rockers – although it is already noticeable, as with Who’s Next, that the main propulsive power is coming from the acoustic rather than the electric instruments. Acoustic guitar throbs into the song, with more than a feeling of “More Than A Feeling” (five years in advance) to its harmonic structure, and then the band vituperatively swipe into rock, like a spindlier Led Zeppelin (Stewart’s “Whoo!”s here and throughout the rest of the record rival both Freddy Cannon and Robert Plant in their merry ubiquity). The singer merrily details his roving exploits, the pickles into which he’s got across the world, but does he care? (“I was acCUSED! Whoo-HOO!,” his sated “eno-ho-hough”). Wood ticks off a brief solo, and after Stewart has found fulfilment with the “slit-eyed lady,” Maggie Bell, of Stone the Crows, abruptly makes her full-throated entrance (she is appositely credited on the sleeve with “vocal abrasions”). The song cools down and then builds up renewed steam as Stewart reaches its crux:

“I couldn’t quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats,
‘Cause it’s all been said before.
Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off.
You didn’t have to come here anyway.”

With that – one of the wisest verses we will come across in this tale - there is nothing to do but for Stewart and Bell to turn the title and point (“Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”) into a chant midway between football pitch and holy shrine, their shouts half-desperate, half-ecstatic. The cry seems to want to get the world in Stewart’s parlour; please understand, it appears to be saying, that life is a joke and crap will happen but don’t take it that seriously, move on and remember not to forget how to smile. Otherwise we would hardly bear ourselves, as the piano and drum breakouts towards the extended fade demonstrate all too fully.

Much of the rest of the record is given over to examining just how crap – or just how great – life can get. Ted Anderson’s song “Seems Like A Long Time” emerges out of its chrysalis of “Handbags And Gladrags” piano and solemn drum roll; Waller gives an impatient grunt across his toms in response to Stewart’s “If you’ve ever waited for the sun”; the song’s lament gradually opens up to encompass not only the singer’s bedroom window, eternally bathed in hopeless night, but the wider world (“War time is only the other side of peace time”). Eventually another choral chant – this one much closer to “Hey Jude” – makes its gospelly entrance, audibly caressing and stirring up Stewart’s beaten-up heart (he’s nudging you frantically in the ninth rib, wanting you to realise what it is like to have the world cave in on him), led by “Mateus Rose,” a.k.a. Long John Baldry, the progenitor of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” to which this song could serve as a more considered cousin. Waller hits his snare with a resounding thunderbolt of rhetoric, after which Wood’s guitar whines into quietude. Piano and voice (with a few guitar ad libs) take the unease into the nearest thing to peace that they can approximate.

Good times duly rise again, however; Wood takes “That’s All Right” back to the Delta in his carefully picked introduction – he generally sounds as though he is already auditioning for the Stones – before drums and piano snap the gladness back into boogie. But in the same way that Presley once introduced the blues to the milkcow, there’s something else, and moreover something new, going on here, and not just the way in which Stewart cannot let the song go (compare with Presley’s “Stranger In My Own Home Town” two years earlier), or the way in which he sings the title in the second chorus, whose vowel manglings appear to invent Alex Turner a generation ahead of schedule, or his joyous hooligan snarl of “Get in there!” before Wood’s bipolar guitar self-duet and Waller’s short drum solo, or the way in which climax after climax is hammered into view like an inpatient Joseph Beuys – but in terms of what the rhythm section are doing. Pyle sounds like James Jamerson, Waller’s drums swing and sidestep rather than thwack on the count; this is nascent seventies Brit ladrock forcibly being reminded of its debt to Motown. What happens with this approach in relation to what happens with all else in this music will provide the innovation.

Martin Quittenton then returns for a careful (and, on the sleeve, unlisted) duet with Stewart on “Amazing Grace,” at the time a major hit for Judy Collins and a song whose aura of revelatory salvation (given its extremely political origins) is apt to recur in pop from time to time, either in chord structure (“Never Ever” by All Saints) or in emotional bequest (“I’m Not Alone” by Calvin Harris). Quittenton’s guitar vibrates on its drone and may well have provided the basis or inspiration for the international hit version by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards the following year. Stewart sings simply, as though he has been saved.

Powell, Quittenton, Thompson and Wood play on Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” and Stewart’s performance is tremendously moving performance, roving from thoughts of loneliness to ideations of retrieved beds, refound Others, and…as if we could ever be allowed to forget…the continued craving for settlement, for home. The happiness of nature, the knowledge of kinship, cannot compensate for her absence, but once again the singer is keen that we should absorb this loneliness, not confuse it with loneness, and realise how vital it is to remember the direction home; not to deny our previous callow youth but rather come to terms with what it represents, where it might cripple us and where and how it might still lead us. The lament, or warning, flickers gradually out of earshot in the manner of so many once bright butterflies.

How we deal with matters of both loneliness and youth are examined in more thorough detail on side two. “Maggie May” is one of those songs and performances whose virtues are liable to become buried, not just through overexposure but also in light of the singer’s subsequent history; how can we take his protestations of “being used” seriously when we know all about his later capers?

But if we can forget the future – goodness knows that the question of remembering Stewart’s future was more than adequately done in Lester Bangs’ short story inspired by the song – and remember a 1971 Rod Stewart who most likely was probably still surviving on mashed potatoes, then the hurt and deceptive radicalism of both song and performance are as truthful as anyone could sanely expect. The song itself is an extended emotional tug-of-war masquerading as an internal monologue, with some black humour to leaven the gasping uncertainty (for instance, the comedic understatement of “You stole my soul, and that’s a pain I can do without,” worthy of Tony Hancock). He is saving the older woman, or more probably she is saving him, and he doesn’t really comprehend or dig it; isn’t he supposed to be a Young Man and therefore Boss Stud Muffin? Well, even he doesn’t believe that; note the elliptical passing reference to the final verse of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (“All I needed was a friend to lend a guiding hand”) and the inevitable Oedipal guilt (“But you turned into a mother and a lover”). He hates the fact that he loves her, that she so evidently needs him as much as, or more than, she “uses” him, and that his brain wants to get the hell away from there, as far away as the protagonist of Morrison’s “Madame George,” back to the train station and school and music, but that his gut knows that he will never leave her.

The song continues to resonate because it is a quite staggering admission of the final failure of the supposed supremacy of the “I’m A Man” kind of boy – and Rod, in almost every way, is going to stay a boy his whole life long; you can already glean that – which the post-Stones sixties were so eager to build up. In the company of most of its Top 40 colleagues – see those Top Of The Pops albums again – it’s easy to forget how different “Maggie May” was, a recitation so brisk and efficient that its unedited five-and-a-half-minute duration slips the listener’s mind. The bright celeste which chimes through the “back to school” final verse recalls Drake’s “Northern Sky,” but the real musical radicalism here is the rapprochement between English folk, British rock and, again, Motown – Lindisfarne’s mandolinist Ray Jackson is the song’s conscience and his commentary is cleverly symbiotic with Quittenton’s acoustic contributions, such that the listener hardly realises that the song’s historical scope ranges from medieval plainsong to up-to-the-minute singer/songwriter mores. Moreover, the top layer of the arrangement – guitars, mandolin, MacLagan’s admirably (stoically) patient organ (which reminds me more of John Cale than the celeste does) – is differently constructed to the bottom (rhythm) layer, whose displacements and off-centre accents are purely out of Motown. Then everything pauses for the final mandolin soliloquy (complete with shoulder-shrugging bass obbligato) before the singer, more exasperated than heartbroken, sighs his slow way out of the song. “I’ll get back home…one of these…days,” are his final words (a Lear-esque “Whooo-oooh” notwithstanding) and we realise that “Maggie May” is in its own way another farewell to the sixties, a time and perhaps a person now unattainable.

This would be remarkable enough in itself, but “Mandolin Wind” raises the game. Like so many of this period’s key songs, it is patient, happy to stop and start, to pause and consider. It is winter, the coldest for fourteen years. Blankets of electric guitar thicken the skies outside the forlorn wood cabin. And she hasn’t left him, not all that time – or is this meditation the necessary answer to “Maggie May”? They have stayed together, and found unexpected strength in each other, right through the worst times as well as the best – and Stewart gives us the finest and truest vocal performance of his career. Hear how his “steel guitar” melts into the hoarsest, most heartbreaking “love ya” you ever heard. Mandolin, pedal steel and tambourine form a sort of Yukon chorus and gradually develop a riff. The final verse (“Noticing your face was thin and pale”) seems bleak until you realise that this is something that they have lived through, survived. Stewart’s “Lordy” puts him in communion with the soul of Cooke, and when, after the most pregnant of pauses – have the candles flickered out? - Waller’s drums eventually spread into the song’s marrow like the freshest of blood transfusions, immediately doubling its tempo (and Waller’s performance on “Maggie May” mustn’t be overlooked; both admonitory and understanding when his drums need to be, Greil Marcus remarked that his drumming should be given the Nobel Prize – for quantum physics), the crimson happiness which this album has been seeking again becomes tactile – and it’s the same tempo and nearly the same key as the title track.

But then the Temptations; “(I Know) I’m Losing You” is a fevered variant on the (already) fevered “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” David Ruffin’s rasp growling grizzly, like an axe he hesitates to apply to his own heart. Wisely, the Faces don’t attempt to out-paranoid the original – that’s scarcely doable – but instead use the number as a pretext to find out more about themselves, as musicians and as a group. Guitar is joined by processed bass, then piano, then voice, and finally drums; MacLagan offers some ironic descents of commentary but the whole is much closer to 1971 than 1966 Temptations. Sears’ piano articulates all the paranoia that this reading requires, but just as the band are about to boil over the cliff face, the song suddenly stops. Then backing vocals seem to rise from the grave, followed by barrelhouse piano, Stewart’s voice and Jones’ toxic hissing cymbal. The song smashes its way back into existence. “Get OUT!” roars Stewart; Wood and Jones offer a thrashing backbeat, Jones then takes over alone (hasn’t anyone sampled this yet?) followed by Wood kicking back in as per Hendrix, before MacLagan brings everyone back to the tune (“Oh yeah!” exclaims an audibly relieved Stewart). The group slows down and quietly blows out for a resolved ending.

Finally, heartbreak and doubt haven’t been extinguished – all four of these second side songs are facing each other in a luminous multidirectional mirror – as we reach “Reason To Believe.” Sears’ piano once again demonstrates eloquent patience before Stewart and MacLagan’s organ take up the song. What’s it all about? Can he live with her or without her, or vice versa? Does he want somebody else, or just a clear explanation of the way things are? The song seems to defy the premature emotional wreaths as Waller once again knocks it into life, pursued very closely by Powell’s violin – but then that organ returns, followed by a plaintive piano…and, almost finally, Stewart’s voice, alone, if not in the world. “Someone like you…makes it hard to live…without…somebody else.” Piano, violin and bass return, one by one, before the rhythm reasserts itself and the piano drives the engine out of the record; things are looking down but really you know the people involved will end up laughing it all off and moving onwards. And that is Rod Stewart’s picturesque story, the first chapter as far as this tale is concerned but also the greatest and most far-reaching; the record on which his reputation and residual love depend almost entirely – remember what he once had to say, where and who he once was, as we move through the seventies with him, and how he managed to break through the screen of session anonymity (as though something like Python Lee Jackson’s “In A Broken Dream” could ever be “anonymous”) and tell himself as much as, or more than, us how much he wanted and needed that light, white and welcoming, through the dusty, muddied windows of that winter cabin, which could clearly have equally been a bedsit in Brentwood.

 

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