The biggest hits of any artist’s career isn’t always something that’s staring them in the face whenever they perform. Sometimes the best songs tend to fall out of the sky with no real rhyme or reason to them, but the muse doesn’t really care if a song takes five minutes to write or five months. All that matters is getting someone that you can feel proud of down on tape for the first time, but Rod Stewart was dumbfounded when some of his most celebrated songs ended up on the hit parade.
Granted, Stewart was always going to be chasing after what was popular in some respects. His voice was the kind of thing that most artists dream of having during their lifetime, and given that something as strange as ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ and even his standards albums did well on the charts, there’s a good chance that he could make a bluegrass record and people would still fawn over it.
But after becoming one of the best rock and roll singers of the time after working with The Faces and joining the Jeff Beck Group, Every Picture Tells a Story was the first time that people could actually listen to him as a songwriter. Not every song may have been his handiwork, but given how rustic the album sounds compared to his early work, it fit right in next to the likes of James Taylor and Cat Stevens, who were starting to rise to prominence around the same time.
There were already pieces of his career that were starting to fall into place, but for as iconic a song as ‘Maggie May’ was, it wasn’t knocking it out of the park by any stretch. Stewart thought that the song didn’t have that much of a melody to it that people could latch onto, and given how much he had tore the roof off of any venue with the song ‘Stay With Me’, hearing him using that raspy shout with acoustic guitars and mandolins twinkling in the background wasn’t the first thing people looked to him for.
And according to everyone else in the studio, Stewart was working with a song that didn’t seem to have any redeeming qualities, with guitarist Martin Quittenton recalling, “We didn’t think it was very good. Never in anyone’s wildest dreams was it a pop standard.” Even keyboardist Ian McLaglan wasn’t thrilled, calling his keyboard feature “rubbish” compared to what he had done in The Faces.
Yes, the song may have been simple, but that was the whole reason why it worked. No one was going to people like Bob Dylan or James Taylor to think about the subtle eccentricities of their sound. They wanted to hear a real person tell stories about their personal lives, and even though ‘Maggie May’ could get a little bit graphic when it comes to Stewart’s sexual escapades, it was easy for people to relate to that sense of heartache.
It wasn’t even the last time that people were surprised by Stewart getting a major hit out of his experiments. Stewart himself claimed that the entire idea of doing ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ was bound to be stupid, and yet it’s still one of the more celebrated disco-rock tunes that never embarrassed itself nearly as much as Kiss or even The Rolling Stones did on their danceable tunes.
So if there’s any lesson to be learned from Stewart’s bandmates, it’s that not every song that sounds like crap is necessarily going to do terrible numbers. It’s all about the collaborative process, and had they not put their “rubbish” pieces on top of Stewart’s song, chances are it wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact it did.
