These days I love it on Unplugged…and unseated. And so did my 75-year old mother as I drove her around Majorca a couple of years back.

I also kinda like the American Classics stuff. It’s the Do ya think I’m Sexy?-era Rod that I can’t stand.

In my (then) neck of the woods Rod was famous for always stopping off at The Wee Barrel pub in Paisley whenever a flight took him to Glasgow Airport. The punters loved him!

All that aside….at 18 we were well into ” The Rod Stewart Album” and “Every Picture Tells A Story” and except for Maggie May being played a lot , still, these albums still stand the test of time. Mostly because the songs are strong and the musicianship is top flight.

I don’t think anyone had heard such a voice before or since , with the exception of Bonnie Tyler. That de-flowered, haphazard vagabond image that Rod had , and the hair , did a lot for him here. I think that everything that Tom said about the song is right and I’m sure that Rod knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote it and I can’t even imagine why anyone would think that ” Reason to Believe ” ( although it’s a great number ) could even come close to Maggie.

I’m not sure I can explain these contradictory responses to myself–much less anyone else–but it’s worth a try. In 1971, “Maggie May” was radically different from anything else on the radio. Stewart was a fresh entity (at least in the US)–his voice was unique and his personality (to which we had not yet been overexposed) still seemed rather charming. It’s hard to believe that the lyrics were quite daring then, but I still think the lyrics (including the love/hate contrarieties) are more about loss of innocence than anything else–loving and hating the “de-virginizer” is probably not an uncommon response.

But I also recall that a big part of the plaisir du disque was the instrumental arrangement, combining the hip and the quaint–I, for one, think the mandolin enhances the recording–effectively echoing the constrast of newly-found worldliness and lost innocence.

By the time of “Tonight’s the Night,” Rod was starting to become a bore, but that’s another story altogether.

This is a good record but I like “You Wear It Well” better by a considerable margin.

BTW I would have sacrificed at least one of Rods weeks at number one for Witch Queen Of New Orleans !

Number 2 Watch – the two records that stalled at 2 behind Rod were Redbone’s “Witch Queen of New Orleans” and Middle of the Road’s “Tweedledee, Tweedledum”. Another nursery rhyme title, but a better song then “Chirpy..”. “If you knew the reason for the fighting you would never understand…” – now that HAS to have been about Vietnam!

So with this the second great new act of the 70s introduces himself to the No 1 lists, and like Bolan it’s a sound you can hardly imagine having heard in the 60s. At a remove of a few years, because I was too young to identify with the experience, this sounds to me like a commentary saying, OK, the 60s party is over and you’re more or less intact, so (in the cold light of the early 70s) what are you going to do now – get on back to school or start another party? We know what Rod’s answer was!

What it brings back is the sense of rebellion that came to me along with the rest of my school cohort in the Upper Sixth, with our own room - not a purpose-built sixth-form centre but a converted 1930s classroom in which every rule we could think of was torn up and pushed under the carpet along with the mountain of dog-ends. (The year below us got the sixth-form centre, we got the reputation as the worst and most unmanageable yeargroup ever to have passed through the school.) The song captures that rebelliousness nicely.

Let’s not forget that this was a double A-side, the other half being a cover of Tim Hardin’s Reason To Believe. It wasn’t played much on the radio and to my mind it completely undermined the delicacy of Hardin’s original. I still believe in Tim Hardin to this day - not many remember him, unfortunately.

I can’t get past Rod’s voice though this review makes me feel more kindly to this song than I ever have before.