Rod Stewart - 'Every Picture Tells a Story'

The Decline and Fall of Roderick David Stewart is one of rock's great tragedies.  In the course of more or less five years, he went from the lovable rogue with a rooster-cut, "Rod the Mod", to a sleazy, cocaine addled, self-proclaimed sex symbol and trend-following hack who gave us "Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?" [No, I do not.— Ed.]

Since then, Rod has released a series of haphazard LPs, including the forgettable 1983 album 'Body Wishes' and the aptly titled 1988 album 'Out of Order'.  Then, he reinvented himself as a popular song interpreter through his five volumes of The Great American Songbook.  This was a series popular with minivan driving Caucasian "soccer moms", who were blissfully unaware of how much better these songs have been covered by singers of a much higher caliber.

Rod’s singing career began in the early sixties, and he played in some half-dozen bands, including The Steampacket (with Long John Baldry and Brian Auger) and The Jeff Beck Group before joining The Faces. At about the same time, he released his first solo LP, 1969’s 'The Rod Stewart Album'.  At the time, Rod was hardworking, splitting his time between the Faces and his solo work, and somehow managing to put out both a Faces album and a solo album nearly every year (all of which are very good).  Unlike the Faces’ rough-edged but smart good-times rock’n’roll, Rods’s solo albums tended to "cover the waterfront" from rock, country, R&B, to folk.


Rod’s first two albums in which he basically enlisted the Faces as a backup band didn’t chart particularly well, although they included such excellent songs as "Handbags and Gladrags", "Cut Across Shorty" and "Gasoline Alley". 

For his third album, he tried a different approach.  He limited the input of the Faces (except for Ron Wood) to basically one tune, a sublime cover of The Temptations’ (I Know) I’m Losing You.  In favor of a sound that accentuated the mandolin of Lindsay Raymond Jackson (of Lindisfarne infamy), the violin of Dick Powell, and the many guitars of Ron Wood.

The result was 1971’s 'Every Picture Tells a Story',

This is an exceptional and timeless album that went to the top of both the US and UK charts.  The album has a somewhat motley assortment of tunes: folk songs by Tim Hardin, Theodore Anderson (who nobody anywhere seems to know anything about) and Bob Dylan rubbed shoulders with the Faces’ hard-rocking Temptations cover and the Arthur Crudup chestnut "That’s All Right".  Plus three outstanding Rod originals, "Maggie May", "Every Picture Tells a Story" and "Mandolin Wind".  'Every Picture Tells a Story' is an essential classic rock album.

The freeload is a limited edition high definition audiophile release, with 24 bit/96kHz remastering from the French label: Lmlr.

For the freeload, my next Rock post will be another essential classic rock album from 1970.  Guess which album it will be.