Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells a Story (1971)

Is Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story the greatest album of his career?

Rod Stewart, who turned seventy years old yesterday, is generally thought of as a singer, but there was a time when he was much more.  He was a rock and roll journeyman who was committed to his art as much as he was ambitious to become a star.  And although I prefer his previous LP, Gasoline Alley (see my review of that album from November 2012), it's easy to see why Every Picture Tells a Story is anointed as Rod's masterpiece.  It was the record that displayed Stewart's indomitable ability to convey all sorts of emotions and experience with his voice, with some of the sharpest and most tradition-oriented musicians in Britain backing him, at a time when a mass audience was willing to listen.  Stewart would spend the late seventies and the eighties recording junk to keep himself atop the charts, and though he became an even bigger star then, Every Picture Tells a Story captures a moment when the magnitude of his stardom was in sync with the value of his music.

Every Picture Tells a Story is a perfect blend of folk, blues and heavy rock, comprised of original songs and covers that explore love, heartache, and maturation.  The title track is a forceful chronicle of a quest for worldliness culminating in the loss of sexual innocence, while Stewart's worn delivery on Ted Anderson's "Seems Like a Long Time" and Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" gives voice to waiting forever for relief.  Stewart has already found that relief by plumbing the depths of his soul and confronting his own sense of loneliness with resignation but also with determination to see himself through.  Stewart voices confusion, tenderness and desire throughout this album, and "Maggie May," about an affair with an older woman, allows him to express all of that at once to the tune of the tart acoustic guitar lines and the pointed drum patterns that typify the song, as well as the rest of the album.

And how about that music!  Stewart benefits handsomely from his studio buddies, which include fellow Faces Ian McLagan on keyboards and Ron Wood on guitar and bass, Martin Quittenton (whom he co-wrote "Maggie May" with) on classical guitar, and, on drums, the incomparable Mick Waller, who produced backbeats so complex that even slide rules couldn't explain them.  The backing musicians carefully enunciate each note in a crisp, earthy, no-nonsense matter.  They particularly lend intricacy and intimacy to Rod's heartfelt romantic lament "Mandolin Wind" and his cover of Tim Hardin's "Reason To Believe" that complements his raspy tenderness.  (The mandolin performances on this LP, by the way, are courtesy of Lindisfarne's Ray Jackson, whose name Stewart couldn't recall when he wrote Every Picture Tells a Story's liner notes.)

Stewart's sidemen play even the heaviest arrangements with subtlety; they help him recontextualize the Temptations' "(I Know) I'm Losing You" as a straight rock song without making it sound like the formulaic heavy AOR that rock was already becoming, and the spareness on "That's All Right (Mama)" gives Stewart the chance to update the urgency of the old Arthur Crudup song without taking anything away from Elvis Presley's  recording.  Indeed, in trying to live up to Presley's standard, Rod makes the song very much his own . . .  and the recitation of "Amazing Grace" that follows it closes the sale.  Which makes what ultimately followed so dismaying; having sold himself as an artist, Stewart went on to sell himself out.  He righted himself in the nineties, and the twenty-first century has seen him take chances on pop standards and rediscover his fondness for Motown with varying degrees of commercial and artistic success.  In fact, the best way to start an argument about Rod Stewart these days is to offer an opinion on his Great American Songbook albums.  (Positive or negative?  Take your pick!)  But, while Every Picture Tells a Story isn't necessarily Stewart's best album, it sums up his artistic integrity in spades.  And there's no argument about that.