Rod Stewart’s career is one of the most dramatically bifurcated in rock history — a division so complete that the two halves of it seem to have been lived by different people who happen to share a voice and a haircut. The early Rod Stewart — the one who made Every Picture Tells a Story and Gasoline Alley and who sang with the Faces — is regarded by serious music critics and by musicians who were present for it as one of the most authentic and most gifted artists in British rock. The later Rod Stewart — the one who made Do Ya Think I’m Sexy and who spent the 1980s and 1990s in various degrees of commercial calculation — is regarded by many of the same people with the specific disappointment reserved for someone who had something real and chose not to sustain it.
Stewart himself has addressed this division with varying degrees of honesty across the decades — sometimes defending the later work with the conviction of someone who means it, sometimes acknowledging the gap between what he was and what he became with the candor of someone who has decided that the honest accounting is more respectful to both halves than the defensive one.
The specific night in San Francisco — during the Every Picture Tells a Story period, 1971 or 1972 by the accounts of people who were present — was a Faces concert that has been described in the accounts of band members from that era as one of the finest the band ever gave. The music was at the level that the early Faces were capable of at their peak — loose, joyful, slightly chaotic in the way that the best rock and roll is slightly chaotic, the specific combination of Ron Wood’s guitar and Rod Stewart’s voice and the rest of the band that produced something that was not quite reproducible in any other configuration.
After the show, Stewart told his band something that has been reported in partial accounts by people who were present backstage — the specific content varying between accounts but the essential meaning consistent: that he was not going to do something. The what that he was not going to do has been characterized differently by different sources. Some accounts have it about the physical demands of performing at that level. Some accounts have it about the personal cost of the specific kind of emotional exposure that his performances of that period required. Some accounts have it about the commercial direction the band’s management was pushing toward.
What is consistent is that what he said he would not do was connected to the specific quality of what had happened on stage that night — that the performance had been too real, too demanding, too exposing of something he was not certain he wanted to continue exposing. And that the subsequent trajectory of his career — the conscious movement toward the more commercially managed presentation that defined the mid and late 1970s — was related to that night in San Francisco in a way that the people who were present have never fully described and have never fully explained.
The voice that made Maggie May one of the finest rock vocals of the era is the same voice that made Do Ya Think I’m Sexy one of the most deliberately commercial recordings of 1978. The journey between them began somewhere — and the people who were in San Francisco that night have suggested that the journey began there, with something Stewart said he would not do again, which turned out to mean something he would not be again.