Turn Around Bright Eyes (15 page)

In his younger days, Rod the Mod was a rambling rock & roll rogue, a devil-may-care ladies’ man charming the world with his tales of romance and adventure. By the time I got to him, Rod was used up, a grim blond Hollywood Casanova with a vacant jet-lag smile on his face that says “if it’s Tuesday this must be Wednesday.” Yet this was my Rod. I was fascinated by his seventies album covers: his sozzled grin, the way he lounged around in pink satin kimonos, his hair spiked up in a state of permanently postcoital bed-head.

You can see your future in his dazed grin, the one he flashes on all his album covers. The grin that says, “I’m all right, me. The tonsils may be a tad roughed up and I can’t get out of this leopard skin catsuit because it’s been three days since I saw the Danish bird who zipped me in. She disappeared between the lobby and the limo. But don’t worry, I’m just here to entertain. And now, if you please, the boys in the band and meself would like to sing you a song about me passion and me pain. It’s called, ‘Hot Legs.’”

Rod faces everything with this serene smile of detachment, as if his life is this great joke he’s stumbled into. Rod’s smile charmed me when I was a little boy. I had only the vaguest idea of what that smile meant, partly because I was too young to have a clear idea what alcohol was, and I knew nothing about hotel rooms, hangovers, divorce lawyers, paternity suits, stomach pumps, all the other clichéd accoutrements of a rock slut’s existence. But it’s not just a smug or self-satisfied grin, and you couldn’t call it stoic or tragic: It’s perpetually bemused.

Everybody likes Rod Stewart, especially Rod Stewart. “I think England is fed up with seeing its pop stars being humble,” he mused in 1972. “Perhaps they should—what’s the word—flaunt it a bit. Me, I’ve never been through a humble phase.” Why yes, Rod, “flaunt it” is definitely the word, and give the man credit for sticking to his guns. He
still
hasn’t hit his humble phase, and nobody would ever want him to.

As a kid, when “Hot Legs” and “You’re in My Heart” and “Tonight’s the Night” were all over the radio, I couldn’t place Rod anywhere in the timeline of pop music. His hits resembled the Irish songs I heard old men sing in pubs, but they were also rock & roll. He didn’t look or sound young, and his most famous hit, “Maggie May,” sounded like he dug it out of a trunk in the attic. Everything about that song feels antique, with a mandolin solo that drops in from some other century. But it has never disappeared. You will hear it somewhere in the next week. It transcends time and trends.

Rod has songs everybody knows. But he also has songs nobody remembers, least of all Rod. He had his classic rock phase, his disco phase, his synth-pop phase, and his latest phase of mom-jazz oldies covers. His early albums are full of buried treasures that are funny (“Lost Paraguayos”) or sentimental (“Love Lives Here”) or both (“Lady Day”). But even in his Hollywood automatic-pilot phase in the 1980s, he had great pop-trash nuggets on terrible albums nobody ever played twice (“She Won’t Dance with Me,” “Oh God I Wish I Was Home Tonight”), or great hit singles forgotten a week after they dropped off the charts (“Passion,” “Baby Jane,” “Somebody Special”). Nobody cares about these songs and that’s fine with Rod, so I guess it’s fine with me. These days I hear him sing “Moon River” on my mom’s radio, and that’s fine with me, too.

A friend did Rod’s hair for a photo shoot and reported that he was wearing see-through plastic flip-flops, yet that somehow gave her an even bigger crush on him. Rod doesn’t care. He will always tease the ladies, with so much romantic wreckage not even he could recall which ex goes with which song: there’s Maggie May, Hot Legs, Shanghai Lil, Baby Jane, Rita, a big-bosomed lady with a Dutch accent, enough to kill or at least bankrupt a lesser man. Everyone’s favorite Rod muse has to be the Swedish sex nuke Britt Ekland, who does the orgasmic moans at the end of “Tonight’s the Night.” According to her excellent autobiography,
True Britt
, she was introduced to Rod by Joan Collins, which makes all the sense in the world.

Some rock stars get tragic as time passes. That would never happen to Rod. He doesn’t take any of this nonsense personally. In the immortal words of Elvis Presley, “Man, I just work here.” That’s Rod’s attitude, too.

You can see that in his face and hear it in his voice: that sense of adulthood as something that sneaks up on you, in the middle of your adventures, and conquers you. You blink once and you’re on a plane, or in an airport lounge, or onstage. Or you hear one of your old songs on the radio and you think, “Crikey, I was cool once. ‘My body stunk, but I kept my funk’—who wrote that line? I did? How the hell did I do that?” Then you go out on the
American Idol
finale in a tux, flounder through “Maggie May,” barely hitting your marks. For a second or two, you might even have the vague suspicion that you blew it somewhere down the line. Then you bite your lip and turn around and it’s showtime.

You can hear it all in Rod’s voice and see it on his face, that smile that says, “Wait, how did I get here?” Every guy knows that smile and what it means, because every guy knows that sensation—that feeling of being trapped in your own life. We know that smile because Rod taught us what it looks like, and we recognize that smile when we see it in the mirror, or on the faces of our friends, at weddings, anniversaries, christenings, or ordinary afternoons. It’s the smile of a man realizing he is no longer a kid, and although he has no idea how it happened, he’s pretty sure it would make a cool story if he ever gets a spare minute to piece it all together.

Like most men, I first realized I was turning into Rod Stewart around the time I turned twenty-four. It’s scary the first few times this feeling hits you, but then it starts to be funny, and that’s when you catch yourself wearing that Rod grin. You have blundered into an adult existence you don’t understand, and you can’t tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it’s too late either way. The feeling waxes and wanes as time goes by. Some years are a little bit Rod, some are extremely Rod, some are moderately Rod.

But I can’t rule out going Full Rod. No man can. Any male is just a couple of fate-kicks away from that, whether it takes a few divorces, a few cocktails, the wrong pair of leotards a few tragic degrees too tight, or just a life that goes according to the plans you made when you were too young to know better. One day you’re a rock & roll rake, the next you’re an L.A. roué trapped in that same crusty catsuit. How did you get here? Was this what you wanted? How much say did you have in this decision? What the hell happened to you? And what do you have to show for it all, besides that smile?

Like I said: No man plans to turn into Rod Stewart. It just happens.

The first time I truly felt Rod’s love touch was a hot summer night, deep in the seventies, in the pinball room of a Holiday Inn in Dunn, North Carolina. My family was on our yearly road trip to Disney World, and we always stayed at this Holiday Inn because my dad figured it was located at the precise geographical halfway point between Boston and Orlando. So over the years I got to know that pinball room well: the Elton John “Captain Fantastic” machine, a couple of others, an air hockey table, foosball, all on a carpet that was Bubble Yum green. And a jukebox.

Every summer, we pulled into the motel parking lot after a long day on the road. I liked to loiter around the pinball room pretending I was staying at the motel all by myself, the way a young boy does. This night, there was a teenage girl playing the Captain Fantastic, a real seventies dream-weaver gypsy queen, feathered hair, blue jeans, hemp-braided belt. I only saw her that one night, but I bet even today I could pick her out of a police lineup and charge her with crimes of love. She commanded the jukebox, playing the same two songs over and over all night: ELO’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” and Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night.”

I felt safe with “Sweet Talkin’ Woman,” which was one of my favorite songs. I could relate to ELO, and the way Jeff Lynne sang about falling in love with girls who walk too fast and talk too sweet and slip away before you can catch them. I also admired the cellos. But I didn’t feel safe with “Tonight’s the Night” at all. I was threatened by how much this older girl liked it.

The jukebox in North Carolina played “Tonight’s the Night” complete with the forbidden line, “Spread your wings and let me come inside.” Not exactly a double entendre—it’s barely two-thirds of an entendre. But it was too much for the radio. The pop stations back home censored that verse. The only time I’d heard the “spread your wings” line was on TV, during the prime-time soap
Family
, as the soundtrack to a slow dance between Kristy McNichol and Leif Garrett.

This song has to be the most effective anti-sex commercial ever; it makes the act of physical love sound unbelievably sordid. They should play it in schools to drive down the pregnancy rates. Rod invites his virgin child into the parlor, pulls down the shades, and pours her a glass of wing-spreading potion. He disconnects the telephone line (probably because Jeff Lynne won’t stop calling, begging her to come back). A brief interlude of gown-loosening, then it’s upstairs o’clock. Somehow you just know how it will end: Rod passed out on the couch, pants down, snoring, while she goes through his wallet, copies his credit card numbers, and plugs in the phone to call her boyfriend back home in Strasbourg.

The girl in the pinball room loved both these seventies songs, even though they’re so different. She clearly heard some part of her soul in them. I strained to understand what that was. Did she identify with the girl in “Tonight’s the Night,” or the seducer? Could she translate the mysterious vocalese at the end, where Rod and Britt sing sexy pillow-talk words in their secret alphabet? Were they speaking French? Or Swedish? Maybe sex-havers speak their own language, which the rest of us can’t understand?

Maybe someday you’ll translate this exotic language, I told myself, crouched over the Duotron machine with my fingers sweaty on the flippers. You will spread your wings. Someday you will be as old and wise as Rod, and not only will you speak this language, you will forget you ever heard it as alien and forbidding.

P.S. Turns out it’s just French. It’s not that big a deal.

Rod was always different from the other seventies rock gods. He’d been around the world and seen it all. He was on the cover of the
Rolling Stone
with Britt. For
A Night on the Town
, the 1976 album with “Tonight’s the Night,” he has a champagne glass, a straw boater perched on his head, and that same dazed expression. He doesn’t even realize this is a photo shoot. He’s just looking over the cameraman’s shoulder, to see if the Swiss models are back with the limes.

For seventies kids, Rod had something else that set him apart. He had the coolest rock star rumor ever. Every school cafeteria was abuzz with the Rod Stewart rumor. The story goes, Rod collapses onstage at Madison Square Garden. They rush him to the ER, pump his stomach, and find . . . a
lot
of semen. Pints. Quarts. Gallons.

Nobody seemed to believe this tale, but everybody loved to tell it. Even Rod himself. “That story spread all around the fucking world!” Stewart chortled to
Rolling Stone
in 1988, still admirably amused by the whole thing. “It was so laughable, it never really hurt me. What could it have been? A fleet of fucking sailors? Or footballers? I mean, what the hell?
Jesus Christ!
”

“Laughable” is a telling word. When you’re Rod, everything is laughable, including the fact that people all over the planet might be laughing at you. But he’s 100 percent right: Nobody bought it. It was just one of those urban legends too funny not to pass on, like the Fonz getting killed in a motorcycle crash or Mikey dying from Pop Rocks (although, to be honest, I believed those). The stomach-pump story has made many comebacks over the years; sometimes it changes to a story about a movie star who goes to the ER with an object up his butt. The stars’ names change—but this rumor was around before they were born.

Everybody loves these hospital rumors, even though nobody believes them. They never explain why a rich celebrity goes to a public hospital instead of calling a fancy doctor. Next time you’re in the hospital waiting room, take a look around. Not a lot of rock stars there, right? You’re not arm-wrestling Cher for that back issue of
Parenting Reluctantly
magazine, are you? Even as a kid, you know hospitals are miserable places where you don’t run into celebrities, only other dumb kids who ate paint or played in poison ivy.

We all knew the stomach-pump story was phony, but we loved it. And I believe the reason was that we knew Rod would think it was funny, too. Even a worldwide rumor about his sex life makes him chuckle, like he’s watching himself from a safer distance than we do.

“Hot Legs” is a song I first experienced in sixth grade, when I watched Rod sing it on a Cher TV special. I can find the clip on YouTube, but I still can’t believe it really happened: Rod cavorts like a burlesque dancer, wearing skintight red hot pants, a purple scarf, and nothing else. He slips behind the cocktail bar to drop trou and change into something a little more comfortable, like a shiny silver leisure suit, with the shirt knotted in his midriff. Then he dances off for a date with Dolly Parton. The seventies kicked ass.

Everybody says Rod wrote all his great songs in the early seventies, and that’s basically true. He’s the all-time most infamous case of selling out. He couldn’t wait to leave his folkie days behind and go Hollywood. But he was already selling millions of records when he was all mandolin solos and tartan kilts. So you can’t accuse him of doing it for the money—it’s more like he sold out for self-expression. It took real artistic courage to sing “Hot Legs.”

Am I going to argue his late albums are better than people think? No, because I’ve heard them, and they’re exactly as flimsy as you’d assume. What, you think I’m gonna claim you’re missing out by not listening to
Body Wishes
? Believe me, you have made a wise decision. If you don’t do anything else right all day, you can assure yourself you avoided
Body Wishes
.