Many have long found it difficult to take Rod Stewart seriously.
The result is a striking and evocative portrait of the most fecund and vital stage in the life and career of one of popular music\'s most important artists..
Sean Egan has interviewed at length many of Stewart\'s colleagues, collaborators, and cohabitees from the period, including musicians Micky Waller, Pete Sears, Ray Jackson, Ian McLagan, Kenney Jones, and Jim Cregan, recording engineer Mike Bobak, manager Billy Gaff, and Stewart\'s then-girlfriend and muse Dee Harrington.
All of this and more is the subject of Rod Stewart: The Classic Years.
They include the splendid 1976 LP A Night on the Town and his peerless confessional love songs of 1977 You\'re in My Heart (The Final Acclaim) and I Was Only Joking.
On top of this are solo-Stewart classics that are neglected because he released them after a point where his increasingly outlandish image caused some of his original fans to disdain to any longer take him seriously.
Said semi-decade also saw Stewart front the Faces, whose often likeably ramshackle albums gave his fans a double dose of their idol each year.
His 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story is considered by some of them to literally be the best album of all time.
His string of albums for the Mercury label across the first half of that decade sent critics into raptures.
The bulk of Stewart\'s Classic recordings were made in the 1970s.
Again and again, the combination of his heartwracked songs and gravelly, sensitive vocal delivery have conjured sonic magic.
However, once we get past the awkward stuff--leopard-skin leggings, bum-wiggling stage schticks, and a hairstyle unseemly for a man of his age--there remains the undeniable fact that the Caledonian Cockney is responsible for some of the greatest recordings ever made.
Many have long found it difficult to take Rod Stewart seriously
