Rod Stewart

Rod Stewart dug graves in Highgate Cemetery and tried his luck as a defender for Brentford FC before realizing the real money was in his voice. In the 1960s, nobody bet on a skinny kid with a sharp nose and a hairstyle that resembled a porcupine. He had a voice roughened by cheap tobacco and distilled liquor in London dives.

That raspy voice saved him from the mud.

Jeff Beck recruited him to provide vocals for his electric blues band. On those stages, Stewart learned to handle noisy rooms where the crowd threw beer cups if the guitar solo dragged on too long. Soon after, he joined Faces alongside Ron Wood.

For four years, he juggled his band's chaotic tours with solo recording sessions in the studio. In 1971 he released Every Picture Tells a Story. The track list included Maggie May, an acoustic song about an older woman that the Mercury Records executives relegated to the B-side of a promo single.

Radio stations ignored the company's orders and kept playing the track relentlessly. The single reached No. 1 on the sales charts in the UK and the US within a few weeks. That financial impact broke up the dynamics of Faces and pushed the frontman to go solo.

Los Angeles Glamour and the Movie Business

By the late seventies, the greasy British pub rock had lost its appeal for the singer. Stewart packed his bags, settled in California and discovered that the screen could multiply the reach of his songs.

In 1978 he released Blondes Have More Fun. Its lead single, Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?, embraced disco music with synthesizer arrangements and a cheeky chorus. The music press accused him of betrayal for embracing mass appeal without apology. But the dance floors and movie theaters filled the cash registers.

The commercial provocation paid off right away.

Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who would later direct Highlander in 1986, built the artist's visual style through music videos with street-action narratives such as Tonight I'm Yours and Young Turks. Those shoots worked as small short films designed to air nonstop on television.

Big-budget movies also called for his raspy voice. For Ron Howard's comedy Night Shift in 1982, he recorded the original version of That's What Friends Are For, produced by Burt Bacharach. In 1993, he teamed up with Sting and Bryan Adams to record All for Love, the central song from The Three Musketeers, which topped the box office charts for an entire month.

The Standards Vault

When the music industry swerved toward alternative sounds at the start of the century, Stewart made an unexpected move for the business. In 2002 he released It Had to Be You: The Great American Songbook, a collection of classic songs from the 1930s and 1940s backed by executive Clive Davis.

The plan smelled like an early retirement for an aging rocker. But the move produced five orchestral volumes and surpassed twenty million copies shipped to record stores all over the planet. That's how he managed to fill arenas for an entire decade without writing a single new line of lyrics.

In 2024 he recorded the album Swing Fever with pianist Jools Holland, a revisit of the classic big band songbook recorded live in the studio without digital tricks [1].

In February 2024, the singer sold his complete publishing catalog and recording rights to Irving Azoff's company for nearly one hundred million dollars [2]. The deal closed the transfer of six decades of master recordings and handed over the exploitation of his name in future business deals [2].