Rod: The Autobiography (28 page)

I believe the first recorded use of live chickens by the Sex Police was in a hotel in Dallas in 1985, and I was its victim. I was in a suite, filming an interview with the late, great Dick Clark, the legendary presenter of
American Bandstand
. The conversation was coming to an end when the door burst open, there was a chorused shout from the corridor of ‘Room service!’ and, for one surreal moment, the room became a blizzard of feathers and chicken shit. Clark, a consummate pro, seemed to find the whole thing rather amusing.

I was possibly fortunate it was only chickens. Sheep had been considered but had proved impossible to source at short notice. Ducks, similarly. It was the Sex Police’s lasting regret that a plan to fill someone’s hotel bathroom with ducks never quite came off, though it got quite far down the line.

Chickens, though, were easier to procure. Accordingly, in Newfoundland, Canada, the Sex Police removed every item of furniture from the room of one of the crew, locked it all in an adjacent room (all standard procedure) and, for the final flourish, left two chickens behind. The crew member returned to the room with a girl that he had picked up – and spent a couple of hours there regardless, which would seem remarkable, except
that behaving as if nothing had happened, as if everything was proceeding as normal, was absolutely critical. If you reacted, you were only inviting more and worse treatment.

Which is why, when I pulled my boots on at the end of a long-haul British Airways flight between Los Angeles and London on 22 December 1977, and felt the crunch of peanuts, coupled with a slightly gooey sensation, most likely attributable (experience told me) to strawberry jam, I didn’t withdraw my feet at once, as instinct might have told me to. I finished doing up the boots and strolled off the plane and into Heathrow Airport, as naturally as a man can when his footwear has been filled with assorted aeroplane catering items.

Or maybe I was just too drunk to notice. Apparently I was still holding a glass of cognac and singing Jolson’s ‘Mammy’ when I reached the baggage collection area. But even then, surely, the realisation was dawning on me that this time we had gone too far. Certainly the sight of Jim Cregan, my guitarist, his curly hair full of ash and cigarette butts and his face smeared with what seemed, upon closer inspection, to be honey, would have been a decent clue. And the laughing was definitely about to stop because Jimmy Horowitz, from the management team, was shortly to be arrested in the airport’s precincts for public drunkenness. (Fine: £25 by the order of Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court.) Behind us lay a British Airways first-class cabin liberally re-decorated with mustard. And ahead of us lay a rightful bashing in the press for our disgraceful behaviour. I don’t know what came over us.

Actually, I do: cognac.

Still, as the
Daily Telegraph
reported: ‘Mr Horowitz admitted that some of the group had taken a ride on the luggage conveyor belt, but he said that Rod Stewart was too drunk to get on and just lay in a corner under some luggage.’ So, at least one of us maintained some decorum. Shortly after that, the border official opened Horowitz’s passport and two slices of bacon fell out. A sorry episode, all in all, and one for which I apologised fulsomely in due course to British Airways. I would like to say we learned
a lesson here, and were chastened, and got a grip on ourselves from this point forward. But we didn’t.

It will be obvious from the above that touring behaviour didn’t become restrained after the Faces. On the contrary, when I set out on the road in 1976 for the first time as a solo artist, it was as if the notoriety of the Faces was out there as a precedent. I think the word going around musicians was that if you joined Rod Stewart’s band, you’d better get used to the bevvy and act daft. So it was as if the Faces were a benchmark to be surpassed. Looking back, I think that very often we managed it, posting new records for on-the-road stupidity by a touring rock group.

For the first post-Faces touring band, I wanted three guitarists. At the time, people sneered and said, ‘It’s taken him three guitarists to replace Ronnie Wood,’ but it wasn’t about that. I wanted three guitarists for the thickness of the sound, and for the dynamic between them, and also (I don’t mind admitting) because I thought it would look good. I had seen it work for Fleetwood Mac.

So, on guitar there was Jim Cregan. (Jim played that lovely, fluid acoustic guitar solo on Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’. We christened him ‘the Somerset Segovia’.) And also on guitar there was Gary Grainger. (Gary had been in the band Strider, who had supported the Faces. He was there to provide a bit of raunch.) And also on guitar there was Billy Peek. I had seen Billy on television in America, playing with Chuck Berry’s band, and he sounded great. I rang Tom Dowd up and said, ‘We’ve got to get him.’ This was during the recording of
A Night on the Town
. I figured that if his rock ’n’ roll playing was good enough for Chuck Berry, it was probably good enough for me.

Phil Chen, the bass player, was someone I had asked to consider joining the Faces after Ronnie Lane had left, but he had had another commitment at the time. The keyboard player was John Jarvis, a classically trained American who had played on
A
Night on the Town
and was a proper musician. And the drummer
was Carmine Appice, who had been in the rock band Vanilla Fudge. Carmine was American, but I talked to him about playing in a British style, rather than an American style. American rock ’n’ roll drumming is right smack on the beat. I wanted a British feel, which is slightly looser, where you sit in just behind the beat. It’s more relaxed. Of course, if it gets too relaxed, it all goes tits-up fairly quickly, as we discovered in the Faces on more than one occasion. So it’s about going for a flow and a looseness, but still holding it together. It’s what the Stones do so well.

I wanted us to take a relaxed approach in general, if at all possible. The word was, in those days, that Jackson Browne was doing virtually concert-length soundchecks. Then, afterwards, his band would be hauled back to listen to a tape of the entire show and everyone would have their errors and sins of omission pointed out to them. This wasn’t the way I saw it going. Our soundchecks tended to be as short as possible. Fifteen minutes would have been strenuous. And there were definitely no post-mortems. It mattered that the show was good, of course, and anyone who wasn’t cutting it on the night found themselves moved along very quickly. But it was meant to be rock ’n’ roll, after all. My attitude was that if it wasn’t fun and entertaining for us, it wasn’t likely to be fun and entertaining for anybody else.

At six, the evening before the first show of the tour, everyone had to come out in their stage-gear for a formal presentation of the outfits. This was never less than hilarious. I encouraged everyone to go in for flamboyance and colour. This wouldn’t always work. People would step into the room and say, ‘What do you think?’ And there would be cries of ‘Fucking hell! I’m not going on stage with you looking like that!’ Phil Chen would have some good little outfits, but Jim and Kevin would make some truly awe-inspiring mistakes and Carmine, the drummer, was probably the worst of the lot: terrible snakeskin-look shirts and silver waistcoats and leather jerkins. Billy, meanwhile, was a bit short and dumpy and we never knew quite what to do with him, in terms of stage presentation. So we used to dress him up as a Frenchman and leave it at that.

I had cloaks made for the band: big velvet cloaks with their initials on them. The roadies had to stand there as the band came off stage after the show and swaddle them on their way to the limousines. And some of them didn’t even sweat. What a waste of money.

Pranks not only took place offstage, they were popular during shows as well: another hangover from the days of the Faces. The show was in no way sacrosanct and if you could think of a good way to send it up, that was fine. For instance, Carmine would take a drum solo (they were still obligatory in those days) which would end with him standing on his stool, sticks aloft. This was the cue for his drum roadie, at the back of the stage, to bash the giant gong suspended behind Carmine’s kit (giant gongs, too, were obligatory at this time), thus bringing the solo to a resonant conclusion. The rest of the band was backstage at this point, remember, so it was the work of moments to snatch the beater off the roadie, leaving Carmine stood on his stool, waiting for the gong that never came.

Alternatively, because the microphone for the gong was generally placed to the rear of it, out of view of the audience, you could very easily replace the noise of the gong with the slightly more mocking sound of a toy hooter or a bicycle bell or, better still, a fart, if one could be mustered. (Farting into microphones became an increasing preoccupation of my touring bands as the 1980s wore on. Sound engineers learned to leave the microphones turned down until the last possible minute at the start of shows to prevent auditoriums abruptly filling with the vastly amplified sound of breaking wind.)

Sometimes slapstick didn’t need to be created. Sometimes it just happened anyway. To create a moment of theatre, we had a lamp post up in the roof that used to be lowered down in darkness just before I sang ‘The Killing of Georgie’. One night I got right underneath it by mistake, becoming one of a very small number of rock artists who have been flattened mid-show by a ten-foot pole. (Just bruises, thank you for asking.)

The band evolved: Robin Le Mesurier arrived on guitar, Kevin
Savigar on keyboards – people who came to be close friends of mine in the ensuing years. The pranking evolved, too. In November 1984, the tour for the
Camouflage
album moved to Tokyo, Japan, where certain members of the band and crew discovered the sport of ‘ledge walking’: the passage from one person’s hotel room to another using only the windowsills. At heights of anything up to twenty-five floors, this game took a lot of nerve. Or a lot of drink. Or a lot of drink in tandem with a lot of nerve. Either way, although I could readily see the comedy value in appearing unannounced at someone’s window on the twenty-fifth floor of a Tokyo high-rise and tapping to come in, I wasn’t persuaded to join in. We all have our limits, and ledge-walking was mine.

As everyone knows, there’s a lot of dead time to fill on tour with a rock band, and you are fighting the evil grip of boredom all the way.

‘If I balance this tray on my head, how many things will it be possible to place on it before the whole thing collapses?’

‘If I put on this plastic cover that came with the dry-cleaning, will it look like a straitjacket?’

‘What would it be like if I wrapped myself entirely in cling film?’

‘Will this headboard fit in that lift?’

‘Where can one get ducks?’

These are the kinds of questions which enter the mind of the touring rock musician and won’t go away until they have been answered. And it might seem a slightly bizarre thing to say about an organisation dedicated to the releasing of live chickens in hotel suites, but I think the Sex Police stopped us going mad.

[Answers to the above questions: 1) a fruit bowl containing fruit; a water jug; three miniature bottles of wine; two paperback books; a sponge bag; and a pair of trousers, usually. 2) Yes. 3) You will look like a packet of uncooked chicken breast, but it will feel quite cosy. 4) Yes, if you push it hard enough. 5) Like I say, we never found out.]

NEVER MIND JOE SMITH
of Warner Bros. and his theory about lasting ten years in the music business. An equally pressing question for me in 1977 was, could I last ten months with just the one woman? In November, separated from Britt and Liz Treadwell, I started dating Bebe Buell, a former
Playboy
centrefold who had recently finished an affair with Todd Rundgren, the American rock musician. Things might have gone better with Bebe if I hadn’t brought her to London for a week and then, while we were there, grown rather distracted by Marcy Hanson. At this point, I was technically two-timing a
Playboy
model with another
Playboy
model.

Was marriage particularly on my agenda at this point? I think we can fairly strongly infer that it wasn’t.

But then I met Alana.

We first set eyes on each other in spring 1978 at a party given for my road crew at the Playboy Club in Los Angeles, a lushly carpeted institution where the drinks were served by girls in one-piece velvet bunny suits. (And that’s how extravagant the music industry was in those days, by the way: even the roadies got a party at the Playboy Club.) Soon after that, I met her properly at a far nobbier gathering organised by the super agent Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar above Ma Maison restaurant. Alana Hamilton was tall, long-legged and (I expect you can guess where this is going) blonde, with the most fantastic smile; a
Southern belle with edge in a beautiful long, tightly fitting white dress. We spoke about music, as I recall, and she told me straight out and laughing that she was a country and western fan, which put me in my place, but there was a real, electric charge between us straight away – that sense you have that something very exciting could happen in the right circumstances. She was there with a date, so our encounter was short and sweet, but I knew that I wanted to see her again.

My usual procedure in these situations was to get Tony Toon to ring up and enquire tentatively about the possibility of a date. This didn’t impress Alana one little bit. She told Tony that if I wanted a date with her, I would have to call her myself. So I steeled myself and did so.

Alana consulted her clearly very busy social diary and said, ‘I’m going to a dinner at Robert Stigwood’s. Do you want to come with me?’ Stigwood was the imposingly successful theatre and film producer who also worked as a manager of groups like Cream and the Bee Gees. I said, ‘Sounds good.’ It was during the course of that evening that Alana and I began to get to know each other.