Hablando de Stewart, he encontrado la crítica que Jimmy Guterman hizo de
Every Picture Tells a Story en su libro
The Best Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time: a Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love. Entre los 100 discos elegidos, Guterman colocó el álbum de Stewart en el nº 1. Copio la crítica:
One of the cardinal myths of rock and roll is that it’s nothing more than black music played by white people. Such an assertion is usually an attemp to cast aspersions on either the source (as played by a black, the stuff was too rough to deserve a hearing) or the recipient (the whites just stole it). The truth is that white boys learned about the blues and loved it so much that they sought to make sense of it in their own language. This may be counterintuitive but it is also indisputable. Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis in Memphis, Buddy Holly in Clovis: these hillbilly cats knew that they didn’t belong in existing structures, that they had to create a new world built on the music they heard on the wrong sides of the tracks in their respective hometowns.
This all got started in July 1954, when Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black tore through an Arthur Crudup blues tune,
That’s All Right, under the supervision of Sun Records owner Sam Phillips. “That’s different”, Phillips said while they played it back. “That’s a pop song now”. Not quite: it resembled nothing on the pop radio stations of the day. What Phillips meant by “pop song” was that this new version wasn’t quite country, wasn’t quite blues. It was… different, but it was something that Phillips immediately sensed would move both blues and country folk. That’s why it was a “pop song”.
One of the most vivid tracks on Rod Stewart’s
Every Picture Tells a Story is a hard-edged
That’s All Right, based on the Elvis, Scotty and Bill version. It rocks harder, thanks to the Cromagnon drumming of Mick Waller, the leviathan guitars of Stewart, Ron Wood and Martin Quittenton, and Stewart’s distintive rasp cajoling, charming, testifying and dancing. The elemental backup, tight and unstudied, gladly cedes room to Stewart, unlike most of the electric British hard rock of the time. Singer and band travel up and down together, through inside jokes (such as a quote from an older Stewart composition) and perilous key changes. This is a song he’s known for fifteen years and Elvis’s version is in a record that Rod has sung along with for all that time. Concious of it or not, Stewart understands tha breakthrough that Elvis pulled off in the Memphis Recording Service. He knows the extent and ramifications of what Elvis invented. He wants to be Elvis, an icon so overwhelming that even a British kid like Rod can identify with it.
Every Picture Tells a Story is Stewart’s bid for rock and roll immortality, an ambitious record in a variety of senses (he wants Elvis’s wallet as well as his gifts) and dwarfs other such attempts, even successful ones like Jimi Hendrix’s
Are You Experienced? and Bruce Springsteen’s
Born in the U.S.A.. Stewart’s third solo album is an all-encompassing work: Stewart demands attention from everyone on every level. His imaginative songwriting is rife with telling detail: the hair-combing scene in
Every Picture Tells a Story, the morning-after madness in
Maggie May and the weather report in
Mandolin Wind are all the products of a man in love with the world and his ability to describe that world and reassure himself.
The performances exceed the writing, especially on the outside tunes, whick thrive on Stewart’s devotion to them.
(I Know) I’m Losing You is a hard rock version of the Temptations hit that Stewart recorded with his sometimes band the Faces. Stewart knows not to mimic the Motown original: he accepts the Sun dictum that personal expression far outlasts attempts to copy, that copying is in itself not merely fruitless but intolerable. Stewart puts across Tim Hardin’s
Reason to Believe as an organ-driven call for moxie in the face of resignation, and on the mostly acoustic take on Bob Dylan’s aching
Tomorrow is a Long Time, Stewart is even more determined. Most of the time, the characters in
Every Picture Tells a Story find themselves in a desperate condition, and what upraises them is the confidence of the narrator.
Such endurance is most apparent on
Every Picture Tells a Story and
Maggie May, a pair of shattering acoustic hard-rock numbers about young men (or old boys, your call) gaining experience in ways they never expected or intended. These two songs, among the most durable pop music offerings of the century, are so bold, so honest about their doubts, so willing and able to trascend their immediate difficulties, that they fulfill the dreams Woody Guthrie gave life to in
Bound for Glory. On
Every Picture Tells a Story, Rod Stewart is as undeniable, as welcome, as any singer will ever be. It’s no wonder that this record made Stewart’s dreams come true (not to mention the aspirations of his fans). Stewart is phenomenally rich now, but his records stink (also, he has recently ruined
Every Picture Tells a Story for many by selling it to a beer company). As
Every Picture Tells a Story reminds you at every turn, he once had it all. And that’s no fairy tale.
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, sinceramente el tiempo les ha dado la espalda a alguno de esos álbumes respecto a otros no nombrados ahi.