No Expectations

An evening with Rod Stewart

The other night I was at a dinner party and someone asked, ‘What’s the next show you have tickets to?” Tim and Donna were going to see Big Thief and Lucinda Williams at the Greek. Joseph was going to see Patti Smith at Stern Grove. Evie had tickets to see the Soul Train musical and Ned, being Ned, was going to see some nameless band he’d vaguely heard of which was doing a show at a mystery  warehouse in the Bayview. (The flyer he had seen the gig on had omitted to put its  address, making it all the more appealing.)

Me, I had nothing. In fact, I subsequently posted a long wail about how I couldn’t afford to see anything anymore – or even get into Stern Grove, because the free seats sell out so fast. So you can imagine my surprise when a mere two nights later I found myself at Shoreline Amphitheater seeing Cheap Trick and Rod Stewart.

Rod Stewart, I hear you cry. Rod Stewart? But guess what, my friends, I love Rod Stewart and I don’t even feel guilty about it. A long time ago, there was this great book edited by Greil Marcus called “Stranded: Rock ‘n’ Roll For A Desert Island,“ and I even used to always say my (putative) entry would have been “Every Picture Tells A Story.”

I still wouldn’t have gone to see the show, however, but a series of circumstances which I won’t bore you with – it involved a traffic jam, the movie theater, and a screening of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – saw me picking my way quietly through the Google Complex at 8 o clock on Tuesday, just as the sun was setting on the Bay.

(Shoreline ridge.)

I wished, as I walked, that there was one of those yellow and red Google bikes I could have ridden instead, but they take them away at night time. Or at least they do on concert nights because there are now these guys in electric rickshaws all covered in Christmas lights who will bike you up to the gate.

(That’s the googleplex in the distance. Or part of it. People working late…)

A few years ago, during Covid, I biked around here a lot, and one day I remember biking up to the arena and peering into the empty concert shell. It looked a lot different empty, and it made me very sad remembering all the fun nights I’d spent there in the company of my peers. It had occurred to me then that the ridge would be a good place to watch a show for free – like we used to watch Greek shows in Berkeley for free from above the stadium – and I was maybe going to do that if I couldn’t get in or if tickets were exorbitant. But just as I was inquiring at the Box Office window about that, a man tapped me on my shoulder and said, ‘Hey, I have a spare if you want to walk in with me.’

So I got in for free.

Of course, there is always something especially special about random, free, concert experiences; something about having no expectations makes every show like that all the better. Also, did I mention I love Rod Stewart? Or, well, I used to. Once upon a time when I was really pretty little I thought he was the apex of London cool, tight tartan trousers and all. I wasn’t sure how I felt these days, but when we found out what the concert that was tying up traffic was, just as we were driving up to the movie theater, I put “Handbags and Gladrags” on the radio and that was it. I just had to try and get in.

And it was obviously meant to be, thanks to some guy named Sebastian. (Thanks, Sebastian!) But it’s just so strange to be at a giant rock concert drinking a beer when you thought you were going to be watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and eating red vines. You kind of have to take a minute to settle in. When I got into the lawn area, Cheap Trick was just closing up shop, and everyone around me was cheering them and waving around these drinks they were selling that have magnetic lights in the plastic so it looks like you’re drinking kryptonite.

As I said, it took a minute to adjust. I kind of wasn’t ready. And then: bagpipes.

Yes, bagpipes. It was weird. And then, weirder still, Rod came on stage surrounded by these gorgeous women wearing blazers and little else, and played the Robert Palmer song “Addicted to Love.” In other words, the scene was a direct visual quotation of the music video, and such a very sucky one, at that.

But then, things turned around. Bam-bam-bam! In quick succession he sang “You Wear It Well” and “Ooh La La” and “Maggie May”. He sang, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” “Have I Told You Lately” and “The First Cut Is The Deepest.” He sang an epic version of “I’d Rather Be Blind,” which he dedicated to Christine McVie, and Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train.” He sang “People Get Ready.”  

Even better: it turned out that the Addicted to Love ladies were actually real musicians disguised as models. Under their jackets they wore silver-sequined mini dresses with these cute silver ankle boots, and three of them played violin, mandolin, and banjo, and one of them played the harp, and three other similarly-clad ladies sang, and two of those ladies could also do Scottish Highland dancing.

(I might have got the numbers wrong, to be honest: it was hard to tell with all the video screens.)

In short, there was an awful lot to look at on stage other than Rod – and that was probably a good thing. He looks pretty good for 78, but only in relative terms. And I couldn’t help but imagine that under his blingy rock star clothes he looked like Harrison Ford in those shocking first non-CGI scenes in the new “Indiana Jones.”

This is the thing about Rod Stewart, though. There’s no escaping the fact that he is a totally degraded artist. Indeed, he has degraded himself aesthetically in the same way that other artists degraded themselves physically or mentally by using too many drugs. But he has been that since before I even met him, so to speak: “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” turned a once-revered singer into a total joke. It was his last song before the encore, and I left during it -- it was still a terrible song and one which, like so much of his music, has a thick undercurrent of yeecch.

But the thing about Rod Stewart is, he has no idea. He doesn’t know that a song about how fun it is to deflower a virgin isn’t a cool, or that whilst leaving your kindly cougar lady-friend you should perhaps not say to her, “The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age” or even that the last verse of “Every Picture Tells A Story” is indefensibly racist.

I am not able to defend him on any of those counts, but the thing is, I still kind of like him. He just seems nice. My friend Wes, with whom I was texting throughout, said, “I just hate his strutting,” but I honestly believe that he is strutting in quotation marks. I have no hard evidence of that, but to me he always seems like he is in on the joke. I mean, at one moment in the show, he made mild mockery of a person in the front row who was texting instead of watching him, by holding out his palm and pretending to text while he sang. And he laughed while he did it, which was big of him.

Plus, there is certainly no doubt that when he is good, he is the best. That opening musical phrase of “Maggie May” – all the way up to the two drum beats that precede him singing, “Wake up Maggie” -- is possibly one of the top ten passages in 20^th century musical canon. And what kind of a lout doesn’t want to lay on the grass in the summertime dusk and hear songs by the Faces, CCR, Etta James, Cat Stevens, Tom Waits, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Van Morrison?

Much of the rest of his work is lounge music, but that’s who Rod is, a kindly old duffer who, had he not become a rock star, would probably be hanging around pubs and pool halls, yammering on about soccer and pinching ladies’ bums. And maybe that’s not the greatest type of person to be, but on the other hand, it’s audibly authentic, and authenticity these days is at a premium.  I feel happy I was able to spend time with him this week, instead of with those Ninja Turtles.