A Man of Wealth and Taste

Rock & roll crooner is just Stewart's latest successful reinvention. His roller-coaster ride of musical tastes began directly under the family piano at their home in North London. "We used to have house parties around Christmas and birthdays, and I used to sneak downstairs and hide underneath our small grand piano," he told me. "I'd watch everybody dancing and getting drunk. They were awful dancers, really, but I think it gave me a very early love of music." After his older brother took him to see a Bill Haley and the Comets show, Rod got turned on to rock & roll. Soon he saw Otis Redding and began a lifelong love affair with Sam Cooke.

In his teens he busked on the streets of Paris and Spain, performing folk and blues songs. "Those were my beatnik years," he remembers fondly. "I was so smelly." (He tells me that when he visited a Parisian cafe where he used to work, he and his fiancee, Penny Lancaster, were serenaded with "Tonight's the Night"; they tipped the busker 100 francs.) When he returned home, his parents burned his filthy clothes. "After that, I became a mod," he says. "And you couldn't get me out of the bathroom."

Then came the first of what Stewart now calls "the three key points of success." Drunkenly playing the harmonica on a train platform one night in 1964, he was taken under the wing of British bluesman Long John Baldry, whom he'd perform with for years, and who would lend Stewart albums to study, like Muddy Waters' Live at Newport, before Stewart then passed them along to Mick Jagger. After Jeff Beck took him to America in 1968, Stewart's third key move was to join the Faces, a phase of his life, between 1969 and 1975, that he barely recalls due to the band's propensity for getting shitfaced before gigs. Regardless, the Faces were one of the greatest party-rock outfits ever.

Still the Same . . . Great Rock Classics of Our Time is Stewart's thirtieth solo album. Like his standards albums, it was co-produced by J Records founder Clive Davis, under whose watchful eye Stewart has been thriving since 2002. "It's a good relationship with Clive," says Stewart. "It's give and take." Davis has been extraordinarily involved with Stewart's recent projects. Stewart had hoped to follow up the Songbook series with an album of soul covers, but Davis nixed it for the time being. "Clive said, 'No, it's about time we did a rock album,' " Stewart says.

Although Stewart did laugh off a couple of Clive's suggestions like "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" and even "Dancing in the Dark": "I go, 'Are you crazy? Sometimes you are so off the mark!' Some songs you just have to leave alone." When I suggest that remaking songs like Van Morrison's "Crazy Love" or the Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" might qualify as songs that should be left untouched, Stewart sums up his approach. "It's a fine line," he says. "When the album was finished, I said, 'Thank God we didn't make any huge mistakes.' It's hard for me to describe why we chose these songs. Bob Seger's 'Still the Same' is tremendous, and Bonnie Tyler's 'It's a Heartache' still sounds really good on radio. And we did A-B them to see if I added something extra with the vocal, and I did bring them up to date a little bit. The old pipes give it a little lift!" But I uncover a sore spot with Stewart when I bring up the fact that though the album has "rock" in the title, it fails to truly rock, in the classic-rock sense -- "It never really rocks out, no," he says. "But it's a nice groove, it jells well together." Later, without further provocation, he comes back to it. "We don't go too fast," he says. "I'm very aware of that. I shall take it to the board the next time we meet!" He said that on his next album, which will likely follow the same template -- plundering the endless resource of classic rock -- he'd like to break the mold. "Clive!" he yells into my tape recorder. "Give me some good up-tempo songs to sing!"

"I was trying to find those songs that would be a natural fit for Rod," says Davis from his office in Manhattan. "I don't care how brilliant an actor or actress is, they can play some roles better than others." And Davis was quick to catch on to the lucrative possibilities of what he calls "paying tribute to copyright" with Stewart's last five albums. "It's brought Rod's music, whether he wrote it or not, to his largest audiences," he says. Stewart's record company has also provided him with opportunities to hawk his product on TV, as opposed to generating interest through radio. In addition to a memorable turn on American Idol (where he gave contestant Kellie Pickler a bemused and lascivious look), Stewart has appeared on every major U.S. talk show, from The Tonight Show to Martha Stewart. And he's his own best goodwill ambassador. He is as charming on TV as he is in real life -- humble, with a childlike enthusiasm and quick wit. (He even farted near me at one point and tried to blame it on me.) When he learned that Still the Same debuted at the top of the charts in the U.S., he sent a bagpipe band, replete with kilts and champagne for sixty employees, into J Records' weekly meeting.