Every Picture Tells a Story

It’s amazing to listen to <i>Every Picture Tells a Story</i> and think about everything the then-26-year-old Rod Stewart had <i>already</i> done. Two solo albums, lead singer for Faces <i>and</i> the Jeff Beck Group, a guy as relatable to teenage mods as the wistful traditionalists of roots-rock, not to mention a pretty good ringer for an American R&B singer, at least as far as white British guys went. <i>Every Picture Tells a Story</i> made him the kind of household name you expected to see on tabloids and TV, but it also had the anachronistic aura of a Band or Bob Dylan album: Music obviously made as a response to modern rock ’n’ roll, but that also felt like it tapped into a sepia-toned world that came before it. Calling it “nostalgic“ would be wrong in that “nostalgia” means wanting to go back to the past, where most of the songs on <i>Every Picture Tells a Story</i> sound like they want to keep the past exactly where it is, at least until they can laugh at it. If you’ve ever thought you were cool but realised you weren’t, you’ll understand the title track. If you ever realised some weird interaction you had when you were younger actually makes <i>less</i> sense now than it did then, that’s “Maggie May”. If you stupidly, bravely continue to fight the good fight in the face of all prevailing evidence for why you should give up, that’s “(Find a) Reason to Believe”. This was 1971: The Rolling Stones were too edgy, Genesis were too complicated, but here was Rod Stewart making the kind of good-timey, rough-and-tumble, beautiful stuff old people could dance to at reunions and shed a tear to at funerals and feel—for a minute—like they were young again. Then the old people would die and the young people who never thought they’d get old would take their turn. In a way, the most progressive aspect of the album was the idea that rock music didn’t <i>have</i> to be youth culture, or at least that it could capture the pleasures of aging as well as anything else—a theme Stewart would explore later with stuff like “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” and “Young Turks” and “Forever Young”. Yeah, he was a little corny—but he had the guts to embrace it.