Rod Stewart is now a crooner of some kind, and, more remarkably, nobody seems to be calling him on it. One minute, boomer CD players are rotating Bruce Hornsby, Marc Cohn and every other faceless adult contemporary one-hit nobody with another sound-alike pleasant-enough-I-guess chunk of aural wallpaper, the next it's their parents' music, only performed by people who haven't got the chops for it.
Why the refusal to just listen to the actual old recordings of the classic American popular music canon -- the standards? Why do that? I blame Linda Ronstadt. Some of you may remember her attempt to go "new wave" in the late 1970s by recording clueless, over-produced covers of about a half-a-dozen Costello/Attractions numbers. The effort flamed out, mainly because it was transparent, ill-conceived and anybody who cared already knew the Costello versions, and could tell immediately they were better.
Linda didn't let that misstep get her down, though . . . putting that pain behind her, she switched direction abruptly and took a page from the Firesign Theatre playbook: "Forward -- into the past!" Linda, being a joke, was unable to take one or recognize one: she corralled poor old Nelson Riddle into arranging a mess of venerated musical chestnuts with an orchestra and tried to turn herself into a combination facsimile of Patti Page, Gogi Grant and Kay Starr, murmuring breathily while leaning against a lush bank of strings, her ample frame stuffed into a strapless rayon sheath -- say hello to Linda Ronstadt, cocktail wiener . . . or maybe that's sausage.
But these days, Linda (or her management -- whoever thought that move up) looks visionary. Exhuming the Tin Pan Alley classics has now become the standard career third-act/fourth-quarter gambit to stay in the spotlight and sell a few more records.
Too old to rock and roll? Put on a tuxedo or cocktail dress, climb onto the cabaret's postage-stamp stage, settle your hip into that dent in the baby grand and pretend to be all world-weary. What used to be world-weary is now just kind of post-detox drug-and-alcohol-damage gappiness. But if don't know the difference between having drunk too deeply from the well of life and just plain having drunk too much . . . or being too drunk too often, well, they probably come across much the same.
Rod Stewart's last good record was probably Never A Dull Moment. I'll accept the singles "Stay With Me" and "You Wear It Well," too. But from Atlantic Crossing onward, things got worse and worse. The wretched, desperate clumsiness of everything else makes his early work seem like a series of lucky flukes. More likely, it seems as though the Faces got work out of Stewart that nobody else could.
Stewart's producers Richard Perry, Phil Ramone and label-owner Clive Davis seem to have figured that nobody bought Bryan Ferry's collection of old cabaret numbers and used it to compile the repertoire for Rod Croaks The Classics, doubtless an endless series. It's eerie how many selections the projects have in common.
Just as tough to understand as not one but two volumes of Rod Stewart mangling material he's not nearly up to: Bette Midler's teaming up with Barry Manilow to try to turn herself into Rosemary Clooney. Who asked her to do this? Why Rosemary Clooney? The poor woman had a tough enough life. Now she has to keep suffering for the sake of some bizarre Continental Baths reunion project. The idea that an unabashed schmaltz-and-syrup-extruder like Manilow would choose Rosemary Clooney's back catalog seems kind of funny, though. Is this his bid for respectability or legitimacy? Is this Barry's idea of getting "tough"?
If you wanted to listen to Rosemary Clooney, wouldn't you just listen to Rosemary Clooney, rather than Bette Midler pretending to be Rosemary Clooney? It's not like her recorded work is hard to find. Amazon offers 122 Rosemary Clooney albums for sale.
This Midler record and the two Stewart efforts seem like introductions to the classic canon for people who can't just figure out how to listen to this stuff on their own. What I don't get is why there has to be some kind of special E-Z version of something as innately likeable as pop standards. It's not like it's tough or challenging to listen to Sinatra's Capitol recordings, or Tony Bennett's work, or Ella Fitzgerald or Blossom Dearie or [your favorite pre-rock-and-roll performer here]. The CD boom ensures that all this stuff has been hauled out of vaults, tidied up sonically, remastered and made available. If you're just curious and unwilling even to order The Best of Frank Sinatra's Capitol Years through Amazon, there's always downloading.
Why would there be any trepidation or resistance anyway? It's not like any of this material is in any way challenging or confrontational or assaultive. The chord progressions are swell, the melodies all use only the pretty notes, and the lyrics are models of poetic concision and subtly calibrated emotional truth. This is work composed by the Gershwins and Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers & Hart -- people who wrote popular music -- not Edgard Varese. Also, these are standards -- everybody and his dog has cut them in every imaginable configuration pretty regularly for 80 years and then some. That ought to make it easy for even the dimmest, most drug-battered ignoroid to find a version to imitate.
The only people who'd figure the Rod Stewart take on the pop music canon was worthwhile are people for whom the songs themselves are a revelation. And a lot of his choices are wonderful songs. It's hard to make them truly ugly.
But it's easy to cheapen, degrade, disrespect and devalue them through a combination of exploitive greed and stupid arrogance and lacking a clue about what to do next in your sorry, meretricious career.
But face it, Rod: you'll never make up for "Tonight's The Night" or "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" or putting yourself in a Renoir on the cover of A Night On the Town, never mind the mess you made of "Downtown Train." Why make God even angrier by soiling the achievements of Tin Pan Alley's finest? Rod Stewart demonstrates, finally and totally and in a completely negative way, that it really is the singer not the song.
