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A Night on the Town
Rod Stewart

Warner Bros. BS 2938
Released: July 1976
Chart Peak: #2
Weeks Charted: 57
Certified 2x Platinum: 10/22/84

Rod StewartAny critic worth his salt comes to an almost mystical rapport with certain artists. When the melodies and lyrics of such performers float across the mind late at night, they are resented by the cynical journalist as much as they're treasured by the sentimental fan (no good critic is less than half of either), but there's no way out.

For me, Rod Stewart is such an artist. Because he is, it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate what I bring to his albums, in the way of hopes and illusions, from what he's truly offering. So, while I can say with considerable assurance that A Night on the Town is among Stewart's most splendid efforts, it's hard to be certain what my reasons are. Are these lines as deep as they feel, or as inconsequential as they look?

I'm a fool for ya baby
My pride won't let me stay
I'm a fool for ya honey
But I'll come back any day

The seduction isn't in these words, of course, but in Stewart's utter exultation as he delineates every romantic's dilemma. Still, there's no logical or technical argument to substantiate my passion or justify my faith. I only know that this music makes me feel larger, fuller, more alive. And if that isn't what it is for, it's not for anything.

But this album's best song, "Tonight's the Night," is defensible both logically and technically. One of many tributes to Sam Cooke, Stewart's soul music inspiration, it is also his closest approximation of that sound. The strings, for once, are perfect -- only Cooke or Stewart could swing through such syrup with so little effort and so much power. The guitar figure has the kind of pop elegance that characterized Abbey Road; the drumming is as confident as the singing.

Rod Stewart - A Night On The Town
Original album advertising art.
Click image for larger view.
This classic soul structure is used, with as much canniness as Stewart has ever displayed, for a lyric unique in all his writing. "Tonight's the Night" is a blissful love song, capturing the feeling of the beginning of a relationship with the grace Stewart has more commonly applied to love's end. Here are those perfect moments in the beginning when everything is possible:

Don't say a word, my virgin child
Just let your inhibitions run wild
The secret is about to unfold
Upstairs before the night's too old

Such pleasures never last long -- if "Tonight's the Night" is about the first few weeks of sexual passion, the rest of the album is about the rest of a lifetime. But the promise of "Tonight's the Night," its tenderness, gives greater resonance than ever before to the catastrophes which inevitably follow Stewart.

Cat Stevens's "The First Cut Is the Deepest" does the job, marred only by an utterly banal guitar solo. But no one can handle feckless love better than Stewart. He treats it as it is, with more complicated emotions than simple self-pity, though with a full measure of that, and blame is spread evenly or not at all. "Fool for You" is cut from the mold that gave us "Maggie May" and "You Wear It Well," but neither the music nor the situation has worn out. In his heart, Rod Stewart, like Smokey Robinson, remains the young innocent, tender to the soul, naive to the end. Even when bitter, he's gentle: "I'm gonna leave my records and a forwarding address/ Ain't you glad, honey, that I'm offa your chest." No matter how ugly the end, as he leaves he really believes what he whispers: "Guess I'll always love ya, all my life."

The hilarious but more than half-serious "The Balltrap" reminds us how gruesome the conclusion of a great love affair can be. But even nightly jilted, Stewart refuses to give up without a fight. "The Balltrap" is a fine slice of Faces-level rock & roll, driven by Fats Domino piano, wacky horns, a turbulent slide guitar. It is also the album's only original rocker. This hurts the album's "fast side" and, beyond that, the division into rock and romance suggests that Stewart's not quite dispersed his old group's ghost. The quality of the nonoriginal rock is another problem -- here's where my personal attraction to his music creates confusion. I like the idea of doing "Pretty Flamingo" as a mock tango, but no one else I know does. And I prefer Ron Wood's version of "Big Bayou" but like "The Wild Side of Life" better than Hank Thompson's country classic original. "Trade Winds," the ballad that closes the fast side, is more banal than incongruous. Maybe he'd better get a new band quick... or devote himself entirely to slow and mid-tempo songs.

The final song on the "slow side" is proof enough that he can work that form as well as anyone who's ever sung or written rock & roll music. "The Killing of Georgie, Part I & II" is among the best songs Stewart has ever written and absolutely the bravest. Here is the pink-suited, rooster-coifed rock dilettante laying it on the line for friendship, not even love. Here is one of rock's leading androgynes writing a breathtakingly tender song without flinching. I have left it for last not only because it is Stewart's breakthrough as a composer but because I am more than a bit in awe of it.

The music alone would make "Georgie" a major achievement. The double-time, chantlike vocal is reminiscent of Bob Dylan's recent approach, but with all the melodiousness Dylan discards. Its female doo-wop chorus, accelerated like Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," is supported by a delicate web of guitar, organ and string figures that is totally Stewart's own.

What counts more is the matter-of-fact concern he brings to the story. The best rock songs are moving ever closer to good prose fiction -- for proof, a listen to Born to Run, the best parts of Desire or "Memory Motel" will suffice -- and "Georgie" too is written completely within this style, at least before its watershed coda. As in Springsteen's "Backstreets," Dylan's "Mozambique" and Neil Young's much different "Tonight's the Night," what's at stake is loyalty, friendship -- the ethical motifs of the western movie. When Georgie dies, Stewart remains cool, but there's an ache in his voice and a shadow in his words that tell you this tale is breaking his heart:

Out of a darkened side street came
A New Jersey gang with just one aim
To roll some innocent passerby...
Another kid, a switchblade knife,
He did not intend to take his life
He just pushed his luck a little too far that night
The sight of blood dispersed the gang,
A crowd gathered, the police came
An ambulance screamed to a halt at 53rd and 3rd
Doo doo doo Doo doo doo Doo doo doo

The jolly chorus is awful, as though the Stones had decided to do "Heartbreaker" as a novelty number about the pleasures of mugging. That's how Stewart tries to leave us, the classic rock & roll dilettante quoting a piece of Georgie's street philosophy about nothing mattering but the moment. But the final line betrays his real grief: Georgie was a friend of mine.

This is Stewart's real strength: a working-class eloquence, a belief in the simplest truths that won't let him get caught up in the canonization of mere punks and gangsters. That simple sentence is just the thing that makes him great, redeems his failures and gives all who listen something for which there is no substitute.

- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone, 8/26/76.

Bonus Reviews!

Part of the appeal of Rod Stewart is you can sense he's self-conscious about the contrived way he looks and sounds and you can sometimes sense the struggle going on within him over what to do about it. Wearing a white suit but no shirt and singing the boyishly leering "Tonight's the Night" (which lets it slip that the chick, as Rod would call her, is a virgin, as if the detailed description of slobbering anticipation weren't enough without some ultimate gimmick) are two things to do about it. Not, in principle, bad things, either, since they amount to fighting the grossness of one's demons with a little grossness of one'sown -- facing them, anyway.

Then too, Stewart has associated with some of the better musicians in rock and has developed some attitudes about quality and some musical judgments that collide, sometimes, in the excesses in the way he styles himself. All this has to go through the final filter, his physical limitations: his voice is so simply distinctive and singular that it isn't very versatile. A movie producer wouldn't here Andy Devine to play the headmaster of a snobbish Eastern academy, and you wouldn't want Rod Stewart to sing certain words and melodies. Here he works well within those limitations, tossing off an occasional potboiler for the kiddie aspect of his audience, but exercising a rather fine care and control over song selection and production. The result is a sketch from a limited palette. Look for line instead of color and you may decide this is a durable album.

- Noel Coppage, Stereo Review, 1/77.

Stewart at his raspy-voiced and imaginative best in a charming and enjoyable package just perfect for summer good-time listening. His songwriting abilities are now nearly as strong as his distinctive vocalizing. Rod seems to be deliberately experimenting with the widest range of styles on this LP, bringing delightfully offbeat insights into the sounds of the Stones, Lou Reed, country traditional, oldies and more. The labeling of "slow side" and "fast side" works much better than usual in an LP concept. If Stewart doesn't tour this year, it will be a great loss to us all. Best cuts: "Tonight's The Night," "First Cut Is The Deepest," "Fool For You," "Killing Of Georgie," "Balltrap," "Trade Winds."

- Billboard, 1976.

This is Stewart's most ambitious record since Never a Dull Moment four years ago, but its ambitions are only partly fulfilled. If he's gonna start doing big message numbers, he'd better rise above the bathetic liberalism of "Tradewinds," the most overblown song he's ever recorded 'cept maybe for the symphonic version of "Pinball Wizard." And if he's gonna break new ground thematically, as on the "gay" "Killing of Georgie," he'd better come up with slightly less Dylanesque melodies -- in the course of comparing Stewart's song with its fraternal twin -- "Simple Twist of Fate," I was reminded of just how precise an arrangement can be. B

- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.

After bouncing back to life with Atlantic Crossing, Rod Stewart crafted his most self-consciously ambitious record with A Night on the Town. The centerpiece of the album, "The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)," was a long, winding Dylan-esque tale of the murder of one of Stewart's gay friends and was one of his better songs of the mid-'70s. Even if "The Killing of Georgie" was the conscious artistic focal point of A Night on the Town, the true masterpiece of the album was an eloquent rendition of Cat Stevens' "The First Cut Is the Deepest." Apart from the flawed political platitudes of "Trade Winds," the rest of the album was filled with competent, professional pop/rock, highlighted by the number one hit "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)," a ballad where the gallant Rod relieves a teenager of her virginity. And, again, the "Slow Half" was more convincing than the frequently perfunctory "Fast Half." * * * *

- Stephen Thomas Erlewine, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.

A Night on the Town plays to Stewart's strengths as a balladeer ("Tonight's the Night," "The First Cut is the Deepest") and barroom rocker ("The Balltrap," "The Wild Side of Life"). * * * 1/2

- David Okamoto, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.

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