This week in 1990 Rod Stewart married New Zealand model Rachel Hunter in Beverly Hills. Stewart was 45 at the time, and Rachel was just 21. After the wedding Stewart was quoted as saying “I Found the Girl that I Want, I won’t be putting my banana in anybody’s fruit bowl from now on.” They split in 1999.
Four years later, still in December, Stewart played in front of 3.5 million people on Copacabana beach in Rio De Janeiro, and made into the Guinness Book of World Records for staging the largest free rock concert attendance in history.
I like Rod Stewart a lot, that Brit-glam style (sophisticated version of New York Dolls) and his smoky-whisky voice. He got my attention when Billboard magazine wrote a rather long and comprehensive article about him way back when.
“Maggie May” was Rod Stewart’s first big hit as a solo artist, included in his third studio album released in May 1971, Every Picture Tells a Story. The song went to no. 1 in the UK Singles Chart in 1971 and at the same time topped the charts in Australia, Canada and the US.
“Maggie May” is the equivalent of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”, songs about sexual relationships between older women and younger men.
“Maggie May was more or less a true story, about the first woman I had sex with, at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival,” recalled Stewart to Q Magazine in 2007. The woman’s name was not “Maggie May”; Stewart has stated that the name was taken from “an old Liverpudlian song about a prostitute.”
_________
Featured image: Who What Wear.
⢠Read also SYMPHONY OF DESTRUCTION NO. 59.
