Artist: Stewart, Rod
Label: Mercury Records
Released: 1972
Length: 32.55
Rating: 4/5
While he was busy with the Faces collective, Rod Stewart kept tirelessly paving a solo path, and did it pretty successfully too. His attractive blend of soul, blues and r&b with elements of roughly hewn rock, led by an exceptionally prolific musician armed with countless innovations, demanded such a halo of media attention that for a good while it kept even the enviable achievements of his home band in its shadow.
Never a Dull Moment brings no major departures from Stewart’s by now traditional maneuvers. Opener True Blue announces business as usual: besides a textbook demonstration of well-drilled rock machinery, mixed with bits of blues and at moments even country, it slyly puts together a kind of thematic and character summary of his famous predecessor’s moves. Stewart’s voice remains the album’s main attraction. Its unmistakable character dominates as the penetrating connective tissue that, through the porousness of a genre mix full of challenges, drives the shoots of vocal blues, soul and rock of the highest quality. Room for instrumental pretensions is heartlessly sacrificed here in favor of the full rotation of this enigmatic musician’s vocal range, and his strongest weapon, that voice, forces the listener to discover a different, soulfully entranced world, where the rules of a colorful palette of life’s and emotion’s diversity reign. Lost Paraguayos nods along to all that in an honest country spirit, and shares the status of the album’s most commercially accessible moments with the hot-blooded rocker Italian Girls. The sensational You Wear It Well adds touches of flaming red to Rod’s already colorful vocal texture, and the excellent cover of Dylan’s Mama You Been On My Mind shows similarly feverish leanings!
Never a Dull Moment jolts us awake with a fresh unveiling of the charms of Hendrix’s Angel, where Stewart pours new life into the song, and the poisonous character of his voice successfully takes on two far more vocally demanding pieces: the r&b gem I’d Rather Go Blind by the immortal Etta James and Twistin’ The Night Away by the one and only Sam Cooke. The determination and confidence with which Rod Stewart sinks his teeth into these eternal classics is almost blasphemous, and no less shocking than the carefree way he stripped these timeless triumphs of vocal music bare, retouched them, gave them a more urban, white look, and in doing so effectively made them his own. With an interpretation this confident and emotionally charged, the line between borrowed and original material is permanently blurred, but the dandy’s debt to the ghosts of the past remains, and you can ultimately feel it right in the spontaneous energy of the album’s original ideas.
Musicians who have gambled with covers of material from black cultural roots are certainly not in short supply, but the ones who made a name for themselves along the way with an innovative treatment and a lived-in interpretation can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand! In that respect Rod Stewart is definitely a unique figure, as he managed to fuse the meaning of r&b and soul standards, in both content and character, perfectly with his own expressive core. And in the early ’70s Rod was far from just a top-notch interpreter of wide expressive range. After its well-received predecessor, Never a Dull Moment cemented him once and for all as a prolific songwriter too, with a clear vision and plans for steering his further artistic maturing.
Lineup
Rod Stewart: vocals
Ronnie Wood: guitar, bass
Ronnie Lane: bass
Micky Waller: drums
Kenny Jones: drums
Ian McLagan: organ
Pete Sears: piano, bass
Brian: piano
Spike Heatley: bass
Martin Quittenton: acoustic guitar
Gordon Huntley: steel guitar
Lindsay Raymond Jackson: mandolin
Dick “Tricky Dicky” Powell: violin
Production
Rod Stewart
Tracklist
1. True Blue
2. Lost Paraguayos
3. Mama You Been on My Mind
4. Italian Girls
5. Angel
6. Interludings
7. You Wear It Well
8. I’d Rather Go Blind
9. Twisting the Night Away
