#MAGGIE MAE ROD STEWARD PROFESSIONAL#
Stewart left school at 15 and had various jobs working in the family shop, as a silk screen printer and at a cemetery, but he longed to be a professional footballer. In 1960 he joined a skiffle group called The Kool Kats, and would play Lonnie Donegan covers. His first musical hero was Al Jolson, but he soon got into rock’n’roll, and he saw Bill Haley & His Comets in concert. Stewart’s other big obsession was football, and he became captain of his school’s team. His youngest’s main hobby, which he still loves, was railway modelling. After he retired, Robert bought a newsagent’s shop, which the Stewart family lived above. He was the youngest of five children, the other four having been born in Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father Robert, a builder, came from. Stewart was born at home in Highgate, London on 10 January 1945. Were it not for its appeal shining through, Stewart may not have become as big a superstar as he did. And yet his first chart-topper, Maggie May, was tucked away as a B-side. Stewart has more hits than just about anyone on the planet, but the 1971 smash remains his signature song and it’s very hard for him to leave any stage without playing it.Sir Roderick David Stewart, aka ‘Rod the Mod’, was one of the biggest-selling artists of the 70s and 80s, with over 120 million records sold worldwide, and six number 1 singles. If they tour, they may be forced to play “Maggie May” once again. They reunited a handful of times over the years, and even toured in 2010 with Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall on vocals and Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols on bass, but there’s finally real talk of a new studio album by surviving members Stewart, Wood, and Jones. It must have been a bittersweet experience for the band since solo Rod hits like “Maggie May” (not to mention Ron Wood joining the Rolling Stones) ultimately led to the dissolution of the band in 1975. Here’s video of a 1973 show where they break it out. They stuck largely to their own catalog, but “Maggie May” was so massive they simply had to play it most nights.
He tried to balance out both worlds for a few years, though it was challenging when the Faces toured and people in the audience wanted to hear solo Rod songs.
Their 1970 debut Faces didn’t get a lot of attention, but now Stewart was a solo star and they were about to release Long Player, which included a little song called “Stay With Me.” Before the year was up, Stewart would be the voice behind two enormous singles. Two years before this, Stewart and his longtime buddy Ron Wood formed the Faces with former Small Faces members Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian McLagan. Guitarist Martin Quittenton helped him flesh it out into a finished song, but nobody thought it was an obvious single, and it was placed as the B side to Stewart’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.” Robinson–style romance with an older woman named Maggie May. When the singer was writing songs for 1971’s Every Picture Tells a Story, his mind went back to that quick encounter in Hampshire and he spun out a fictionalized account about a Mrs. “How much older, I can’t tell you exactly - but old enough that she was highly disappointed by the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity of the experience.” “I lost my by then not remotely prized virginity to an older (and larger) woman who has come on to me very strongly in the beer tent,” Stewart wrote in his 2012 memoir Rod: The Autobiography.
The song was inspired by Stewart’s first sexual experience, which took place 10 years earlier at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in Hampshire, England. Stewart had spent much of the prior decade trying to become a superstar, and this was the moment where it finally happened. At the same time, it was charting high everywhere from Ireland and New Zealand to Canada and the Netherlands. Fifty years ago this month, Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” knocked Donny Osmond’s “Go Away Little Girl” out of the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the biggest song in America.
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