227. Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story (1971)

















Track Listng

1. Every Picture Tells A Story
2. Seems Like A Long Time
3. That's All Right
4. Tomorrow Is A Long Time
5. Maggie May
6. Mandolin Wind
7. (I Know) I'm Losing You
8. (Find A) Reason To Believe

Review

Another good Rod Stewart album. Scrap that, another positively GREAT Rod Stewart album. What the hell is wrong with me? There are some similarities with Gasoline Alley here, the use of acoustic instrumentation and rocking hard with it. But this comes off as an even better album, more delicate and beautiful.

The use of acoustic instrumentation works brilliantly here and particularly the use of mandolins in Maggie May and Mandolin Wind are particularly inspired. Hell, Rod even makes an amazing cover of a Dylan song here. In fact the album is pretty much inspired, there are elements of blues and folk tinged with good rock.

It is actually very sad to see how far Rod has fallen from these early days. He is an amazing singer and the instrumentation in his songs is just amazing. He makes sparse use of electric material, but when he does it works really well. He manages to make mostly acoustic songs vibrate with more joie de vivre than many electric rock bands. Rod is never far from his roots and that shows in this album, although he is British he was clearly brought up listening to the Blues and has filtered that Blues tradition into something different and original as well as updated to his own time. Really nifty album, you'll never think of Rod the same way. Get it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Maggie May
2. Mandolin Wind
3. Every Picture Tells A Story
4. (Find A) Reason To Believe

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Every Picture Tells A Story is the third album by Rod Stewart, released in the middle of 1971. The album is a mixture of rock, blues, soul and folk, and includes his breakthrough hit, "Maggie May", co-written by classical guitarist Martin Quittenton, as well as "(Find A) Reason To Believe", the song from Tim Hardin debut album of 1966. "Reason" had initially been the A-side of the single and "Maggie May", the B-side, until general reaction resulted in their reversal.

The album also included version of Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right (Mama)" (the first single for Elvis Presley) and a cover of the Bob Dylan song, "Tomorrow Is A Long Time", an outtake to Dylan's 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (Dylan would later officially release the song on his 1971 release, Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II).

Again in addition to Ron Wood and Ian McLagan, members of The Faces (with whom Stewart at that time was lead vocalist), musicians included Ray Jackson on mandolin (though Stewart forgot his name and merely mentioned "the mandolin player in Lindisfarne" on the sleeve). Maggie Bell made backing vocals (mentioned on the sleeve as "vocal abrasives") on the title track, as well as Madeline Bell on next one, "Seems Like A Long Time".

It reached the No. 1 position in both the UK (for six weeks) and the USA (four weeks) at the same time that "Maggie May" was topping the singles charts in both territories, making Stewart the first artist to achieve such a feat. It has often been voted among the best British albums of all time.

In 1992, the album was awarded the number one spot in Jimmy Guterman's book The Best Rock 'N' Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 172 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Every Picture Tells A Story was ranked 99th in a 2005 survey held by British television's Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time.

Maggie May (The Faces are there and is that John Peel pretending to play the Mandolin? Yes, yes it is!):