International pop star Rod Stewart was born in London on January 10, 1945, the fifth child of a large family. Though he played in skiffle groups as a teenager, Stewart flirted with a career in professional soccer, before becoming a full-time musician in the early 1960s, touring Europe for a time with British folk singer Wizz Jones before returning home in 1963.

    Gritty-voiced singer and sometime songwriter Rod Stewart earned the tag "vocals extraordinaire" during his first stint with the Jeff Beck Group and maintained it during his subsequent tenure with the Faces and his commercially much more successful solo career. After earning initial critical acclaim for his unerring choice of cover material, Stewart in the late Seventies became known as a jet-setting bon vivant and bottled-blond sex symbol, always a stellar live performer but often indulging in self-parody on his albums. While his later work failed to live up to his early awesome promise, his self-mocking charm and sheer singing skill have survived. In 1994 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

    The son of a Scottish shopkeeper, Stewart was born and raised in London but considers himself a Scot. By the time he left secondary school, he longed to be a soccer player. He erected fences and dug graves until he signed as an apprentice to a pro team. But after a year of bench-warming and odd jobs, Stewart took up with bohemian folksinger Wizz Jones. Jones supposedly taught Stewart guitar and banjo, and the two performed on Continental streetcorners until they were arrested for vagrancy in Spain and deported to England in 1963. In London Stewart began hanging out at R&B clubs. He played harmonica with Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, then joined the Hoochie Coochie Men. That group (with Stewart and Long John Baldry sharing vocals) lasted a year, during which time Stewart moonlighted as a session musician and recorded a single, "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl." His stylish apparel earned him the nickname "Rod the Mod."

    Baldry disbanded the Hoochie Coochie Men in 1965 to form Steampacket with Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll and again called on Stewart to share the vocals. Stewart left the group in 1966 following a dispute with Baldry, although in 1971 he and Elton John coproduced Baldry’s It Ain’t Easy. He joined Shotgun Express, which included future Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green and drummer Mick Fleetwood. Modeled after Steampacket, the Express couldn’t shake that group’s shadow and broke up within a year.

    In 1967 Jeff Beck enlisted Stewart as vocalist for the Jeff Beck Group [see entry]. Beck was especially popular in America, where the new group first toured in 1968. Petrified by the first-night audience at New York’s Fillmore East, Stewart sang the opening number from backstage. Truth (1968) and Beck-Ola (1969) established Stewart as a vocal stylist, and his tenure with Beck taught him to phrase his sandpaper voice around the lead instrument.

    In 1969 while still with Beck, Stewart signed a contract with Mercury. His solo debut, The Rod Stewart Album (#139, 1969) (originally titled An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down), was recorded with Mick Wailer and Ron Wood of the Jeff Beck Group plus Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan and guitarist Martin Quittenton. Stewart’s material was a grab bag of gentle folk songs, bawdy drinking songs, a taste of soul, and a couple of barrelhouse rockers. The album sold modestly -- Jeff Beck Group fans considered it too subdued -- but critics were impressed by Stewart’s five original songs.

    Planning to form a new band with Stewart and the Vanilla Fudge’s Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, Beck disbanded his group. That project finally materialized in 1972, long after Stewart and his buddy Wood had joined the Small Faces, soon redubbed the Faces [see entry]. Stewart spent the next seven years dividing his time between that band and a solo career, recording a Faces album for each of his own.

    In 1970 the Faces recorded First Step, Stewart recorded Gasoline Alley (#27, 1970), and together they toured the United States twice. In the studio with the Faces, Stewart was but one of a quintet of equals merrily banging out rock & roll. On his own, he was different; the moody Gasoline Alley amplified his reputation as a singer and storyteller. When Every Picture Tells a Story came out in June 1971, the response was swift and strong. In October, the album went to #1 in America and Britain simultaneously, the first record to do so. Its first single, "Maggie May," a Stewart-Quittenton song, was the second record to do the same. Before "Maggie May" had faded, Stewart followed up with a gritty version of the Temptations’ "(I Know) I’m Losing You" (#24, 1971). Never a Dull Moment (#2, 1972), with his own "You Wear It Well" (#13, 1972), was also a hit.
With two gold albums, Stewart’s role in the Faces became strained. Their records were never as popular as Stewart’s, and more than the occasional gig was undermined by the group’s sodden sloppiness. Bassist Ronnie Lane quit in 1973, to be replaced by Tetsu Yamauchi, and legal battles were waged between Mercury and Warners (with whom Stewart had signed a new solo contract) over control of the Faces. While court proceedings kept him out of the studio, Mercury released a greatest-hits compilation, Sing It Again Rod. The next year, the disputing companies jointly issued Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginnings, a live album billed under "Rod Stewart/Faces Live." Late in 1974, Mercury released Smiler (#13, 1974), Stewart’s last album for the label.

    Stewart hired veteran American producer Tom Dowd and Muscle Shoals session musicians to record his Warner Bros. debut, Atlantic Crossing (#9, 1975). In 1975 he moved to Los Angeles to escape British income taxes and was soon the toast of the Beverly Hills celebrity set. His romance with Swedish movie starlet Britt Ekland (which ended in 1977 with a $15-million palimony suit, settled out of court) added juice to her autobiography, True Britt, and made him a gossip-column staple. It was the first of his liaisons with glamorous blondes. In 1979 he married Alana Hamilton, former wife of George Hamilton IV, and with her had two children; later he lived for six years with model Kelly Emberg, who also bore him a child (after the relationship ended, Emberg demanded $25 million in palimony). In 1990 he married model Rachel Hunter; they have two children.
Stewart retained Dowd and the American studio musicians for the double-platinum A Night on the Town (#2, 1976), his first effort to outsell Every Picture, largely on the strength of the biggest single of 1976, "Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)," which topped the U.S. chart for eight weeks. That year the Royal Navy adopted Stewart’s cover of the Sutherland Brothers’ "Sailing" as its unofficial anthem; the following year, two other singles, Cat Stevens’ "The First Cut Is the Deepest" (#21, 1977) and "The Killing of Georgie (Part I & II)" (#30, 1977), about a gay friend’s murder, made Stewart a star in the previously indifferent international market.

    The Faces had by now fallen apart, and Wood was a full-fledged Rolling Stone. Stewart formed a new, American touring band. The hits kept coming: raunchy rockers like "Hot Legs" (#28, 1978), romantic ballads like "You’re in My Heart (The Final Acclaim)" (#4,1977), and even a #1 disco hit with "Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?" (1979). That song was damned by critics as Stewart’s ultimate fall from his earlier grace; Stewart has continued to donate its royalties to UNICEF (upward of $1 million), and in the Nineties himself admitted to its tastelessness.

    Of his Eighties albums, Foolish Behaviour, Tonight I’m Yours, and Out of Order all went platinum, and Stewart released Top Ten singles throughout the decade, among them "Passion" (#5, 1980), "Infatuation" (#6, 1984), "My Heart Can’t Tell You No" (#4, 1988), and "Downtown Train" (#3, 1989). By and large critics continued to assail him but conceded the merit of such occasional efforts as his 1985 collaboration with Jeff Beck on the Impressions’ "People Get Ready," from Beck’s Flash.

    In 1986 Stewart and a re-formed Faces gathered for a one-off performance at a London benefit for Faces’ bassist Ronnie Lane, a victim of multiple sclerosis. Out of Order (1988), coproduced by Chic’s Bernard Edwards and former Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor, was better received than much of his Eighties output, boosting a revival in Stewart’s critical reputation that blossomed with the 1990 career overview, Storyteller. In 1993 Stewart put out Unplugged... and Seated, which went on to sell five million copies worldwide. A Spanner in the Works (#35, 1995) continued Stewart’s more acoustic musical approach.

Born January 10, 1945, London, England
1969 -- The Rod Stewart Album (Mercury)
1970 -- Gasoline Alley
1971 -- Picture Tells a Story Every
1972 -- Never a Dull Moment
1973 -- Sing It Again Rod
1974 -- Smiler
1975 -- Atlantic Crossing (Warner Bros.)
1976 -- A Night on the Town; The Best of Rod Stewart (Mercury)
1977 -- The Best of Rod Stewart, vol.2; Foot Loose and Fancy Free (Warner Bros.)
1978 -- Blondes Have More Fun
1979 -- Greatest Hits
1980 -- Foolish Behaviour
1981 -- Tonight I’m Yours
1982 -- Absolutely Live
1983 -- Body Wishes
1984 -- Camouflage
1986 -- Rod Stewart
1988 -- Out of Order
1989 -- Storyteller: The Complete Anthology: 1964-1990
1990 -- Downtown Train: Selections from the Storyteller Anthology
1991 -- Vagabond Heart
1992 -- The Mercury Anthology (Polydor)
1993 -- Unplugged.. and Seated (Warner Bros.)
1995 -- A Spanner in the Works