To appreciate the naughty, gaudy two-hour spectacle that Rod Stewart brought to MCI Center on Thursday, you need to know that the pantheon of pop stars can be divided into two categories: Born Rockers and Secret CEOs.
Here’s the difference:
Born Rockers, generally speaking, would never get rich or famous if they didn’t have careers in music. Typically, these are eccentrics who lucked into a certain talent or set of skills — writing and singing hits, whipping up a live audience — that the market just happens to reward. (Think Kurt Cobain or Joey Ramone.) Secret CEOs, on the other hand, are salesmen at heart, and they have the charisma, competitive spirit and smarts that are common in the upper tiers of major corporations. They could sell antiperspirants, or Saturns, or software, if they weren’t selling themselves.
Rod Stewart is the ultimate Secret CEO. His tour, which kicked off last month, ought to be studied in business schools, because it is a marvel of cross-generational marketing. With his signature mix of sentimentality and lust, the shaggy-haired 59-year-old hammed it up through songs from every period of his lengthy career. It was so schlocky that at moments it was hard to watch, but schlock is exactly what the crowd came to buy.
The show started off as a conventional pop concert, with samplings of Stewart’s early garage-rock days with the Faces (“Stay With Me”), his panting ’70s solo stuff (“Hot Legs”) and the gooey ballads he sang in the ’80s and ’90s (“Some Guys Have All the Luck”). He didn’t just sing these tunes, he pushed them like excess inventory. He did some air humping for “You Wear It Well,” mawkishly clutched a teddy bear for “The First Cut Is the Deepest” and shook his fanny at the crowd during a lull in the embarrassingly bland “Young Turks.” With a trio of backup singers to enhance his ever-raspy voice, he kicked soccer balls into the audience, tousled his hair a lot and spun the microphone like a samurai.
After an hour of this, and a 20-minute intermission, the show was transformed. The stage had been taken over by an orchestra out of some 1940s New York ballroom, complete with a bandstand and a baton-waving conductor. It was time to serve Stewart’s newest audience, fans of his two “American Songbook” albums, the collections of pre-World War II standards and Sinatra tunes that have returned him to the charts for the first time in years. Now clad in a black tuxedo with tails, a red carnation pinned to his lapel, Stewart was backed by an eight-piece string orchestra, a stand-up bass — and his rock band, whose members had been cleaned up and dressed in formalwear.
“Natasha, come down for your spanking,” he quipped to a backup singer, who joined him for Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
Entrancing a crowd as large as one in MCI Center with classy love songs isn’t easy, particularly after it’s been riled up by a track like “You Wear It Well.” Stewart’s tendency to overact lurched into some kind of hyperdrive. He carried around a bouquet of roses during “The Way You Look Tonight” and glided around the stage like a man on skates. When he finished “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” a Van Morrison number, he drew out the final syllable like it was his last breath: “That’s what you doo-wooo-wooooo-woooo-oooooo.”
The audience, at least the under-40 part of it, seemed restless through much of this, but Stewart wisely steered back toward rock before any rioting began. By the time he got to “Tonight’s the Night,” he was winning them back, and once the opening notes of “Maggie May” were plucked on a guitar, fans were again in his well-tailored pocket.
Stewart is a master of seduction — when you think about it, seduction is just sales with a lascivious twist — and he’s utterly shameless when he gets warmed up. That shamelessness explains a lot about his long and lucrative career. It underlies his uncanny ability to hopscotch from rock to disco to “It Had to Be You.” He’s a master at the art of repackaging, one of pop’s great opportunists, a tycoon disguised as a crooner.
courtesy: David Segal, The Washington Post Company
