Thanks Mark. Very happy to be here. Let's get started…
I've lived in Massachusetts for 24 years, but in the first half of the '90s I spent a lot of time in Nashville. I worked as a reissue producer, compiling box sets of veteran country and blues performers. Some of the projects were fun, some were more challenging, but it was always great being in Music City.
One of the many musicians I met during my trip to Nashville was Bill Lloyd. You may know him as half of the popular country-rock duo Foster and Lloyd, but he's produced, recorded with, or written for dozens of acts you love, from Carl Perkins to Cheap Trick. (Disclosure: He contributed to my Sandinista Project a few years back.)
One of Lloyd's more intriguing ongoing projects is The Long Players. When the spirit moves them, Lloyd and the Long Players, an ever-changing group of Nashville's finest, gallop through a classic rock'n'roll album. They've played through plenty of the usual suspects — Blonde on Blonde, My Aim Is True, After the Gold Rush — and they've stayed consistently true to the spirit of the originals but, at their best, just a bit wilder.
I wish I was going to be in Nashville on Saturday night because they'll be performing maybe my favorite-ever album, Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story. Yeah, I know: Rod hasn't made an interesting album since the Nixon Administration (and the first Nixon Administration at that), but he was once as good as rock'n'roll got.
Every Picture Tells a Story is Stewart's bid for rock-and-roll immortality, an ambitious record in a variety of senses (he wants Elvis's wallet as well as his gifts) and dwarfs other such attempts, even successful ones like Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? Stewart's third solo album is an all-encompassing work: Stewart demands attention from everyone on every level. His imaginative songwriting is rife with telling detail: The hair-combing scene in "Every Picture Tells a Story," the morning-after madness in "Maggie May," and the weather report in "Mandolin Wind" are all the products of a man in love with the world and his ability to describe that world and reassure himself.
The performances exceed the writing, especially on the outside tunes, which thrive on Stewart's devotion to them. "(I Know) I'm Losing You" is a hard-rock version of the Temptations hit that Stewart recorded with his sometime band the Faces. Stewart knows not to mimic the Motown original: He accepts the Sun dictum that personal expression far outlasts attempts to copy, that copying is in itself not merely fruitless but intolerable. Stewart puts across Tim Hardin's "(Find a) Reason to Believe" as an organ-driven call for moxie in the face of resignation, and on the mostly acoustic take on Bob Dylan's aching "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," Stewart is even more determined. Much of the time, the characters in Every Picture Tells a Story find themselves in a desperate condition, and what upraises them is the confidence of the narrator.
Such endurance is most apparent on "Every Picture Tells a Story" and "Maggie May," a pair of shattering acoustic hard-rock numbers about young men (or old boys, your call) gaining experience in ways they never expected or intended. These two songs, among the most durable pop-music offerings of the century, are so bold, so honest about their doubts, so willing and able to transcend their immediate difficulties, that they fulfill the dreams Woody Guthrie gave life to in "Bound for Glory." On Every Picture Tells a Story, Rod Stewart is an undeniable, as welcome, as any singer will ever be.
Rod is long done with that now, of course, but the record is still very much alive. If you're in Nashville on March 6, go to The Mercy Lounge and witness The Long Ryders with special guests including Dan Baird, Warner Hodges, and Radney Foster as they keep this record alive.
