Maggie May

Rod Stewart on the Making of ‘Maggie May’

Rod Stewart releases his 30th solo studio album, ‘Another Country,’ on Oct. 23. The 70-year-old singer and songwriter recalls recording ‘Maggie May,’ the 1971 hit that made him a star.

ENLARGE

Rod Stewart at the Reading Festival in the U.K. in 1973 PHOTO: IAN DICKSON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

By 

MARC MYERS

Updated Oct. 20, 2015 11:54 a.m. ET

61 COMMENTS

Rod Stewart’s new album, “Another Country,” due Friday, marks his 30th solo studio album and second in the past two years to feature mostly original material. Though Mr. Stewart began his singing career in London in 1963 and was lead singer in the Jeff Beck Group in 1967 and then the Faces starting in 1969, he didn’t become a household name until “Maggie May” in 1971.

Initially, there were low expectations for the song. Written by Mr. Stewart and guitarist Martin Quittenton, “Maggie May” was added to Mr. Stewart’s third solo album at the last minute and then placed on the B-side of a single. After radio DJs discovered the flip side in the summer of ’71, ”Maggie May” climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s pop chart that October, where it remained for five weeks.

More: Listen to Rod Stewart’s ‘Another Country’ (Exclusive Album Premiere)

After “Maggie May’s” release, Mr. Stewart had three additional #1 hit singles while his five-album songbook series in the 2000s helped make him one of the most successful contemporary interpreters of the genre. Mr. Stewart, 70, recently talked about writing and recording “Maggie May.” Edited from an interview:

Rod Stewart:

In July 1961, a few of my mates and I went off to the south of England to camp out at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. The concert was held on the lawns of an estate owned by Lord Montagu, who was a big jazz fan. I was 16 and just coming out of my beatnik phase, wondering whether I should become a Mod. It was a transitional period for me with days of much confusion.

At the time, I was into mainstream jazz—not Dixieland or modern but guys like [saxophonists] Tubby Hayes and Johnny Dankworth. A year earlier, there had been a riot at the jazz festival, so going there in ’61 came with a bit of intrigue.

Watch Rod Stewart perform ‘Maggie May’ in 1971.

That afternoon, we snuck into the festival through a large runoff pipe and eventually made our way to a beer tent. There, I met an older woman who was something of a sexual predator. One thing led to the next, and we ended up nearby on a secluded patch of lawn. I was a virgin, and all I could think is, ‘This is it, Rod Stewart, you’d better put on a good performance here or else your reputation will be ruined all over North London.” But it was all over in a few seconds. Her name wasn’t Maggie May, but the experience I had with her would influence the writing of the song 10 years later.

In 1971, I was both the lead singer in the Faces and I was signed to Mercury as a solo artist. I was planning to record my third solo album, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” when I met Martin Quittenton, a guitarist and songwriter who had been in a blues-rock band called Steamhammer.

Martin seemed like a very sophisticated, educated guy, and I was looking for good acoustic musicians for my upcoming album. I invited Martin over to my house in Muswell Hill, which had a beautiful view of North London. As we sat and talked in my sitting room, Martin took out his guitar and started running through an old Bob Dylan song. It may have been Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” but I can’t recall.

ENLARGE

Rod Stewart singing with The Faces at Southern Illinois University in 1971, the year ‘Maggie May’ was released. PHOTO: DEBI DOSS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Then Martin began playing chords to a song he had written. I rather liked them. I told him, “You strum and I’ll sing.” I still write like this today. I’ll work with a guitarist, and when I hear a lovely set of chords, I’ll start humming and adding words to see what comes of it.

As Martin played, I started singing “Maggie Mae,” an old Liverpudlian folk song about a prostitute. The Beatles had included it on “Let It Be” a year earlier. As I sang, the idea of a hooker popped into my head, then the jazz festival when I was 16 and then losing my virginity. It all flooded back as Martin and I got into it and I started coming up with words.

But I didn’t write anything down. I merely created a vocal sketch in my mind of the song by humming along and improvising lines here and there to match Martin’s melody. Lyrics weren’t important at that point, only the feel. As with any song I eventually record, I first wanted to develop an emotional connection.

Martin and I kept at it until we were both satisfied with what we had. When we finished, I said, “Right, we have enough of a line here to bring it into the studio. Let me book drums and bass and we’ll produce it all there.”

We recorded a rough instrumental track at Morgan Sound Studios in Willesden, London. I sang abstract lines on top of the music to remind me later of the feel I wanted. [Mr. Stewart hums “Maggie May’s” melody, singing words here and there, such as “since you’ve been away it’s been so long” and “just because of you, all my nights are blue.”] When we were done, I took the tape home to write the lyrics.

Even today, I always want the melody line first. Then I put the words and music together later like a jigsaw puzzle. With “Maggie May,” I listened back a few times to the demo tape we had made and paused, saying to myself, “Right, what have I got here?” It’s sort of like sizing up the music to help determine the story I want to tell. I began thinking back on that day at the jazz festival and I came up with a song about a young guy who has been with an older woman and the aftermath going through his head.

I still have the black notebook with red binding down the back that I used to write all the lyrics. My scribbling for “Maggie May” filled about 20 pages. What was unusual about the words is that they turned out to be more of a story than a traditional song that circles back to a sing-along chorus. That was my fault, really. Telling stories is what I’m best at. I also didn’t use “Maggie May” in the lyrics—just the name “Maggie.” “May” just popped onto the end of “Maggie” in the title at some point.

ENLARGE

Among the members of the band the Faces were guitarist Ronnie Wood and keyboard player Ian McLagan, seen in April 1975. PHOTO: WATFORD/MIRRORPIX/CORBIS

When it was time to record, we didn’t rehearse. That’s the beauty of what we did back then. I just got together with the five musicians on the session [guitarist/bassist Ronnie Wood, guitarist Martin Quittenton, organist Ian McLagan, mandolinist Ray Jackson and drummer Micky Waller] and told them what I wanted to do with the music and where in the song I wanted things to happen. Both Ronnie and Mac [Ian McLagan] were in the Faces with me. I didn’t have a clue about the technical aspects of music, but I could feel it. If you can feel it, you can speak it. That’s the innocent beauty of what we did. But we had a problem.

Micky, a studio drummer then, had showed up without a full drum kit. He had forgotten his cymbals, so all he had were his drums. I was relatively unknown then and couldn’t really afford to cancel the session, pay the musicians and pay them again for another session just so Micky could grab all his gear.

Fortunately, Micky was superb. Like [Rolling Stones drummer] Charlie Watts, Micky had come up in Britain’s jazz world. That’s why on the record, the drums sound pronounced. We overdubbed the cymbals later, so you hear them more faintly. Micky forgetting to bring his cymbals actually gave “Maggie May” a sharper beat.

I knew I wanted Ronnie to play eight bars on the electric guitar for the intro and then play guitar and bass behind Martin’s acoustic guitar. I also wanted Ronnie to overdub bluesy guitar solos in the middle and toward the end, to break up the song, which meant we had to leave room on the song for those.

I had Ian hold his organ chords for full measures, so the song would have a density behind the guitar work. Ray was in the folk-rock band Lindisfarne at the time, and I asked him if he could give me sort of a joyous mandolin solo at the end, which I knew would add the traditional folk feel I was looking for.

ENLARGE

Once all of the music was recorded, my vocal was last to go on. The falsetto “whoo hoo-hoo” I added at the end had first popped out when we were making the demo, so I added it again on the recording.

At first, “Maggie May” wasn’t going to be on the album. It was too unusual. The song ran longer than five minutes and it didn’t have a catchy chorus. But as we finished up the album, we found we were a song short. So we added “Maggie May,” since it was already produced.

For the album version, we added a short, 32-second intro to “Maggie May” called “Henry” that Martin wrote and handled on mandolin. Since there would be a gap between his intro and “Maggie May,” Martin would get paid separately for “Henry.” I wanted to give him an extra bonus. No matter how long a stand-alone song is, you still get credit and royalties for it. But I have no idea why Martin called it “Henry.”

When the single was released Mercury for some reason put “Maggie May” on the B-side, with “Reason to Believe” on the A-side. It wasn’t until a radio disc jockey in the States flipped over the 45 and played “Maggie May” that the song began to catch on.

At first, I didn’t think much of “Maggie May.” I guess that’s because the record company didn’t believe in the song. I didn’t have much confidence then. I figured it was best to listen to the guys who knew better. What I learned is that sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

NHL Escrow & Anaheim Ducks finances

NHL Escrow explained



Anaheim Ducks lose money every year

Whistler - Horstman House

Horstman House  - stayed 4 nights $852,  2 large bedrooms 2 large bathrooms kitchen & living room

20 minutes to the Upper Village, 25 to Whistler Village, free bus twice an hour

Walked around Lost Lake each day - 40 minutes

We saw black bears at the gondola & twice near our hotel

Peak 2 Peak - amazing, held my breath on the way over & talked to Aussies on the way back. Happy to get on firma terra after the gondola ride to the Village.

Nairn Falls

Visited Pemberton briefly, 30 minutes from Whistler.

Hypomaniacs - Donald Trump & Bill Clinton

ELECTION 2016

AUGUST 25, 2015

Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Have the Same Secret Weapon

A psychologist explains the personality trait that these two 5ambitious, impulsive men share

By John GartnerPhoto: Getty Images



Donald Trump is the Republican frontrunner for president, a fact that has befuddled just about everybody—except perhaps Trump himself—and spawned countless theories: He's leading because Americans are frustrated with politicians and want a straight-talking outsider. Because he shamelessly caters to paranoid conservatives. Because he's famous. He's not politically correct. He never says sorry. He's unfailingly entertaining. And the press can't resist him. But there's another reason that no one has considered yet, a secret weapon that has propelled past charismatic politicians like Bill Clinton and Theodore Roosevelt to the White House: hypomanic temperament.

To be clear, I’m not using my authority as a professor of psychiatry to call Trump mentally ill. Hypomanic temperament is not an illness. It is genetically linked to bipolar disorder and manifests the same traits as mania—but crucially, does so to a less severe and more functional degree. Historically, hypomanic temperament has received little attention compared to bipolar disorder, but the founders of modern psychiatry—Eugen Bleuler, Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer—first described these personalities around a century ago. "Hypomanics," as I describe them in In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography:


are whirlwinds of activity who are filled with energy and need little sleep, less than 6 hours. They are restless, impatient and easily bored, needing constant stimulation… and tend to dominate conversations. They are driven, ambitious and veritable forces of nature in pursuit of their goals. While these goals may appear grandiose to others, they are supremely confident of success—and no one can tell them otherwise…. They can be exuberant, charming, witty, gregarious but also arrogant…. They are impulsive in ways that show poor judgment, saying things off the top of their head, and acting on ideas and desires quickly, seemingly oblivious to potentially damaging consequences. They are risk takers who seem oblivious to how risky their behavior truly is. They have large libidos and often act out sexually. Indeed all of their appetites are heightened.

This description doesn't just match Clinton; it also sounds an awful lot like Trump. He reports, for example, “I usually sleep only four hours a night,” which by itself is usually a pretty reliable indicator of hypomania, and something he boasts about: “How can you compete against people like me if I sleep only four hours?” He claims to work seven days a week, and in a typical 18-hour day makes “over a hundred" phone calls and have “at least a dozen meetings.” “Without passion you don't have energy, without energy you have nothing!” Trump has tweeted. Hence his taunt of Jeb Bush as “a low energy person,” by contrast. Like most hypomanics, he is distractible. “Most successful people have very short attention spans. It has a lot to do with imagination,” he once wrote. He is correct. The same rapidity of thought that helps engender creativity makes it difficult to stay on one linear track of ideas without skipping to the next. Like most hypomanics, he follows his “vision, no matter how crazy or idiotic other people think it is.” Trump sees himself as a person of destiny and no one is going to talk him out of it. Trump's inflated self-esteem is illustrated by the fact that his net worth is reported by Forbes to be $4 billion, a fraction of the $10 billion he claims. It’s not just hyperbole: Hypomanics' wild optimism systematically distorts their perceptions.

Dripping with arrogance, Trump is an uber-aggressive alpha male who gleefully dominates, bullies, and colorfully disparages his competitors and critics. His hypomanic energy gives him that elusive charisma: Whether you love him or hate him (and charismatic figures produce such polarized responses) he makes himself the center of attention, the most exciting figure on the stage, who consumes all the oxygen in the room. But his impulsivity is manifested in his impolitic, unfiltered, outrageous statements, like his remark about Mexican immigrant "rapists." Many assume that one of these gaffes will ultimately bring him down, and they may be right. Leaders who live by their hypomania often die by it as well.

Take Bill Clinton.

For my Clinton biography, I interviewed a hundred people who have known him well, from childhood to the present day, and read aloud to each one of them the narrative description of hypomanic temperament. All one hundred of them agreed—enthusiastically in most cases—that it described Bill Clinton. Clinton also requires little sleep and is brimming with energy. When he first ran for Congress, he regularly campaigned for 36 hours at a time without sleeping, and required rotating shifts of drivers; he wore out the soles of three pairs of shoes. George Stephanopoulos recalled that Clinton called him with “fifty ideas a day.” In what seemed like an attempt to “change the world overnight,” the youngest governor in Arkansas history submitted 150 bills to the legislature on its opening day, a packet so thick legislators complained they couldn’t lift it, much less read it.

Clinton also evidences classic hypomanic pressured speech pattern, to a degree so extreme I have never seen the likes of it before. At a three-hour dinner in Africa, seated at a table with a dozen members of the travelling press corps in 2007, I heard him speak off the cuff for three hours, without interruption. “Why didn’t any of you ask him a single question?” I asked a veteran reporter from a national publication. “I was having trouble just keeping up with him,” he confessed. Of course, Clinton is off the charts in his charisma, and his erotic electromagnetism always made him the center of attention in any room. But with these assets came his downfall—the inability to contain his sexual impulses.

The irony is that Donald Trump and all his success, indeed America’s success, has been produced by the very phenomenon Trump claims is destroying America: immigration. In The Hypomanic Edge, I propose that the secret to America’s character and success is that we have more hypomanics than anyone else, precisely because we are a nation of immigrants. Immigrants are unusual people with the restless energy, ambitious drive and risk tolerance to come here. America's gene pool has been seeded these self-selected, highly driven people from all over the world—the type of people most likely to become entrepreneurs.

Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant himself, called immigration the “golden stream” that contributed more to America’s wealth than “all the silver and gold mines in the world.” Contrary to Trump’s contention that Mexico is sending us their worst, Carnegie argued that the “the best of the workers seek [America's] shores.” “The old and destitute, the idle and contented do not brave the waves of the stormy Atlantic, but sit helplessly at home,” he wrote. Yet each generation of Americans forgets this lesson, insisting that the most recent wave of immigrants is different than previous generations'—immoral, criminal, and a drain on society. Lest we forget, the same was once said of the Irish and Italians. The irony is that the Mexican immigrants Trump disparages are very much like him—thinking big and pursuing their dream of a better life, no matter how big a wall you put in their way. One of them might even be the father of the next Donald Trump.



John Gartner, Ph.D., part-time assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, is a psychologist in practice in New York and Baltimore, and author of The Hypomanic Edge: the Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot) of Success in America and In Search Of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography.

San Diego, California

May 16 - 23 2015  US exchange rate 1.25

YVR to LAX Westjet (met Jack ... lost leg accident as LA County Sheriff, working in IT for USAF talked about SoCal & BC for 2 hrs). LAX is huge, half under construction

Henry's Pub ... found out about San Diego's May "gray"  ... cooler than expected for SoCal

On the menu saw this: 

Went to the San Diego Zoo ... 4000 animals

Walked everywhere for 4 hours & then took the bus to get more information

Westin Gaslamp Hotel .. 4 stars very nice

Selena gave us Starbucks coffee for $1 because we brought our own mugs. Needless to say went back twice a day.

Went to Ralph's for food & wine ... great downtown market ... Yellowtail Shiraz $6.69 ($4.89 for 6)

Gaslamp Quarter


Petco Park - Padres beat the Cubs  4-3 25,017

Old Town  - It commemorates the early days of the town of San Diego and includes many historic buildings from the period 1820 to 1870. (Jail, Bank etc) - good lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel

Sea World $86 US each - worth it

Seaport Village & Port of San Diego - walked along the waterfront everyday for an hour

Transit
Somalian taxi driver