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