![]() ![]() In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the song number 130 on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. We’ll see him again." Maggie May" is a song co-written by singer Rod Stewart and Martin Quittenton, and performed by Rod Stewart on his album Every Picture Tells a Story, released in 1971. But he was just starting on his journey to becoming the drunk uncle of pop music. Stewart would stick around with the Faces until the band’s 1975 breakup, maintaining his more-popular solo career at the same time. He wasn’t crazy about the song, and neither was the label it started out as the B-side to his single “Reason To Believe.” But radio DJs liked the B-side better, and it took off, turning Stewart, in short order, into a star. Stewart might not have meant for “Maggie May” to become that. (Stewart’s real father was a master builder.) But then he hits on another idea: “Or find myself a rock ‘n’ roll band that needs a helping hand.” And just like that, “Maggie May” becomes Rod Stewart’s superhero origin story. He thinks about going back to school, or about becoming a pool hustler, like his father. Stewart is thinking about what he can do with his life now that it’s been totally upended. He kept rambling.Īs Tom Ewing’s “Maggie May” review points out, there’s a great lyrical trick toward the end of the song. And yet he ends it all unmoored and regretful: “Maggie, I wished I’d never seen your face / I’ll get on back home one of these days.” He never did, of course. Stewart is nebulously pissed off: “I know I keep you amused, but I feel I’m being used.” He’s cruelly petty: “The morning sun, when it’s in your face, really shows your age.” But he’s also completely caught up in her: “You stole my heart, I couldn’t leave you if I tried.” The music is a warm, affectionate reel, a sign that Stewart’s looking at all this with a happy glow rather than a seething rage. “Wake up, Maggie, I think I’ve got something to say to you,” Stewart starts out, as if this has been keeping him up all night, even though he’s too conflicted to articulate what he needs to say. It’s more of a freeform unburdening, a wild parade of accusations and equivocations and confessions of love. ![]() There’s no chorus to the song, no structure. ![]() He’s mad about it, but he’s not sure why he’s mad. Something has happened, and he’s not sure how it’ll affect his life, but he knows he’ll never be the same again. “Maggie May” is the sound of a guy processing a formative experience. Nobody sounded anything like Rod Stewart. Every Picture Tells A Story, the album that gave us “Maggie May,” remains an absolute motherfucking front-to-back burner. It comes out organic, as if Stewart had drunkenly stumbled upon this sound. On paper, that combination looks a little too neatly triangulated, but that’s not how it sounds. (Jackson only got session-musician pay for that, and no songwriting credit, and he was pissed off about that for decades.) For two albums, Stewart had been figuring out his own solo style, which built folk instrumentation and sloppily cluttered rock arrangements around his beautifully whiskeyed white-soul rasp. Ray Jackson, of the folk group Lindesfarne, improvised the mandolin intro. Stewart co-wrote “Maggie May” with Martin Quittenton, guitarist for the blues-rock band Steamhammer. And thanks to the song that Stewart wrote about that afternoon in 1961, his solo records soon came to overshadow anything the Faces did. (The Faces’ highest-charting song was 1971’s “ Stay With Me,” which peaked at #17.) But Stewart had also started recording his own solo albums in 1969. So Wood and Stewart came in to replace him, and the Small Faces became the Faces, leaning into Stonesian blues-choogle and enjoying another pretty-great run. Frontman Steve Marriott had just left the band to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton. When that band broke up in 1969, Stewart and his Jeff Beck Group bandmate Ronnie Wood (still six years away from becoming a Rolling Stone) joined the Small Faces, a pretty great London band who were huge in the UK and who’d had some success in the US. ![]()
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