When I first started listening to rock, Rod Stewart's voice already sounded affected, gender-neutral and ridiculous. By the MTV era, when I started to buy myself records, he seemed absurd, a has-been. It took Alex's mid-1980s suggestion of the work that Stewart had done with Jeff Beck, on Truth and Beck-Ola, to hear it fresh, without the glam and the comeback haircut and the self-deprecation that seemed like so much pandering. The last few days, I've been listening to Every Picture Tells A Story, and it's been a lovely reminder of Stewart's relative youth, when he sounded a little like Janis Joplin and a LOT like Cat Stevens, at least to my ear. All these singers had that sort of determinedly hoarse, gentle or belty (sell it! sell it!) sound, and it interests me that they sort of clustered then, in the early 1970s, reinterpreting what it meant to be a pop singer. What I am hearing, I guess, is a kind of ur-Tom Waits, the idea that the blues singers like Billie and Son House had made so clear in that genre -- the voice doesn't need to be liquid to be lovely.
"Maggie May" is still a charming song, no matter how hackneyed it may sound, now. Listen to it again, make believe you never heard it before, and you'll hear Stewart all over again.