HE WEARS IT WELL
I’d like to commend Uncut on the recent Rod Stewart cover story [September issue]. Swanning about in a sports car in Beverly Hills sounded great fun, and Rod acquitted himself well in a morethan-expected open and frank way. He was particularly honest, for example, about the writing of “The Killing Of Georgie”. “If I looked back on that now and said, ‘I’m going to write a song about homosexuality,’ I’d have said, ‘Fuck off!’ It would have scared me.”
Even though for decades Rod The Mod has enjoyed a rich LA lifestyle few of us can even imagine, he still comes over as a down-toearth and sincere family man with an abiding love for music… Even after all these years!
More colourful interviews with colourful characters, please! Tony Farthing, via email …Rod Stewart says, “I think we blew The Grateful Dead way off the stage.” Indeed they did! I saw the Jeff Beck Group open for the Dead at the Fillmore East in 1968, and they truly were sensational, one of the very best gigs I’ve ever seen. I had a seat in the fourth or fifth row, and so drained was I after their set that I actually fell asleep during the Dead’s set. Later that year, I saw the Beck group at a small club in New York’s Times Square area called Steve Paul’s Scene, and at the end of the performance Beck brought on “a friend” of his to jam with them, a fella called Jimi Hendrix. After their set, my girlfriend and I spotted Beck sitting alone at a table, and he bade us join him, and soon after we were joined by Hendrix, who bought us beers and gave our planned “elopement” his blessing. Incredibly, in the 30 or so minutes we chatted, no-one disturbed us.
As the say, those were the days! Bruce Paley, via email – Amazing story, Bruce! Thanks for sharing. I very much hope you’ll have read Peter Watts’ Hendrix cover story by now; some of it takes place in the Scene. I wonder if it was the night you were there? (MB)