The telephone rang at ten in the morning, in a hotel room in Sheffield, Alabama.
Rod Stewart, thirty years old and newly arrived in America, was still asleep when it rang.
The voice on the line belonged to Tom Dowd, the producer steering his first American album.
“Get down here in half an hour,” Dowd said, because the band track was already mixed.
Stewart dressed in a panic and drove through the dry Alabama morning to the studio.
There was just one problem.
In all his years of recording, he had never sung in a studio without a drink first.
Alcohol steadied the nerves that had once driven him to hide behind amplifiers onstage.
That morning there was nothing alcoholic to be had anywhere in town, as he later recalled.
He stood before the microphone stone cold sober, at half past ten, terrified.
The song waiting for him was a slow anthem about crossing stormy water toward home.
It had been written by two English brothers and recorded three years earlier to little notice.
He sang it anyway, take after take, while the tape rolled in the small Alabama room.
Six or seven takes later, the biggest recording of his life was sitting on tape.
It had to cross an ocean to come home.
Two Brothers and a Harmonium
The song began in England in 1972, with a young songwriter named Gavin Sutherland.
Gavin sang in a duo with his brother Iain, the two of them harmonizing over minimal accompaniment.
In June 1972 the brothers recorded the song with Gavin on bass drum and Iain on harmonium.
They overdubbed their own voices and aimed, by their own account, for a Celtic feel.
Gavin later explained that he had written not a love song but a kind of spiritual journey.
He described it, in his own phrase, as “mankind’s spiritual odyssey” toward freedom and fulfilment.
Most listeners, of course, would hear something simpler: a traveler crossing rough water toward home.
Island Records released the brothers’ version as a single that June, produced by Muff Winwood.
It climbed only to number fifty-four in Britain and sold a reported forty thousand copies.
Because the session came after their album Lifeboat was finished, the song missed the British edition entirely.
American buyers found it on the United States edition of Lifeboat, while British albums ignored it for years.
Its British album debut waited until 1976, on a compilation that simply borrowed the song’s name.
The Fan Who Heard It First
The song might have stayed a footnote if a young woman had not been watching television.
Dee Harrington, Stewart’s girlfriend, saw the Sutherland Brothers on The Old Grey Whistle Test in June 1972.
She urged Stewart to hear them, and he caught the brothers live at London’s Marquee Club.
The raspy London singer became a genuine fan of the duo’s gentle, hymn-like harmonies.
Stewart even wrote two songs with the brothers, hoping to record them for his next album.
Neither song was ever recorded, but the sessions kept one older Sutherland tune in his mind.
When he planned an album called Atlantic Crossing, a song about the sea seemed to fit perfectly.
A Singer Between Two Shores
By 1975, Stewart himself was the traveler his new album described, leaving England behind him.
He had ended his years with Mercury Records and signed with Warner Brothers for the American market.
He moved to Los Angeles, having complained that Britain’s punishing tax rates left him little choice.
Atlantic Crossing would be the first album he ever recorded in North America rather than Britain.
He hired Tom Dowd, the legendary Atlantic Records engineer and producer, to shape the new sound.
Much of the work happened at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, far from London.
Behind him stood the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the fabled house band of southern soul.
The album was divided into a fast side and a slow side, speed on one face, ballads on the other.
“Sailing” closed the record, the final track of the slow side, like a ship entering harbor last.
Stone Cold Sober
The band track came first, built around Pete Carr’s acoustic and electric guitars.
Then came the morning call, the panic, and the empty shelf where a calming drink should be.
Stewart had sung on records for a decade by then, always with a drink somewhere within reach.
He needed only six or seven takes, by his own later count, to nail the performance.
The vocal he delivered was unhurried and hymn-like, swelling slowly toward its final chorus.
Dowd mixed the track around that voice, and the take from the sober morning survived.
There is a final irony in the record’s paperwork, hiding on the other side of the single.
When “Sailing” was released, its B-side carried the gloriously accidental title “Stone Cold Sober”.
The Argument He Lost
Stewart loved the finished album, but he fought hard against this song leading it into the shops.
By all accounts, he argued vehemently against releasing “Sailing” as the album’s first single.
He wanted his own composition, “Three Time Loser”, to carry the album into the charts instead.
Gavin Sutherland later said Rod saw “Sailing” as a big ballad to close side two, nothing more.
The label overruled its own star, a decision stars are rarely asked to forgive.
Warner Brothers released the single on 8 August 1975, one week before the album appeared.
Four Weeks at the Top
The single reached number two in only its second week on the British chart.
In September it climbed to number one and stayed there for four full weeks.
Ireland, the Netherlands, and Norway also sent the record to the top of their charts.
Australia held it at number two, Germany at number four, and New Zealand at number three.
The album matched the single, topping the British chart as his fourth solo number one there.
Its British sales eventually passed a million copies, making it the biggest-selling single of his career there.
The View from the Far Shore
In America, the country he had just adopted, the song barely made a ripple at first.
The album arrived there in August 1975 without any single at all to announce it.
When “Sailing” was finally released as an American single that October, it stalled at number fifty-eight.
Canada gave the exile’s anthem exactly the same lukewarm position on its own chart.
The contrast was almost comic: the whole of Britain singing a song America politely ignored.
It had to cross an ocean to come home.
The Ark Royal Effect
A year later, the song’s second voyage began on British television, of all unlikely harbors.
In August 1976, BBC1 launched Sailor, a ten-week documentary series filmed aboard the carrier HMS Ark Royal.
Week after week, the series followed the great ship and the young sailors who crewed her.
Its theme music, drifting over the opening credits, was Stewart’s recording of “Sailing”.
Viewers who had missed the record the first time now heard it attached to real sailors.
The single re-entered the chart at number fifty in early September, then climbed as the series ran.
By late October 1976 it had reached number three, nearly repeating its triumph of a year earlier.
It lingered in the British top fifty into January 1977, long after the series had ended.
That autumn Stewart also sang the song in concert for the first time, on a European tour.
Night after night it closed the show, the purported finale before the encore brought him back.
Played Out to Sea
Television and film kept finding new oceans for the song to cross in the years after.
Its first video was filmed in the Port of Dublin, with Stewart’s partner Britt Ekland appearing.
A second video, shot in New York Harbor in 1978, was among the first aired on MTV’s launch day in 1981.
The strangest honor came on 5 April 1982, on a quayside in Portsmouth, England.
As the British task force sailed out for the Falklands, loudspeakers played “Sailing” across the harbor.
Nobody had planned the moment as theater, which is exactly why witnesses remembered it forever.
Zeebrugge
In March 1987, the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized off Zeebrugge with heavy loss of life.
In the disaster’s aftermath, “Sailing” was reissued as a charity single to raise relief funds.
It reached number forty-one in Britain, number thirty in Ireland, and number twenty-four in Flanders.
Modest numbers, but the song had never really been about numbers in moments like that.
It was, tellingly, Stewart’s only charting single anywhere in the British Isles that whole year.
The Song Sails On
Other singers kept borrowing the song, from Joan Baez to Dame Vera Lynn across the decades.
In 1990, guitarist Steve Hackett gathered an all-star cast to remake it as Rock Against Repatriation.
That version protested the forced return of Vietnamese boat people from camps in Hong Kong.
Football crowds borrowed the melody too, from Millwall’s defiant chant to Hertha Berlin’s homecoming hymn.
Stewart himself carried it into Wembley Stadium in 1986, with Elton John on piano and Eric Clapton on guitar.
He sang it again at the Concert for Diana in 2007, in the same stadium, decades on.
In 2012 he performed it at the Festival of Remembrance in London, before Queen Elizabeth II.
And in 2019 his old vocal returned dressed in a full orchestra, on an album of reworked hits.
You probably know a song that waited years to find its moment in your own life.
It plays at the dock, the wedding, or the long drive home, and suddenly the whole journey makes sense.
Home is the harbor every exile carries.
Rod Stewart: The Rascal with the Rasp
A Builder’s Son in Highgate
Roderick David Stewart was born on 10 January 1945, at home in Highgate, North London.
He was the youngest of five children born to Robert Joseph Stewart and his wife Elsie.
Robert was a Scot from Leith, in Edinburgh, who had worked as a master builder there.
The couple had raised four children in Scotland before moving south to build a London life.
When Robert retired from building, he bought a newsagent’s shop, and the family lived above it.
It was a football household before it was anything else, ruled by the Saturday game.
His father had played amateur football himself and managed local teams around the neighborhood.
His earliest memories included the pictures of Scottish footballers his brothers pinned above their beds.
The family also sang together, gathering around the songs of Al Jolson at home.
In January 1959, his father bought the boy a guitar, and everything quietly changed direction.
The first song he learned was a folk tune about a worried man singing a worried song.
The Footballer Who Never Was
For years, though, football and not music looked like the family trade he would inherit.
Young Rod captained his school team and played centre-half for the Middlesex Schoolboys side.
In the summer of 1960, spurred on by his father, he went for trials at Brentford.
The Third Division club never called him back, as he freely admitted in his autobiography.
He left school at fifteen and drifted through a string of unlikely working-class jobs.
He printed silk screens, delivered newspapers, erected fences, and labored briefly at Highgate Cemetery.
Music, he decided, offered an easier life than football, and allowed a man to drink besides.
Twickenham Station
His apprenticeship began the way folk tales begin, with a stranger listening at a station.
He spent the early sixties busking around London and Paris with folk singer Wizz Jones.
The harmonica became his calling card, carried everywhere and played at every opportunity.
In January 1964, at Twickenham station, bluesman Long John Baldry heard him playing that harmonica.
Baldry invited the teenager to sit in, then discovered the boy could sing as well.
After securing his mother’s approval, Baldry hired him for thirty-five pounds a week.
Stewart joined the Hoochie Coochie Men and was soon billed on posters as Rod the Mod.
The group held a weekly residency at the Marquee Club, the beating heart of London rhythm and blues.
His recording debut came that June, uncredited, on the B-side of a Baldry single.
A solo deal with Decca followed, though his first singles sank without troubling any chart.
He passed through the soul revue Steampacket and the short-lived Shotgun Express, still searching.
Learning to Roar in America
The break arrived in February 1967, when guitarist Jeff Beck recruited him for a new group.
The Jeff Beck Group toured Britain without reward, then sailed for a six-week American tour.
On his first night in New York, stage fright drove him to sing from behind the amplifiers.
A quick shot of brandy coaxed him forward, and the tour became a triumph instead.
Their album Truth reached number fifteen in America in 1968, though Britain ignored it entirely.
A second album, Beck-Ola, followed in 1969, as the band quietly pulled itself apart.
In those years Stewart learned phrasing, stamina, and the sandpaper edge that defines his voice.
He first played with Ronnie Wood there, beginning a partnership that shaped his next decade.
Faces, and One Famous B-Side
In October 1969, Stewart followed Wood into a rebuilt Small Faces, soon renamed simply Faces.
Faces were a glorious shambles onstage, all grin and groove, beloved far beyond their sales.
Alongside the band, Stewart pursued a solo career on Mercury Records, album by album.
His third solo album, Every Picture Tells a Story, changed everything in the autumn of 1971.
A song called “Maggie May”, tucked onto a B-side, was flipped over by radio programmers.
Album and single reached number one together in Britain and America, a chart first.
Never a Dull Moment followed in 1972, and “You Wear It Well” topped the British chart.
Faces managed one American top forty hit, “Stay With Me”, amid Stewart’s growing solo shadow.
By 1975 his solo career had outgrown the band, and Faces broke up at year’s end.
Wood drifted off to the Rolling Stones, and Stewart stood alone at a genuine crossroads.
The Move West
The crossroads led west, to Los Angeles, Warner Brothers, and the reinvention called Atlantic Crossing.
A Night on the Town followed in 1976 and became his first platinum album in America.
Its ballad “Tonight’s the Night” spent eight weeks at number one on the American chart.
“The First Cut Is the Deepest” gave him another British number one the following year.
Foot Loose and Fancy Free kept the run alive, powered by “You’re in My Heart”.
In “You’re in My Heart” he name-checked Celtic, the Glasgow club he had adopted as his own.
Disco King for a Season
Then came 1978, spandex, make-up, and the most argued-about record of his entire career.
Blondes Have More Fun topped the American album chart and sold three million copies.
Its single, “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, reached number one in Britain and America alike.
In February 1979 it was the record holding the Pointer Sisters’ “Fire” at number two.
Critics sneered at the disco turn, but Stewart quietly donated his royalties from the song to UNICEF.
He performed it at the Music for UNICEF concert at the United Nations in 1979.
The Long Eighties
The eighties opened with “Passion” at number five and a wall of his videos on the newborn MTV.
“Baby Jane” returned him to number one in Britain in 1983, his last chart-topper there.
“Infatuation” followed in 1984, with old bandmate Jeff Beck supplying the guitar fireworks.
“Every Beat of My Heart” reached number two in Britain in 1986, between the dips.
Out of Order, in 1988, steadied the ship with “Forever Young” and a run of American hits.
His version of Tom Waits’s “Downtown Train” reached number three in America in 1990.
Restoration
Vagabond Heart, in 1991, carried “Rhythm of My Heart” back into the top five everywhere.
In 1993 the Brit Awards gave him their prize for outstanding contribution to music.
That year “All for Love”, recorded with Bryan Adams and Sting, topped the American chart.
An Unplugged session with Ronnie Wood reunited the old Faces chemistry before the cameras.
“Have I Told You Lately”, from those sessions, climbed to number five in America.
In 1994, Jeff Beck presented his old singer for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
That New Year’s Eve he sang to three and a half million people on Copacabana beach.
The Rio crowd entered the record books as the largest free rock concert audience ever.
The Voice, Repaired
The new century nearly took the voice away before it gave the voice a second career.
In May 2000, surgery following a thyroid cancer diagnosis forced him to relearn singing entirely.
The rasp survived the lessons, altered in ways only its owner could fully measure.
The Songbook Years
It Had to Be You, his first Great American Songbook album, reached number four in America in 2002.
As Time Goes By followed at number two, and the series gathered unstoppable momentum.
Stardust, the third volume, topped the American chart in 2004, his first there in twenty-five years.
It also won him his first Grammy Award, for best traditional pop vocal album.
By then the songbooks were selling at levels that rivaled his nineteen-seventies peak.
In October 2005 he received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard.
A rock covers album, Still the Same, even debuted at number one in 2006.
Soulbook and further volumes carried the experiment through the decade almost without pause.
Sir Rod
Writing his autobiography in 2012 unlocked the songwriter who had been silent for twenty years.
Time, the album that followed in 2013, returned him to number one in Britain.
It set a British record for the longest gap between an artist’s chart-topping albums.
He had already entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a second time, with Faces, in 2012.
A CBE in 2007 had made him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 2016 the Duke of Cambridge knighted him at Buckingham Palace, for services to music and charity.
Blood Red Roses arrived in 2018, his thirtieth studio album, restless as ever.
A year later You’re in My Heart, reworking his classics with an orchestra, became his tenth British number one album.
“Sailing” rode among them, its old vocal wrapped in new orchestral clothes.
Eight children, a knighthood, and more than 120 million records sold trace the outline.
Above his Los Angeles home runs Three Rivers City, a model railway city of nineteen-forties America.
It is the grown-up version of the hobby that filled his Highgate childhood bedroom.
Into his eighties he kept touring, rasping, and closing shows with the old anthems.
The rasp remained after every fashion washed out.
Return, finally, to that small studio in Sheffield, Alabama, on a spring morning in 1975.
The band track was finished, the producer was waiting, and the singer had nothing to steady him.
He sang the brothers’ hymn six or seven times, and one of those takes carried everything.
Within months the song he had argued against was sitting on top of the British chart.
Within a year it had crossed back, attached itself to a warship, and done it all again.
It had to cross an ocean to come home.
Somewhere tonight, in a harbor town or a football stand, strangers are singing it still.
And the man who sang it sober is still out there, sailing it home.