Rod Stewart never released Gasoline Alley as a single, and it never troubled a chart. Yet the title track of his second solo album became one of the defining songs of his life: a homesick young man’s promise to himself that one day he would go back down the alley where he started from. Written with Ronnie Wood before either of them was famous, recorded with the Faces moonlighting as his band, and later covered into the charts by Elkie Brooks, it is the song that turned Stewart’s north-London childhood into mythology — and, nearly half a century later, the song he chose to name a tour after. It is also, not coincidentally, the first thing you hear on the album.
Born Above the Newsagent’s
Roderick David Stewart was born on 10 January 1945 at 507 Archway Road, Highgate, in north London, the youngest of five children. His father, Robert, was a Scottish master builder from Leith, Edinburgh; his mother, Elsie, was English. The family later lived above the newsagent’s shop his father bought on Archway Road, and Stewart has always described the childhood as fantastically happy — the youngest child, thoroughly spoiled, in a house where football and Al Jolson records were the twin religions.
That upbringing is the fuel of Gasoline Alley. By the time he wrote it, Stewart had spent a decade failing picturesquely: he had busked around Europe with folk singer Wizz Jones, slept under bridges in Paris and been deported from Spain for vagrancy in 1963; he had worked, briefly and legendarily, as a labourer at Highgate Cemetery, a short walk from the family home; he had been hired off a railway platform at Twickenham by Long John Baldry after Baldry heard his harmonica, sung with the Jeff Beck Group and watched record deal after record deal come to little. The song’s narrator has left home and made the classic young man’s bargain with the world, and the song catches him recanting it: he thinks he knows now what is making him sad — a yearning for his own back yard — and he resolves to swallow his silly pride, put on his wedding suit when the weather turns and the rails unfreeze, and catch the evening train home, arriving before the milk is on the doorstep. It is a small, precise, working-class homesickness, written by a man who had genuinely been homesick in harder places than most, and Stewart sings it like a man reading his own diary.
Two Careers at Once
In early 1970 Stewart was living a double life. By night he fronted the Faces, the good-time band he and Wood had built from the remains of the Small Faces; by day he was pursuing a solo career for Mercury and Vertigo that had begun with An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down in 1969. The partnership at the album’s heart had been forged in the Jeff Beck Group, where Stewart sang and Wood played bass through two albums of heavy blues before both men walked away in 1969. When the Small Faces splintered that same year, the leftovers of the two bands — Stewart and Wood joining Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones — became Faces, and the chemistry was instant: a singer and a guitarist who finished each other’s musical sentences.
Gasoline Alley, his second solo album, was recorded between February and April 1970 at Morgan Studios in London, produced by Stewart with Lou Reizner and issued by Vertigo in Britain and Mercury in America, and the two careers are indistinguishable on it: the Faces are all over the record.
Wood plays guitar and bass, Martin Quittenton adds acoustic guitar, Stanley Matthews contributes mandolin, and Ian McLagan plays piano and Hammond organ — though the British sleeve famously credits him with the note that Mac was not available due to a bus strike, a credit restored properly on the American release. Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones appear on other tracks, and Stewart and Wood’s title song opens the album, four minutes of acoustic warmth with Wood’s slinky slide guitar shadowing the vocal line, answering nearly every phrase Stewart sings. AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine would later call it a vivid, loving tribute to his adolescence, which is exactly what it is.
The Company It Keeps
The title track also set the terms for everything after it on the record. Gasoline Alley is a singer’s album in the old sense — half originals, half borrowed songs, all of them bent into Stewart’s shape. He takes on the Womacks’ It’s All Over Now, already a Rolling Stones hit, and stretches it past six minutes of country-rock swagger. He sings Bob Dylan’s Only a Hobo, a song Dylan himself had not released and would not for decades, as a simple acoustic waltz. He covers Country Comfort, written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, with Pete Sears at the piano, and revives the Small Faces’ My Way of Giving, written by Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott, with Lane himself on bass. Eddie Cochran’s Cut Across Shorty becomes a fiddle-driven back-porch stomp.
Heard in that company, Gasoline Alley the song is the album’s thesis statement. The covers are all, in their way, songs about drifters, losers and travellers; the title track is the moment the traveller turns for home. Stewart’s own writing on the album — Lady Day and Jo’s Lament sit alongside it — shows a songwriter learning to do with his own material what he already did instinctively with other people’s, and the title song, the first thing the listener hears, is where that lesson lands.
Modest Numbers, Enormous Reviews
On release on 12 June 1970, the album was a slow burner commercially. It reached No. 27 on the Billboard 200 in America, No. 24 in Australia and No. 32 in Canada, but in Britain it stalled at No. 62 — a puzzling home result for a record so steeped in home. The critics, however, heard it immediately. Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone in September 1970, Langdon Winner wrote that Stewart possessed a rare sensitivity for the delicate moments in a person’s existence, and judged the record the work of a supremely fine artist. Robert Christgau awarded it an A-minus, and AllMusic eventually gave it five stars.
Within a year the argument was settled by events. Every Picture Tells a Story, in 1971, made Stewart one of the biggest stars on earth, and listeners went back to Gasoline Alley in droves, discovering that the superstar’s finest early statement had been there all along — an album of covers and originals held together by the homesick title track. The reassessment never really stopped: The Rolling Stone Album Guide would rate the album four and a half stars, and Stewart was still reaching back into it decades later, making a live Cut Across Shorty a highlight of his unplugged performances in 1993.
Covered by Friends and Strangers
The song’s portability was proved by the people who picked it up. Long John Baldry — Stewart’s old mentor from the Hoochie Coochie Men and Steampacket days, the man who had first hired him as a teenager — covered Gasoline Alley on his 1973 album Good to Be Alive, closing a circle that had opened at Twickenham station a decade earlier. A decade after that, Elkie Brooks took the song into the British chart in 1983, reaching No. 52 on the singles chart and No. 15 in Ireland, with heavy radio play carrying it to No. 12 on the UK airplay chart — a remarkable second life for a song its own writer had never issued as a single. Brooks was a kindred spirit for the material: a Lancashire blues shouter born the same year as Stewart, who had come up through the same club circuit and sang homesickness like she meant it.
Even the album’s sleeve became a place of pilgrimage. The famous gatefold photograph, shot by Marcus Keef, shows a cobbled Kensington mews — Colbeck Mews, off Collingham Road — and fans still seek out the archway and the cobbles to stand where the young Stewart stood. And in 2016, when Stewart assembled a hits tour spanning his whole career, he reached back to this song for its title: From Gasoline Alley to Another Country. The homesick boy of 1970 had, in the end, made the whole world his back yard — but he never stopped singing about the alley where he started from.
There is a postscript in the partnership itself. Stewart and Wood’s double act could not hold forever — Wood drifted to the Rolling Stones, becoming their guitarist for the next half-century — yet the two kept returning to each other, and in 2012 Stewart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a second time as a member of Faces, with Wood beside him. The song they wrote together as unknowns, in the months when neither could get arrested, had long since become the foundation stone both careers were built on.