Time Is on Your Side: The Battles Behind Rod Stewart’s ‘Young Turks’

In the autumn of 1981, Rod Stewart was 36 years old, a decade past the breakthrough that had made him a star, and in real danger of becoming a period piece. The rock press that had once championed him now treated him as a disco dilettante who had traded his soul for a mirror ball, and a new generation of British bands was building the future out of synthesizers and drum machines — the very instruments serious rock singers were supposed to despise. “Young Turks” was Stewart’s answer, and it was a gamble on every level: a song about teenage runaways, sung by a man closer to forty than to twenty, built on a sequencer groove cooked up in his drummer’s home studio, and released into an America that had just switched on a cable channel called MTV. If it failed, it would confirm every charge against him. Instead it spent the Christmas season at number five on the Billboard Hot 100.

The battles behind “Young Turks” were fought on several fronts at once. Stewart had to fight his own band’s instincts, because the song was written by sidemen experimenting with machines his drummer barely used on the finished record. He had to fight the calendar, because the music business of 1981 belonged to younger men, and a veteran singing “young hearts be free” risked ridicule. He had to fight for the song’s identity in his own catalogue, where it was nearly buried near the end of its album, and he had to fight the simple strangeness of a hit whose title he never actually sings. That it won on every front — becoming one of the defining records of his second act and a small landmark in MTV history — is a story of an old pro refusing, loudly and tunefully, to be put out to pasture.

The Singer the Critics Had Written Off

To understand what “Young Turks” was up against, you have to remember where Stewart stood as the 1980s began. His artistic reputation rested on the early 1970s: the folk-rock masterpiece Every Picture Tells a Story, the Faces’ glorious bar-room rock, and a run of albums that made him one of the defining voices of the decade. But the decade ended with “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, the 1978 disco-rock smash from Blondes Have More Fun that topped charts around the world while convincing a large part of the rock establishment that Stewart had sold out. The song made him richer and more famous; it also made him a punchline, and punk and new wave had arrived in part as a reaction against exactly the kind of jet-set rock stardom he represented.

Stewart’s first move of the new decade, Foolish Behaviour in 1980, had kept him commercially alive — its single “Passion” reached number five in the United States — but it had not restored his standing with critics, and the ground was shifting under him fast. British music in 1981 was being remade by synth-pop and the New Romantics, by bands for whom the guitar heroics of Stewart’s generation were ancient history. A singer who had come up through blues clubs and beat groups now had to decide whether the synthesizer was an enemy or an instrument.

Stewart, to his credit, had never been a purist. His whole career was a series of absorptions — blues, folk, soul, Motown, disco — and his instinct was always to chase the sound of the moment and bend it around that gravel voice. Drummer Carmine Appice, who had joined Stewart’s band in 1977 and co-written “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, later explained the philosophy to Songfacts: “Rod was always trying to be on the cutting edge at that time.” The cutting edge in 1981 was electronic. The question was whether a 36-year-old rooster-haired veteran could stand on it without falling off.

There was also a quieter battle, the one every aging star fights: relevance to the young audience that buys singles. “Young Turks” would approach that battle in the boldest possible way — not by dressing Stewart up as a teenager, but by handing the song’s story over to two teenagers entirely and letting him narrate, urge them on and bless their escape. It was a songwriter’s solution rather than a marketing one, and it began, improbably, with two of his own musicians messing around with new toys.

Screwing Around with a Sequencer

The music for “Young Turks” was not written in a professional studio or at a formal songwriting session. It was built by Appice and keyboard player Duane Hitchings in Hitchings’ home studio, on an 8-track machine, around a piece of equipment that had just arrived in Hitchings’ life: a sequencer. “Duane had just gotten a sequencer, so we started screwing around and came up with the chords and melodies,” Appice recalled. The third writer, Kevin Savigar, contributed what Hitchings called a nice instrumental line. The models in the room were not the bluesmen of Stewart’s youth but Devo, the Akron band whose herky-jerky synth-rock had become one of the defining sounds of American new wave. “I started the idea because Devo was really big and one of my favourite groups,” Hitchings said, “thus the fast pulsing synth groove.”

What the three men handed Stewart was not a sketch but a concept nearly complete: music, groove and machinery all in place. “We presented it to Rod,” Appice said. “This one was easy because we used the whole concept that we came up with. We just transferred it from the 8-track that Duane had going right onto the 24-track. We used the drum machine and everything. Once we gave Rod the music, he wrote the lyrics.”

That division of labour matters. The Appice–Hitchings team had been through this process once before, on “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, where their demo’s chords and melody had been dressed up in strings and disco finery until, as Appice later complained, the arrangement dwarfed the band. On “Young Turks” the opposite happened: the demo’s stark electronic blueprint survived into the master recording almost untouched. The song that reached the public is essentially a home-studio experiment that a major star had the nerve to release as his American comeback single.

It is also worth noting who these writers were. Appice was a veteran of Vanilla Fudge and Cactus, a thunderous rock drummer of the old school; Hitchings and Savigar were keyboard men steeped in the new technology. The song’s authorship — drummer on hi-hat and drum machine, two synthesizer players, and a singer writing words over the top — is a perfect little diagram of rock music changing hands in 1981.

The Drummer Who Only Played Hi-Hat

The album sessions for Tonight I’m Yours ran from November 1980 to June 1981 at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and they were not harmonious. Membership in Stewart’s band was fluid throughout the four months of recording; Appice, after a four-year tenure as Stewart’s drummer, departed during the sessions, and Hitchings, who had joined up during the album’s making, left again before the tour. The two men most responsible for “Young Turks” were both halfway out of the organisation by the time the record came out.

The finished track tells that story in its credits, if you read them closely. On “Young Turks,” the drumming Stewart’s audience hears is mostly an Oberheim DMX drum machine, programmed by Appice. The great Carmine Appice — one of the most powerful live drummers of his generation, a man who had made his name hitting things very hard — contributes hi-hat and backing vocals to his own co-written hit. The human drummer had been partly replaced by the machine he himself had programmed, which is either a humiliation or a prophecy, depending on how you look at it. The rest of the track is equally lean: Savigar and Hitchings on synthesizers (Savigar also plays clavinet), guitarist Jim Cregan — who co-produced the album with Stewart — and Stewart’s voice, light and quick on top of the pulse.

The production credit is significant, too. Stewart produced the record himself with Cregan, which meant the decision to lead the American campaign with a drum-machine track was his own. There was no outside producer to blame if the experiment embarrassed him. And the sound was genuinely new for him: where his classic records had been built on acoustic guitars, mandolins and wheezing Hammond organ, “Young Turks” runs on sequenced synth bass and machine time, five minutes and four seconds of it in the album version, trimmed to 4:35 for the single. The gravel in the voice remained — nobody could mistake the singer — but everything underneath him had been swapped out.

The contrast with the rest of the album’s personnel underlines how deliberately the track was quarantined from his usual machinery. Elsewhere on Tonight I’m Yours, the drumming is by Tony Brock, a flesh-and-blood player; Jeff Baxter adds pedal steel to the Dylan cover; Byron Berline plays fiddle on “Only a Boy”; a Pentecostal choir waits at the end of side two. Stewart was perfectly capable of making the warm, human record his audience expected — most of the album is one. “Young Turks” was kept cold on purpose, its tiny crew of two synthesizer players, one guitarist, one singer and a machine standing apart from the big band next door. The gamble was not that Stewart could not do it the old way. The gamble was that he chose not to.

Billy and Patti

Stewart’s lyric is a miniature film, and it is the reason the song has outlasted most of the synth-pop of its year. Billy leaves home with a dollar in his pocket and a head full of dreams, convinced that somehow, some way, life has to get better than this. Patti, just seventeen, packs her bags, leaves a note for her mother and kisses her little sister goodbye through tears. Paradise, the song tells us, was closed — so the two of them head for the coast in a borrowed car, holding each other and talking about the day they will marry. Then the second half delivers the twist that lifts the song out of simple runaway romance: a letter arrives for Patti’s parents, in which Billy tries to explain that they are sorry it turned out this way, but there was no point in talking when nobody was listening. They did not just run away. Patti has given birth to a ten-pound baby boy.

Appice summarised the conception bluntly: “In English slang, a ‘Young Turk’ was a rebellious kind of teenager that would go against the grain. That was the story of this guy Billy leaving his town and getting his chick pregnant.” Inside the song, though, Stewart refuses to judge his characters. There is no cautionary ending, no punishment, no return home in disgrace — the standard-issue moral machinery of a hundred earlier runaway songs is simply absent. Instead the chorus keeps breaking in like a voice from the radio of the car they are driving: young hearts, be free tonight; time is on your side; do not let them put you down, do not let them push you around, do not let them ever change your point of view.

The letter is the song’s masterstroke, because it changes who the story belongs to. Until it arrives, “Young Turks” is a celebration; after it, the song becomes an apology that refuses to grovel. Billy’s explanation — that there was no point in talking when there was nobody listening — is the closest thing the lyric has to an accusation, and it is aimed not at the kids but at the parents who would not hear them. Stewart, a father himself by 1981 and a man who had spent his own youth one step ahead of respectability, sings that line without a trace of irony. The runaways are sorry, the song concedes. They are not sorry enough to come back.

That chorus is the song’s engine and its argument. Stewart, the 36-year-old narrator, never claims the story as his own; he stands outside it, almost avuncular, a man who has made his own escapes blessing two kids making theirs. It was a shrewd piece of writing — a star of the wrong age for youth anthems could sing one anyway, by casting himself as the elder who remembers — and it gave the single an emotional warmth that its cold electronic backing might otherwise have lacked. Machine pulse below, human heart on top: that tension is the record.

The Title He Never Sings

Here is the strangest fact about “Young Turks”: the words “young Turks” appear nowhere in it. As chart historian Jon Kutner has noted, the song belongs to the small category of hits that never quite state their own title. The chorus Stewart actually sings is built on the near-identical phrase “young hearts be free,” and for four decades listeners have misremembered the song as “Young Hearts,” “Young Hearts Be Free” or simply “that young hearts song.” The title exists only on the label and the album sleeve, a piece of slang waiting outside the record it names.

The phrase itself had a long journey before it reached a Los Angeles studio. The original Young Turks were the secular nationalist reformers who seized power in the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, and their name passed into English as a term for any young insurgent bent on overturning the old order — a rebellious youth who acts contrary to what society deems normal. Stewart’s lyric needs no explanation once you know that: Billy and Patti are young Turks in the purest sense, overthrowing the government of their parents’ expectations.

There is a commercial irony in the mismatch. A title nobody sings is a title nobody can request, hum or look up easily, and conventional record-business wisdom would call it a mistake. Yet the mistake may have helped. “Young Turks” is a distinctive, slightly mysterious name that sticks in the mind precisely because the song refuses to explain it, and the chorus it does sing — “young hearts be free tonight” — is so much the song’s true title in spirit that the two phrases have fused in public memory. The record answers to both names, and after forty years there is no separating them.

It helped, too, that the unsung title quietly flattered the listener. To call the song “Young Turks” is to file Billy and Patti not as delinquents but as revolutionaries, insurgents against a stale order — which is exactly the side of the story Stewart is on. The phrase does in two words what the whole lyric does in five minutes: it takes the teenagers’ side before the evidence is even heard.

The Season of the Synthesizer

Stewart’s timing deserves some credit, because the autumn of 1981 was the precise moment the synthesizer stopped being a novelty and became the sound of the mainstream. Devo, the band Hitchings had taken as his model, had already cracked America with “Whip It” the year before. In Britain, the Human League released Dare in October 1981, the same month “Young Turks” came out, and its single “Don’t You Want Me” would be the UK’s Christmas number one while Stewart’s record sat in the American top five. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was everywhere. The machines were not coming; they had arrived, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the same season.

What made “Young Turks” unusual within that wave was the age and pedigree of the man singing it. The synth-pop breakthrough belonged overwhelmingly to musicians a generation younger — art-school bands and studio boffins for whom the guitar was already an antique. Stewart was a contemporary of the Beatles and the Stones, a singer whose legend had been built on acoustic folk-rock and bar-room R&B, and here he was matching the new bands machine-beat for machine-beat while outselling nearly all of them in the world’s biggest market. The record did not sound like a veteran imitating the young. It sounded like a veteran who had hired the young — two keyboard players and a drummer with a new sequencer — and given them the run of his single.

That is also why the record annoyed some people then and fascinates now. It collapses the supposed war between rock generations into a single five-minute track: the future, programmed by a Vanilla Fudge drummer; the past, singing its heart out on top. Plenty of 1981’s synth hits are period pieces. “Young Turks” is a period piece with a pulse that refuses to stay in its period.

America Gets It First

The battle plan for the single tells you where Stewart’s market power lay in 1981. “Young Turks” was released on 9 October 1981 as the first American single from Tonight I’m Yours, backed with the album rocker “Tora, Tora, Tora (Out with the Boys).” In Britain the order was reversed: the album’s title track, “Tonight I’m Yours (Don’t Hurt Me),” led the campaign, and “Young Turks” followed as the second single, not reaching the UK chart until December. America, which had kept Stewart’s career buoyant through the late 1970s, got the experiment first — and America, crucially, had just acquired the perfect machine for selling it.

The staggered release was a hedge, and everyone involved knew it. If the drum-machine record had died in America, Britain could have been spared the embarrassment and the campaign there could have stayed with safer material. Instead the news from across the Atlantic forced the issue: by the time the British single appeared, “Young Turks” was already a proven American hit, and the only question left was whether Stewart’s home audience — the one that had watched him busk, boogie with the Faces and conquer the world — would follow him into the synthesizer age as willingly as the Americans had.

The early reviews were on his side for once. Billboard’s Top Single Picks, on 17 October 1981, called it “the kind of song Stewart is best at: melodic, lyrical and a bit harder than a ballad.” Record World heard something it plainly had not expected from him: “Stewart hitches onto a brisk beat and trades in his vocal gravel for an attractive light tenor.” Both notices caught the record’s balancing act — familiar enough to reassure his audience, strange enough to sound like 1981 rather than 1975.

The public agreed quickly. “Young Turks” entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 61 on 17 October 1981, the same week those reviews appeared, and climbed steadily through the autumn — no small thing in a season crowded with comeback records and new wave novelties. By the week of 19 December it stood at number five, where it remained through 9 January 1982: a synth record by a supposedly washed-up 36-year-old, sitting in the American top five across the whole Christmas and New Year season, the most commercially valuable weeks of the year. It spent 19 weeks on the Hot 100 in total.

Number Five for Christmas

The American peak was the headline, but the song travelled. It reached number three in Australia, number five in Belgium, number nine in Ireland, number two in South Africa and number 30 in West Germany. Canada embraced it almost completely: the CHUM chart in Toronto took it to number one, the national RPM chart to number two, and Israel’s singles chart also put it at the top. In the Netherlands it reached number nine on the Top 40. The one market that resisted, relatively speaking, was Stewart’s own: in Britain “Young Turks” stalled at number 11, a respectable showing that nonetheless underlined how completely his centre of commercial gravity had shifted across the Atlantic.

On Billboard’s specialist charts the record’s hybrid nature showed up in its spread: number 23 on the Top Tracks rock chart, a modest number 63 on the Dance Club Play chart, and number five on the rival Cash Box Top 100, confirming the Billboard peak was no fluke. When the year-end tallies were compiled, “Young Turks” finished at number 48 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 1982 — impressive for a record released the previous October — and the album it came from kept selling behind it.

The year-end charts abroad told the same story of a slow, long burn rather than a flash. In Australia the single finished 1982 as the country’s number 23 record of the year; in Canada it closed the year at number 26 on the RPM tally, having already placed on the 1981 list; in South Africa it was the number 11 single of 1982. Records that peak at Christmas often evaporate by spring. This one was still being counted among the biggest singles of the following year on three continents, which is the statistical signature of a song that had crossed over from hit to fixture.

Its commercial afterlife has proved unusually durable. In Britain, where its original run had been the weakest of the major markets, the single was eventually certified Silver by the BPI on the strength of post-2004 sales and streaming — a slow-burn vindication in the one country that had shrugged at it the first time around. Few records of 1981 can say that their second life out-charted the memory of their first.

Behind the numbers sat a very public exclamation point. In mid-December 1981, with the single cresting, Stewart headlined the Los Angeles Forum on a bill with Kim Carnes and Tina Turner, in a concert carried around the world by satellite — at that date a genuine technological spectacle, and a statement that whatever the critics said, Rod Stewart remained one of the biggest live draws on the planet. The old guard was not retreating. It was broadcasting.

Breakdancing on MTV

If the chart run won the commercial battle, the video won the cultural one, and it won it on a battlefield that had existed for barely ten weeks. MTV had launched in the United States on 1 August 1981, with several of Stewart’s existing clips in heavy rotation, and “Young Turks” arrived just as the channel was inventing the grammar of the music video. Stewart, managed alertly and always visually minded, understood the new medium faster than most of his generation.

The “Young Turks” video was directed by Russell Mulcahy, the Australian who was becoming the defining director of the early MTV era, produced by Simon Fields and Paul Flattery, and choreographed by Kenny Ortega. Filmed in downtown Los Angeles in the summer of 1981, it intercuts the song’s story — Billy, played by Dale Pauley, and Patti, played by Elizabeth Daily, running through a city of shuttered grills and grand old hotels — with a troupe of street dancers who weave through their story. The locations are real and specific: Billy climbs down a ladder outside the abandoned Licha’s Santa Fe Grill at 7th and Santa Fe; the couple are hustled through the entrance of the Hotel Hayward at 6th and Spring; the dancers finish in a railway yard, where Stewart himself, perched above the action, sings the song’s second half.

The detail that earned the clip its place in television history is in those dance sequences: “Young Turks” was the first music video shown on MTV to feature breakdancing. A form born in the Bronx, still years from its mainstream explosion, entered America’s newest music channel inside a video by a British singer in his late thirties — a layering of generations and cultures that captures exactly how pop renews itself. Stewart was not a breakdancer and never pretended to be; his role in the clip, strutting along a rooftop and through the rail yard, is the same as his role in the song, the ringmaster blessing the young talent around him.

There is a pleasing symmetry in who shot it. Mulcahy had also directed the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first clip MTV ever broadcast when the channel launched that August — so the director who opened the MTV era was, within months, filming the record that carried one of the pre-MTV generation’s biggest stars into it. The young faces in the frame had futures of their own: Ortega would go on to choreograph Dirty Dancing, and Elizabeth Daily, the video’s Patti, would become one of the most familiar voices in American animation as Tommy Pickles in Rugrats. Even the casting of “Young Turks” seemed to be seeding the next decade of pop culture.

He hedged his bets in the older medium, too. A separate videotaped rooftop performance of the song turned up on 30 October 1981, roughly a third of the way through Dick Clark’s three-hour American Bandstand 30th Anniversary Special — Stewart simultaneously courting the audience of television’s past and its future. In the space of one autumn, “Young Turks” had conquered radio, the charts and two generations of music television. Not bad for a track the band had assembled on an 8-track in a keyboard player’s home studio.

The Album It Rode In On

“Young Turks” sits ninth of ten tracks on Tonight I’m Yours, released on 6 November 1981 — buried, on paper, in the position record companies reserve for filler. That it escaped from there to become the album’s biggest American hit (the title track reached number 20 in the US, the Ace cover “How Long” number 49) says something about both the song and the album around it, which has aged far better than its initial dismissal as a trend-chasing exercise suggested.

The album itself is a characteristically Stewart mixture: synth-pop experiments alongside covers of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and the Burnette brothers’ rockabilly “Tear It Up,” Paul Carrack’s “How Long” recut as smooth pop-soul, and a closing track, “Never Give Up on a Dream,” dedicated to Terry Fox, the Canadian athlete who had run 3,339 miles on a prosthetic leg in his Marathon of Hope before cancer stopped him in 1981. That finale — featuring a young soloist, Penny Jones, and the Pentecostal Community Choir — is the emotional opposite of the drum-machine pulse of “Young Turks,” and the fact that both live happily on the same record is the clearest evidence that Stewart’s eclecticism, often mocked as opportunism, was actually his method.

Stewart doubled down on the visual strategy across the whole campaign: the video for the album’s title track was also directed by Mulcahy, the man who had shot the first clip MTV ever played. For an artist whose reputation had been built in the pre-video age, Stewart was staffing his comeback with the new medium’s founding generation — a deliberate act of alliance with the future rather than a defensive one.

The critics, unusually, met him halfway. Rolling Stone’s contemporary review, published in February 1982, awarded the album four stars out of five; AllMusic’s retrospective verdict matched it at four stars; Robert Christgau, never a soft touch, gave it a B. The album reached number 11 on the Billboard 200 and number eight in Britain, number two in Sweden and number four in New Zealand, and went Platinum in the United States, double Platinum in Canada and Gold in Britain. Goldmine magazine, revisiting it decades later, framed it as an underrated transitional record — the sound of a 1970s giant learning, in public, how to survive the 1980s. “Young Turks” was the lesson that stuck.

What the Song Proved

Strip away the charts and the video trivia, and the battle of “Young Turks” was about a single question: could a star of the 1970s change his sound without changing his soul? Stewart’s contemporaries were mostly answering no — retreating into nostalgia circuits, softening into balladry, or standing still while the business moved. Stewart answered by handing his comeback single to a sequencer, a drum machine and two keyboard players, then singing one of the warmest, most humane lyrics of his career over the top of it. The machines did not replace his identity; they reframed it, and the contrast — the oldest voice in the room riding the newest groove in the building — is precisely what made the record exciting.

There is a final irony in the authorship. When Appice and Hitchings reunited around Hitchings’ new sequencer, they were, as Goldmine later put it, hoping lightning would strike twice — their previous collaboration for Stewart had been “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, the most commercially successful and critically despised record of his life. “Young Turks” was the same team reaching for the same prize by opposite means: no strings, no disco orchestra, no come-on from the star, just a machine, a story and a chorus of encouragement aimed at somebody else’s children. If “Sexy?” had been Stewart chasing the moment’s sound to please himself, “Young Turks” was Stewart chasing the moment’s sound to tell a story. Critics who had sneered at the first could not easily sneer at the second, and the difference between the two records is the difference between a singer being used by a trend and a singer using it.

It also quietly redrew his band’s internal map. The writers of “Young Turks” were the hired guns, not the star: Appice, Hitchings and Savigar between them had already supplied “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, and the success of their second experiment confirmed Stewart’s late-career model, in which he functioned less as a solitary auteur than as a bandleader and editor, spotting the strong idea in the room and writing the words that made it his. Kevin Savigar, the youngest of the three writers, stayed in Stewart’s orbit for decades — he is there in the band, on piano, organ and accordion, when Stewart recorded his Unplugged…and Seated comeback in 1993. The thread from the home-studio 8-track runs straight through Stewart’s next reinvention.

The song bought him the decade. Stewart had only four American top ten singles between 1982 and 1988, and “Young Turks” — carried over from 1981 — was the first and biggest of them, the bridge between the “Sexy?” era and the later hits “Infatuation” and “Love Touch,” and beyond them to the full-scale renaissance of Out of Order and Vagabond Heart. Without its success, the story of Stewart in the 1980s reads as a long decline. With it, the decade reads as a negotiation — sometimes clumsy, often mocked, but conducted from inside the top five.

Why It Endures

“Young Turks” endures, first, because its story never dates. Every year produces new Billys and Pattis with a dollar in their pocket and a head full of dreams, and the song’s refusal to punish them — its insistence that time is on their side — sounds as generous now as it did in 1981. Plenty of runaway songs warn; this one waves from the platform. Stewart built the record out of the newest materials available and filled it with the oldest sentiment in pop, and the combination has never stopped working.

It endures, second, because it caught pop music in the act of changing. It is a document of the exact moment when the drum machine entered the mainstream singles chart, when MTV rewired how a song could look, when breakdancing first flickered across the channel that would carry youth culture for a generation, and when a 36-year-old blues singer from Highgate proved that the future did not have to belong to the young alone. Historians of the video era return to it for the breakdancing first; historians of Stewart return to it as the hinge of his career.

And it endures because of the joke at its centre that turns out not to be a joke at all: a hit song whose title is never sung, whose chorus is a blessing, and whose singer was supposed to be finished. Young hearts be free tonight, Stewart sang — to Billy and Patti, to the dancers in the rail yard, and, whether he admitted it or not, to himself.