Still the Same: Great Rock Classics of Our Time

Early on in his career Rod Stewart established himself as one of rock's great interpretive vocalists, which made the flatness of his Great American Songbook series a bit puzzling. If any classic rock veteran of the '60s should have been able to offer new spins on old standards, it should have been Rod the Mod, who was turning Elvis' "All Shook Up" inside out on Jeff Beck's Truth and turned the Rolling Stones' defiant "Street Fighting Man" into a folk-rock lament, all before "Maggie May" turned Rod into a star. But none of the Great American Songbook volumes strayed from the tried and true, which may have been part of the reason they were big hits -- after all, familiar songs are always warmly received when they're performed in a familiar fashion -- but they were filled with undistinguished performances that bordered on laziness. It was possible to make excuses for his performances, chief among them that Stewart was simply not rooted in this material, so he simply chose the easiest route out of the song, but it didn't change the fact that all three records were deadly dull, even if they were enormous successes one and all. It's hard to give up that success, particularly for a veteran who was so desperate for a hit a few years back, he foolishly attempted the clunky modern R&B album Human, so it's not surprising that when he moved on from the Great American Songbook, he chose a related project: Great Rock Classics of Our Time, which is the subtitle of 2006's Still the Same, his first new record since GAS, and one that shares the aesthetic of that respectful and commercial trawl through the past. Still the Same finds Rod singing 13 songs that more or less could be called rock standards, every one of them hits since Stewart himself was a hitmaker, most of them dating from the '70s, when he was a superstar (roughly ten, if you count "Love Hurts" as a hit for Nazareth, which in this context you should). ... Read More...