Review: Will this be my lasting memory of Rod Stewart? If so, it’s a bizarre one
Of all the ways Sir Rod Stewart could have chosen to end what — it’s not crazy to imagine — might be the last concert he ever plays in Charlotte, I never would have been able to predict the one he actually went with.
We’ll discuss that in a little bit. But first ...
... and you can play this game whether you were at PNC Music Pavilion for Stewart’s show on Tuesday night or not: What do you get when you take an 80-year-old former heartthrob with a thing for Vegas-ready showmanship, attractive young blond women and departed peers, and put him in front of 15,000 or so people on a muggy July evening in the South?
a) a hoot
b) a hot mess
c) a sobering reminder of our heroes’ mortality
d) all of the above
This one, for me, is actually easy.
It was a hoot mostly because Sir Rod simply refuses to act his age.
He emerged from underneath the rising curtain with his mic stand held above his head and his Mr. Darcy-esque white shirt unbuttoned to below his sternum, swishing his arms, flicking his wrists, shaking his rump, and flirting with front-rowers as he purred through his steamy 1984 hit “Infatuation.”
He got a big “WOOOOOO!” from the crowd when, before launching into the final chorus of that song, he dropped to one knee in one swift, dramatic motion. (Even he looked surprised by how well he pulled it off.)
While performing 1989’s “Downtown Train,” he skipped across the stage with surprising crispness, to more approving outbursts from the crowd. And while performing his old band Faces’ hit “Ooh La La,” he bounded up the steps of his current band’s riser just so he could strike a classic rock-star pose at the top of them; this, too, made fans squeal.
By the way, did I mention that he’s 80?
Meanwhile, it was a hot mess in a literal sense because, when it comes to his wardrobe, I mean, Rod Stewart’s gonna Rod Stewart.
The weather might have been warm and the air might have been thick, but this old chap ain’t wearing shorts and a T-shirt to one of his concerts. He was always gonna throw on that double-breasted jacket with horizontal stripes over a polka-dotted shirt with pinstriped slacks; was always gonna change into that canary-yellow top with pleated, wide-legged, electric-blue bottoms; always gonna don the various other not-so-summer-friendly outfits he donned Tuesday night.
Which means even though he was spared last weekend’s triple-digit temps, he spent a good deal of time wiping sweat from his face and/or wriggling out of whatever designer jacket he’d changed into last — so that he could introduce it to the floor.
It was a hot mess in a figurative sense, too, because Stewart is just so unapologetically ... um, how do I say this?
Let’s put it this way: If you were to add up the amount of time he spent interacting with his six male band members and the amount of time he spent fawning over his six female band members/backup singers, and if you were to consider that all of those women appeared to be about 50 years his junior, and if you gave all that info to ChatGPT, there’s a very good chance ChatGPT would just spit out whatever the closest thing to a side-eye emoji is.
Try to view it all through a grandfatherly lens, strain hard enough, and maybe it comes into focus as adorable.
But it’s not easy to do that, when he’s booping one of the women on the nose and she’s booping him back as he sings “It Takes Two”: Two lovers walking hand in hand / Is like adding just a pinch of spice ...
Or when he’s sitting among the women, and they’re all smiling at each other as they pass around a glass of dark liquid that he and three of them sip from, paying as much attention to one another as to the male sax player soloing on “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright),” moments after Stewart delivered these lyrics: Don’t say a word my virgin child / Just let your inhibitions run wild ...
For the record, he’s married — and has been, to Penny Lancaster, since 2007. That’s a good long time. I trust they’re in love.
But those facts and figures aside, there’s no way you could sit through Tuesday’s concert and not have thought about the age difference, or not have studied at least one interaction between him and one of those women ...
At any rate, moving on, yes, the correct answer was D. Because perhaps as much as anything else, it was a sobering reminder of our heroes’ mortality — and not just for the reason you might think.
Stewart definitely, understandably, slowed down as the night wore on, over the course of 102 minutes and 21 songs. He popped a squat multiple times on the riser’s steps after the show’s midpoint, including during “Maggie May” (which he teed up with the famed story, about losing his virginity at a music festival in 1961, that inspired the hit); he also rested on a large speaker cabinet at stage right, for nearly half of “Some Guys Have All the Luck,” his encore song.
I’m 99.44% sure that these weren’t artistic choices. He was clearly pretty beat. He’s 80, after all. (I might have mentioned that.) You could tell by the amount of sweating he was doing that the heat was a factor, too.
What was even more sobering than the effects of his own aging, though, were his various tributes to deceased friends. “It Takes Two,” for Tina Turner. “I’d Rather Go Blind,” for Christine McVie. “Forever Young,” for the recently dearly departed heavy-metal star Ozzy Osbourne.
During the first verse and chorus of the latter, AI-created videos played on the big screen that depicted Ozzy taking joyous selfies in “heaven” with an eclectic laundry list of late musicians: Prince, Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Juice WRLD, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, 2Pac, David Bowie, and several others.
“Very sad. A lot of those people died ’cause of drugs,” Stewart said to the crowd, glumly, as he reflected on the images. Then, brightening, he added, “I’m still here, though!”
Or ... is he?
After the singer and his band took a bow at the end of the show, the curtain fell. Then it came up one last time to reveal a strange sight: all of them laying motionless on the stage.
Then the curtain dropped again, the lights came up, and I walked to my car scratching my head.
Rod Stewart’s setlist
1. “Infatuation”
2. “Tonight I’m Yours (Don’t Hurt Me)”
3. “It’s a Heartache”
4. “Having a Party”
5. “It Takes Two”
6. “The First Cut Is the Deepest”
7. “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)”
8. “Forever Young”
9. “Ooh La La”
10. “Young Turks”
11. “Maggie May”
12. “I’d Rather Go Blind”
13. “Downtown Train”
14. “Lady Marmalade” (without Stewart)
15. “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”
16. “You’re in My Heart (The Final Acclaim)”
17. “Have I Told You Lately”
18. “Proud Mary” (without Stewart)
19. “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
20. “Hot Legs”
Encore:
21. “Some Guys Have All the Luck”
