Can’t Shake The Bias
I understand why you wouldn’t enjoy watching The Ten Commandments. I can respect that. I was once the same way. I couldn’t enjoy a single Rod Stewart song because of the atrocities he had committed. But Never a Dull Moment and Every Picture Tells a Story I can’t get enough of these days.
Clearly, when he left his various bands, he was not the most talented one. Rod Stewart can look back at his life and he’ll only see one set of footprints. But that’s because before he became ROD STEWART, The Faces carried him.
After all, this is a guy who subliminally plagiarized a Bob Dylan song. Yet, he showed enough humility and foresight to beg forgiveness before it became a problem. That was quite un-papal of him, IMHO. He did, however, have this big hit which he titled “Forever Young” (the least he could have done is change the name) a scant four years after Alphaville (in this context the little band that kind of did) had their less spectacular hit of the same name. I’m sure that was unintentional too. And probably harmless. It’s all good now though. How many times has the Alphaville version been covered and sampled? And Rod Stewart’s? Exactly. Having said all this, his version of “Mama You’ve Been On Mind” might be my favourite. For today at least.
Jae-Ho
Ok, that required a lot of looking up on my part.
And let me start by saying that when you search YouTube for Rod Stewart Forever Young this is the first video to come up (presuming Google doesn’t change it for you based on other searches – maybe clear your cache first):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9apksOv6k
And not to spoil it, but no one seems to realise it isn’t Rod Stewart, except some guy named Thomas Wong from Poke London who found this so remarkable that he left a comment to that affect.
I must admit I don’t understand anything you said about Dylan, but I understand the other atrocities you speak of.
I should also have said that it pleases me no end someone would upload the Alphaville song under Rod Stewart, precisely because it seems to fit so nicely into what you’re saying.
I have now listened to Bob Dylan’s Forever Young.
Seriously Rod? This is like my sister thinking she’d written the melody for a very catchy song. She did. The song? Yellow by Coldplay.
Rod Stewart’s choice to name the song Forever Young is interesting. On one hand, it instantly draws attention (assuming the plagiarism was nefarious and not accidental). On the other hand, the blatant name copying could act as a defence: “Why would I go so far as to copy even the name? I am not crazy.”
Well played, Mr. Stewart. Well played.
Although, I am sympathetic to the kind of confusion that Rod Stewart is claiming as his defence. Happens to the best of us. Perhaps the error was that no one in his committee knew the Dylan song/said anything.
If he just used a different name, I might not find the similarities so shocking. I also feel he could have absolved himself completely if he changed the name and had stayed away from the “May you…” refrain. Similar melodies seem easier to defend than similarities in language, to me.
Similarities in melody, whether deliberate or not, are defensible in the sense there are only 8 notes at most in a scale, and while there are so many variations of those notes as to render it almost infinite, the amount that will “sound good” are smaller, etc etc.
Whereas the way words can be ordered is literally infinite, and while the “May you” phrasing predates Dylan by at least a few hundred years in Irish folk songs and the like, using that same construction in a song of the same freakin’ name can mean only one thing:
Rod Stewart has giant brass balls.
And so it appears the upside of plagiarism have served him very well and the downside have not hurt him. Just like Rod Stewart predicted.