Tired Rooster

When English Rock Superstar Rod Stewart travels in his executive jet, he takes along a retinue of 43 musicians, managers and publicists who indulge his every whim. When he arrives, he is met by a cozily appointed limousine and, invariably, an assortment of cozily appointed groupies. His singles like Maggie May and albums like Sing It Again, Rod (his latest, with 700,000 sales in two months) are regular chartbusters. He derives enough additional money from concerts (a recent month-long tour of the U.S. grossed $500,000) to qualify easily for millionaire status. When he takes time off, it is in a Georgian mansion just down the road from Queen Elizabeth's castle in Windsor.

Sad Business. At the peak of his career, Stewart, 28, would seem to have everything a rock-'n'-roll musician could aspire to. Certainly he has everything he dreamed of ten years ago when he was a $25-a-week soccer player and part-time gravedigger in the suburbs of London. Yet, at the end of his U.S. tour, while relaxing by the pool of Los Angeles' Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he confided to TIME Correspondent David DeVoss: "I'm so tired I really don't care." There was bitterness in his voice when he said: "This is a sad business I'm in."

Stewart, the rooster of vaudeville rock, prances about the stage in pomp and plumage. His costume includes a baby blue pantsuit with flowered muffler, a yellow negligee and gold toreador pants with a white sleeveless top. In order to maintain his concert pace, Stewart has to keep himself in top physical trim; he follows a preperformance regimen of steam bath, black coffee and port-and-brandy. At a recent show in Anaheim, Calif., he wiggled his way through Maggie May and Every Picture Tells a Story, and later, during an instrumental break, backstagers could see him gasping and wheezing behind a large loudspeaker. Stewart is an adult playing a kid's game. And the drive is gone.

Fancy cars and duds are Stewart's own contribution to his image, although he resents criticism of his indulgences ("Joan Baez shows up at concerts in jeans and sandals--the only difference between her and me is that I own up to the money"). Other aspects of his image please him less, like never being allowed to be seen in public drinking anything as mild as a beer. "It's funny, because people think I'm drunk when I go onstage. But my musicians and I can't destroy the myth, so we act drunk."

One of Stewart's goals during a tour stop in Los Angeles last month was to throw a party for his fans in the Hollywood Palladium after his concert there. "Just with the kids that paid to see me. A party where for a change I don't have to put up a false front." His New York-based pressagent, Connie DeNave, nixed that. "Rod, darling," she said, "you're an artist. You need to be with your own kind--nice big, important people. Your kind of people." Rod darling turned away, half in frustration, half in anger. "You see what I mean? These people [the fans] are paying the money and we treat them like trash. I should be making the decisions, but I'm not in control. The image people are in control. After a lot of these concerts, I just want a bit o' beer. The last thing I want is to go out with a cover girl."

Not that Stewart has anything against girls. Groupies, plaster casters and a species that he calls "really wild birds"--he has had them all. "Our thing now is dirty pictures. We each have our bird and Polaroid, and in the morning we compare pictures." Yet even the exertion of sex is taking its toll: "Would you believe--me 28 and already taking vitamin E?"

Promotion and personal publicity can also run a man down. "I shouldn't even be talking during the day, but my managers say I have to give these interviews." One day, Stewart tried to beg out of an audience with a teen magazine but the interviewer, says Rod, threatened to expose him to her 4,000,000 readers as a stuck-up sham unless he saw her. He did.

The clowning around once enjoyed by Stewart and his group, the Faces, is beginning to pall. At times Rod and the boys used to smash hotel furniture, throw TV sets through the windows and paint the walls purple. "The destruction comes because of complete boredom," he says. "We don't do it now, at least not at the Beverly Wilshire. I don't know what it proved. It's an idiotic way of having a party."

In his quieter moments, Stewart thinks about his place in pop history. "I'd like for me old name to go down in the Doomsday Book of rock. I'd love to pass through America in five years and hear my old records on the stations." He also dreams of making a movie, but not too seriously. "I'm just a rock star, I know that. The best thing for me is to exhaust what I've got going now and then . . ." And then? Stewart cannot complete the sentence. In a life lived almost exclusively for "now," "then" is strange and vaguely frightening territory.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.