Rod: The Autobiography (29 page)

She was thirty-three, the same age as me, but her origins made my humble background look almost regal by comparison. She had grown up in Nacogdoches, Texas, in real rural hardship, living in a remote house without electricity. She became an air hostess on a Texan airline (with a uniform of a fringed jacket and Stetson) and then made it onto the books of the Ford Modeling Agency in New York. After that she came to Hollywood, hoping to make it as an actress, and met and married George Hamilton, the film and TV actor. Alana and George had separated three years earlier, in 1975. They had a son, Ashley, who was four at this time. During their marriage, she had exploded onto the Hollywood social scene and now seemed to know absolutely everyone who was anyone and to be popular with them all.

At the end of the dinner, Alana said, ‘Let’s go over to Tina Sinatra’s house,’ and I said, ‘Fine by me.’ Tina, Frank’s daughter,
was Alana’s best friend and her home was a kind of small temple to contemporary design, full of glass and lucite. Some salsa music went on and Alana and I danced together flirtatiously on the white marble floor – kind of in jest but kind of for real, shoes clicking, bell-bottoms flapping – and I knew right there that she had a hold on me.

However, our next date didn’t go so well. It was at a party, and I became annoyed because I thought Alana was spending too much time working the room and not enough time with me. A few days of haughty silence passed. But in that time, I found I was still thinking about her a lot. She had seemed so smart, so funny, so vivacious. So eventually I called her and asked her out to dinner again and she turned up, looking wildly sexy, and told me that she had spent that time thinking about me, too. And from that night on we were inseparable.

We didn’t move in together for the first eight months of our relationship. I continued to live at Carolwood Drive, where I had lived with Britt, and Alana had her own house in Beverly Hills. Yet there was probably only one night in that first year when we weren’t together. And there were very few nights in that time when we didn’t go out. More than any woman I had ever met, Alana knew how to have fun. Nightclubs, parties, dinners . . . we absolutely hit the town – went all out in the energetic pursuit of pleasure. One night in bed Alana handed me a little capsule and said, ‘Try this.’ It was a popper: a little container of amyl nitrate. The idea was that you cracked it and inhaled the contents at the moment of orgasm to intensify the pleasure. I had never done that before. Of course, it’s not the cleverest thing to do to your cardiovascular system, but we didn’t seem to care about the risks. Seeking ways to intensify the pleasure was what we were all about in that heady first rush of our time together. It was almost like a competition between us: who could do the most, drink the most, party the most, dance the most, fuck the most. And it made us both extremely happy.

* * *

Meanwhile, during the day, when I could get my battered head together, I was recording the music that became
Blondes Have More Fun
. As usual in this period, I had gone into the studio with nothing in the way of finished songs. The drill was, the band would set up on day one and we would start bashing away until something took shape. Inevitably, things we were listening to were always informing what we came up with. I would often say, ‘Can we do something along the lines of this?’ It’s a good way of getting the doors open. And at this specific time, in 1978, I had been listening to records by Chic, where the bass guitar is the driving force and almost the main provider of the melody. I had also been listening a lot to ‘Native New Yorker’ by Odyssey, a track I loved. And then there was the Stones’ ‘Miss You’: a rock band’s take on disco, a blend that really appealed to me. And so the question was, can we come up with something along the lines of that? And what emerged was a song called ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’.

Probably nothing I have written has been as commercially successful. And certainly nothing I have written has caused me more ambivalent feelings. Ask me now, and I’ll tell you I love the song to bits and that I’m fiercely proud of it. And yet, what was that thing that Jeff Beck said about ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’? ‘It was a pink toilet seat hung around my neck for the rest of my life.’ There was a time, early in the song’s life, when I wondered whether ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ was going to be my ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. The difference was that Jeff had to be coaxed into wearing his pink toilet seat, much against his will. I, on the other hand, had actually been the driving force in the creation of my pink toilet seat – had painted it myself, if you like – and had then very deliberately and perfectly cheerfully put my head right through it.

You never really have a clue about how a song is going to be received or the journey it’s going to take. But what was quickly clear when ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ came out was that an awful lot of people liked it. It sold more than two million copies in America, half a million in Britain, and was a hit all
over the world, including some places I’d never heard of, and some other places where it was news to me that they even had electricity. It was the fastest-selling single that Warner had ever had, until Madonna came along six years later with ‘Like a Virgin’. So how could I not be proud? If you’re a songwriter, you spend your entire working life dreaming of the moment when something you have written heads out into the world and triggers a response as broadly favourable as that.

And yet, in the same moment, I appeared to have alienated a portion of the people who up until then had felt close to me. Some of the fans from the
Gasoline Alley
days, in particular, felt truly let down. Some regarded disco as the bitter enemy, and wondered what I was doing, consorting with the other side. Music was strewn with battle lines in those days, in ways that (God be praised) it no longer is. In the late 1970s, there was soul and there was heavy metal and there was punk, and so on – with their followers all in their separate trenches with bayonets drawn. And you couldn’t hoist yourself out of, say, the rock trench and make a sprint for the soul trench, even just to say hello, without serious risk of getting your head blown off.

Well, I had always mixed things up, right from the beginning, on all my albums – taken a bit of rhythm and blues, a bit of folk, a standard, some rock ’n’ roll, and hoped that the voice bound it all together. And, in a solo campaign lasting almost a decade, I had only sustained very light wounding as a result of these tactics. But disco was clearly regarded in some places as a dash too far. Cue heavy artillery fire – and especially from music critics who wrote off ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ as a big old lump of cheese and the work of a terrible show-off, to boot.

What could I say? I got tired of pointing out that the lyric was written in the third person – ‘She sits alone, waiting for suggestions, He’s so nervous, avoiding all the questions’ and so on – and that when it opens up into the first person in the chorus, you’re meant to be hearing the unspoken thoughts of
the bloke and the girl in the song, who are aching to get each other’s clothes off but don’t quite know how to broach the topic (‘If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy’, etc.). It wasn’t
me
, asking every Tom, Dick and Harriet in the world if they thought
I
was sexy. There was a story being told here. But that rather tended to get brushed aside. And I didn’t get much help from my management and the marketing people, whose campaign for this single had me stretched out in full spandex-clad glory beneath the slogan ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’. Heaven knows how a lot of my male fans must have been feeling at this point. Possibly like putting my old albums out of sight at the back of their wardrobes for a while.

Just to complicate matters, the Brazilian musician Jorge Ben Jor eventually pointed out the similarity of the melody in the chorus to a song of his from 1972 called ‘Taj Mahal’. Bang to rights, too. I held my hand up straight away. Not that I had stood in the studio and said, ‘Here, I know, we’ll use that tune from “Taj Mahal” as the chorus and be done with it. The writer lives in Brazil, so he’ll never find out.’ But I had been to the Carnival in Rio earlier in 1978, with Elton and Freddie Mercury, where two significant things had happened: firstly, I had developed a brief and hopeless crush on a lesbian Brazilian film star who wouldn’t let me anywhere near her; and secondly I had heard Jorge Ben Jor’s ‘Taj Mahal’ being given heavy rotation all over the place. It had been re-released that year, and clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced when I was trying to find a line to fit the chords. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple. I handed over the royalties, again wondering whether ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ was partly cursed.

Now, the synth hook at the start of the song: that I
did
whip, very deliberately, from the strings on Bobby Womack’s ‘(If You Want My Love) Put Something Down On It’. But the rules are that you can lift a line from an arrangement – as distinct from a melody line – without infringing copyright. So you can’t touch me for that.

I took the song out of the live show for a while at the
beginning of the 2000s, feeling tired of it, but people who had bought tickets complained and I felt I was selling them short by not doing it. And then when I put it back on the set list I realised that I was enjoying singing it again anyway. So it’s back in the show now – late on, as a rule, where it tends to turn into a bit of a romp. It seems to evoke a whole era for people – the late 1970s disco period – and to connect them with their pasts, and you have to be grateful, as a songwriter, to have something as potent as that in your locker.

Also, I make no apologies for the bum-wiggling in the video, though this too attracted some flak at the time. I don’t know why: it was nothing new for me. Since I had first properly discovered my confidence as a front-man, in the Faces, I had been a major proponent of the bum-wiggle, firmly believing the arse to be an important part of the rock ’n’ roll stage performer’s armoury and a powerfully communicative tool, if harnessed appropriately. Plus I just happen to dance that way.

I’m prepared to admit, however, that the black spandex trousers – worn, for the purposes of this video, with a billowing silk blouson – gave the buttocks a prominence that they hadn’t enjoyed in earlier, looser outfits. The same went for the leopard-print versions, in similar material, that I took a shine to in this period. But we’re talking about a difference in fashion here, and the cut of the clothes, rather than a wholesale change in my approach to buttock-work. Different trousers, yes; but same wiggling arse. That’s my contention, anyway.

One final point about that video for ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’: you may notice that, in the performance sections, when the band is on a stage, miming to the track, I quite often spin away from the camera and face the back. That was to hide the fact that I kept forgetting the lyric. You would have seen a lot less of my arse if I could only have remembered the bloody words.

The British leg of the tour for the
Blondes Have More Fun
album opened in Manchester in December 1978. Still keen to spend as little time apart as possible, Alana and I rented a house in Chester Square in London to use as a base, and brought
Ashley over with us. I hadn’t played in England for two years, and I didn’t know what to expect. The UK press had been less than enthusiastic about the album. Did anybody care any more? Would anybody turn up? It’s something I live with constantly: the terror of the empty seat, the all too visible sign that you’re on the fade, that the decline is underway. I once read how Al Jolson, one of my childhood heroes, was completely paranoid about the sight of empty seats and I have definitely caught his fear.

No problem this time, though. The tartan hordes were still rampant, rushing the front of the stalls as usual, completely ignoring the seating plan. The tour seemed to build and build through to five nights at Olympia at the end of December, and the atmosphere of those shows and the atmosphere of Christmas seemed to combine to create a delirium like I had never known. And, more than once, when I started into ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ and heard the words come back at me off the audience, heard the audience take the song out of my hands completely and charge off with it as they usually did, I got choked up and couldn’t have sung along with them if I had wanted to.

* * *

At the start of 1979, Alana said she thought she was coming down with flu. She wasn’t, though. She was pregnant.

We had talked about children. I knew I wanted them. I had loved living with Britt’s children, Victoria and Nikolaj. I loved Alana’s son, Ashley. I loved being around kids. I came from a big family and I wanted a big family. I couldn’t see how children were anything other than a good thing.

But did I want them now, in 1979 – like, in less than nine months’ time?

The reality of it threw me for a loop. I panicked, and in my panic I turned cool on Alana and we had a couple of really bad months. I got cold feet and behaved badly. On tour in Australia
in February 1979, I had a fling with Belinda Green, the Australian model and former Miss World. I was on the other side of the globe, and in those days, when news travelled slowly and with difficulty, I genuinely expected to get away with it. A big feature in the
Sydney Morning Herald
, with a photograph, meant that I didn’t. Word got back to Alana, who, understandably, was fantastically upset.

I felt about as popular as the lookout at Pearl Harbor. However, I managed to persuade myself, and her, that this transgression had been a final fling, just the terror of impending responsibility forcing me astray. And when Alana flew out to join the tour in Japan, we patched things up. And in the process of patching things up, we remembered that we were still in love and we decided to get married. There was no big romantic proposal, no going down on bended knee. Just a decision between the two of us that this was the right way. In the hotel, I wanted to pass the news to my parents back in London, but I was so afraid of telling them. I knew they wouldn’t approve. I got my secretary, Gail Williams, to break it to them first, and then I took the receiver and spoke to them, slightly cringing and very nervous, perched on the end of a twin hotel bed. It was an awkward conversation. My mum did her best to sound pleased. (It was much later that she shared with the press her agreement with my dad’s view that I ‘should have married a nice Scots girl’.) My dad just came right out and said, ‘You’re not old enough.’