English folk artist Al Stewart was speaking to me just hours before he was to open the first of two nights in which he performed at Hugh’s Room in Toronto, Canada, one of several Canadian and American appearances on his mini tour with guitar virtuoso Dave Nachmanoff. Stewart for those too young to remember soared to the top of the charts in the early to mid seventies with hit songs, “Year Of The Cat,” (1976) and “Time Passages,” (1978) and music fans in recent years have come to appreciate his artistic flair and ingenuity in creating the albums, A Beach Full Of Shells and Sparks of Ancient Light.

 

This month (September) Stewart and Nachmanoff are releasing a collaborative effort Uncorked that Stewart says, “was a chance to explore things that I hadn’t played in thirty years.  I hadn’t played the “News From Spain,” (1972) for thirty years for example. I hadn’t played Warren Harding (1973) for thirty years, so I said let’s make an album of obscurities and Dave thought that would be a great idea. Uncorked (consists of) all of the songs that I have neglected for thirty years and I probably shouldn’t have done. We had a fine old time, because I have twenty or thirty songs that I literally never play, so we started playing them at shows. We dug up all of these things, and of course some of them didn’t work at all, but some of them did (you can hear a quiet sense of satisfaction in his voice). We got a great version of “News From Spain,” on this album with Dave, because he took Rick Wakeman’s piano part and he covered it on the acoustic guitar and the result is pretty mind boggling. It is different from the original, but I think that it is (still) quite a powerful thing. The idea was to make an album of obscure songs that people wouldn’t expect.”

 

In a way Uncorked represents the second piece in what could become a three part chronology of Stewart’s career, as he previously did a live recording with Peter White with whom he played for a good portion of his career, and that album covered Stewart’s hit tunes. He has also expressed interest in getting together with Laurence Juber (formerly of Wings) to record some of the songs from the four albums that Juber produced for him.

 

Throughout most of his career, Stewart’s signature has been his penchant for writing songs that cause the listener to think about the lyrics and his words are often informed by historical events or the reflection of cultural awakenings or transitions that took place during certain periods of history, such as his thirteen minute odyssey “Class of ’58,” which unfortunately the record label EMI wanted to drop from the album A Beach Full Of Shells, and only agreed to let it stay, once Stewart had literally gutted the song to make it more acceptable length wise in the eyes and ears of the talking heads at the label. Stewart later released the full thirteen minute version as a single.

 

Speaking about the EMI decision, Stewart says, “This is something that annoyed me, because I have made I think, nineteen albums and they all went fine, and no one at any record label has ever commented on anything that I have ever done, apart from I delivered it, they stamped it and put it out. “Class Of ’58,” was thirteen minutes long and it ran the whole gamut of the history of British rock and roll, from ’58 to ’68, how it developed out of forty year old session players doing horrible cover versions of America’s greatest hits and how it eventually went through Cliff Richard’s Move It, which was the seminal record of English rock and roll. Move It was the first good record ever made in England. (“Class of ‘58”) then talks about how that turned into the iced coffee bar scene and how that led to the British invasion of the United States. I wrote this song, which explored the history, and that is also explored in great depth by Pete Frame in a book called The Restless Generation, which I think is the best book on the history of rock and roll that I have ever read. I was trying to do the same thing in song. Bits of it were pretty subtle (for instance) about a band who made a record for a label named Oreo. You may not know, but at the time there were two major record labels Decca and EMI, EMI had the Beatles and Decca had the Rolling Stones. If you didn’t fall into the first division you had to go to Pye (Records) or Phillips and Pye had the Kinks and Phillips had Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and it went down from there. If you absolutely couldn’t get a deal with anyone there was Oriole Records and they signed Rory Storm and the Hurricanes after Ringo left. Oriole didn’t have any of the first tier or second tier (artists). I wrote my little throw away line, “the song came out on Oriole and it did not make the charts,” and the thirteen minute version is full of these little references. If you grew up with the English record industry you would understand. I think the song went straight by EMI. I don’t think that they understood what I was trying to do. They thought it was silly and they said, ‘We don’t want this song on the album,’ so I edited it down to three minutes and thirty seconds or whatever the hell it is on the record. I kept the beginning and the ending and the whole of the middle is missing.”