Milford Daily News
  • Al Stewart returns to Passim Nov. 12-13

  • There’s a lot more to British pop singer Al Stewart than his long-ago soft-pop records "Year of the Cat" (1977) and "Time Passages" (1978). There was more of him before those hits and there’s been plenty more since.

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    The Scottish singer-guitarist began as a busy and successful folksinger, later fronted a band when he was getting radio play, and since the early 1990s, has been back behind an acoustic guitar, often recording and touring with just another guitarist. He comes to Club Passim in Cambridge, along with his regular accompanist Dave Nachmanoff, for shows on Nov. 12 and 13, to perform selections chosen from his 20 albums, and maybe a new song or two.
    Alastair Stewart actually broke into the business working as a stagehand at Les Cousins, a small folk club in London in the mid-’60s. He had grown up listening to the British skiffle music of Lonnie Donegan on the radio. But he was also digging lots of American sounds: Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Duane Eddy.
    "Whatever Lonnie Donegan was doing, I definitely wanted a piece of that," said Stewart by phone from a tour stop in New York. But in 1959 my parents took me to my first rock concert, which happened to be Duane Eddy. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, and whatever that noise was I just wanted to do it."
    But he got an acoustic guitar, not an electric, and started writing and singing. Then came his time at Les Cousins, where up-and-coming players included Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, and Cat Stevens.
    "They used to have all-nighters from midnight to 6 on Friday and midnight to 7 on Saturday," said Stewart. "My job was to put people onstage for three songs and then take them off. I took the job on the grounds that round about 4 in the morning I could put myself on and nobody could argue with me. I was playing around the corner at Bunjie’s Coffee House, where I had a residency every Friday. So I would do that and then I would do the all-nighter at the Cousins and I would do the all-nighter there on Saturday. I was 19 at the time."
    Stewart was in a right time-right-place situation when he got to record his first single, which soon led to his first album. He had recorded eight of them, and was doing well as a folk singer in England, before "Year of the Cat" came along and broke through on American radio. Yet he doesn’t speak very fondly of that record.
    "What people don’t understand is that the business side of the music business is pretty much upside down," he said. "During the time that I was having hit records I didn’t make any money at all. But earlier, when I was on the folk scene, I was doing extremely well, because there was no overhead and there were no expenses. In the early ’70s, you’d get in the car, they’d give you a chunk of money, you’d throw it in a drawer, and that drawer would just fill up with money."
    Page 2 of 3 - He laughed and added, "I bought a Ferrari, I bought a house ... I just didn’t know what to do with it. But then I had a hit record in the States, and we flew a band over and started touring. We began losing money hand over fist and I basically lost it all."
    But there was more than just the problem with money. Stewart’s audience was changing. His 1973 concept album "Past, Present & Future" had the standout song "Road to Moscow," and became a sort of cult record in England. He started playing bigger halls, and was regularly drawing a thousand people to concerts.
    "Then when ‘Year of the Cat’ came out, we had an extra couple of thousand in the audience, but they were all tourists," he said. "Nobody knew songs like ‘Road to Moscow,’ they just wanted the sax solo on ‘Year of the Cat.’ The people who’d loved me for ‘Past, Present & Future’ thought I’d sold out, so they stopped coming, and all I had was the pop people. So in a way ‘Year of the Cat’ was a mistake; I should’ve just continued to make records like ‘Past, Present & Future.’ "
    Stewart’s certainly not ungrateful, and he admits to having enjoyed being a pop star for a year or two. But by the early-’90s, he and the band had run out of steam, and he opted to return to his roots, going into the studio and on the road with just guitarist Laurence Juber.
    "That worked totally," he said, "and I’m still doing it. And the audience who went away after ‘Year of the Cat’ all came back. Once I became a folk singer again, I was OK again."
    At Passim, a club he’s played many times, and where he says he can feel a real sense of history, Stewart and Dave Nachminoff will have a set list in front of them but probably won’t stick to it.
    "We try to play different songs every night, and we do make up a set list," said Stewart. "But the audience tend to yell out things, so I’m usually led astray."
    Of his penchant for premiering new songs from the stage, he said, "Lately I’ve been doing one about a javelin salesman. The first line is ‘He was a traveling salesman of javelins, archery goods, and supplies. And she was his April surprise, with pale green eyes.’ There are not many pop songs with javelins in them, I don’t think.
    And I like songs to be about things that no other songs have been about."
    Al Stewart
    WHEN: Nov. 12-13, 8 p.m.
    WHERE: Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Cambridge
    TICKETS: $32/$30
    Page 3 of 3 - INFO: 617-492-7679; www.passim.org
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