Every Concert Tells a Story

“I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger,” goes the bittersweet refrain of “Ooh La La,” the last song Rod Stewart sang at Irvine Meadows before a promising evening plummeted and proved he had it all wrong.

If only Stewart knew now what he knew then, when he was younger, his career, and the two-hour-plus amphitheater retrospective that reflected it, wouldn’t have turned out so maddeningly contradictory Thursday evening.

What Stewart knew then--meaning from his days with the Jeff Beck Group in 1968-69 through the better parts of his “A Night on the Town” album in 1976--made him a warmly endearing, focused artist drawing on blues, soul, folk and raucous rock ‘n’ roll. Forgetting that knowledge, he gave himself to disco, schmaltz and slick professionalism and settled for an ongoing career as a colorful and popular, but inconsequential, entertainer.

Stewart’s show couldn’t have been more illustrative of his achievements and his downfall. “Ooh La La,” sung in tribute to his old band mate in the Faces, Ronnie Lane (Lane, who died last year of multiple sclerosis, sang the original version), ended the first half of the concert on a glowing note, although the glow would have been more deeply burnished with a real fiddle and tin whistle rather than the synthesized ones Stewart’s keyboard players generated.

*

When Stewart swung into the lumbering disco of “Infatuation,” the show went from “ooh la la” to “oy vey”--although an audience of 12,000 or more delighted in each successive hit.

Through most of an uninvolving second half, Stewart’s band was numbed into forgetting what it had known during the first: how to rumble and crank and blast out some good, juicy, roughhouse rock ‘n’ roll.

Two black-leather-clad guitarists, John Shanks and Oliver Leiber, had been adding a jolt of personality to nearly every song, especially rock ‘n’ roll tunes, which they sparked with attitude and grit. But after emulating the old Faces in the first half, they turned faceless in the second, as the program required them to become uninteresting functionaries rather than vibrant rockers.

*

Going halfway seems to be Stewart’s habit these days. His current album, “When We Were the New Boys,” was trumpeted as his bid to recapture his freely rocking days of old, but it fell short with a too-tailored production approach. Onstage, he and his band smashed through that restraint while firing up “Cigarettes and Alcohol” and “Rocks,” the only two songs culled from “New Boys,” Stewart’s first album of new material since 1969 not to make the top 40.

Stewart’s voice sounded more gargly than usual and sometimes lacked the bite to dominate the rockers. But his exceptional warmth always emerges in live performance, and on Thursday it yielded a particularly tender reading of Cat Stevens’ “First Cut Is the Deepest.”

Stewart remains an entertaining fellow to watch, with his indefatigable, skinny-legged strutting and prancing. After introducing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” as a song that “you either love . . . or you hate,” he momentarily charmed this writer out of the latter camp with his zestful trouper’s delivery, which included some sliding, twirling steps worthy of Michael Jackson. There was no charm, however, in his treacly reading of Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately,” or in an over-inflated, chugging version of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train.”

Stewart, 53, came up with an all’s-well-that-ends-well finish with a couple of his staple Sam Cooke covers, “Twisting the Night Away” and “Having a Party,” which were sandwiched around a shining “Maggie May.”

Led by Carmine Rojas’ lovely bass lines, “Maggie” was played close to the original, except when Stewart--either transported or distracted--blew a cue and began singing over the guitar solo.

Whether his career can end well after such a long falling-off depends on whether he can find a way to recapture in the future what he knew in his distant past.