Will the Vintage Stewart Please Return?

“I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger,” went the bittersweet refrain of “Ooh La La,” the last song Rod Stewart sang Thursday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre 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 concert retrospective that reflected it, wouldn’t have turned out so maddeningly contradictory.

What Stewart knew then--his career up 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 all that, 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 downfall. “Ooh La La,” sung in tribute to his old bandmate in the Faces, Ronnie Lane, who died last year of complications of multiple sclerosis, ended the concert’s first half on a glowing note.

When Stewart swung straight into the lumbering disco of “Infatuation,” the show went instantly from “ooh la la” to “oy vey”--although an almost-capacity house delighted in each successive hit.

Stewart remains an entertaining fellow to watch, with his skinny-legged strutting and prancing. A couple of his staple Sam Cooke covers sandwiched around a shining “Maggie May” provided an all’s-well-that-ends-well finish.

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