Long-time readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of Al Stewart, the singer/songwriter who gained his greatest fame with the hit single, “Year of the Cat.”
Fellow Al Stewart fans probably know that he is a big-time wine aficionado who has been featured in the pages of Wine Spectator magazine. He even put together an entire album of wine-related songs, which we wrote about in this blog.
We’ve also written about how Stewart’s interest in wine has rubbed off on two of his guitar players over the years.
I’ve seen Stewart in concert literally dozens of times over the years, in venues ranging from the tiny McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California, to the much larger Universal Amphitheater, which was part of the Universal Studios complex in Los Angeles. No matter where I may have been living at the time, if Stewart was coming to town, I made a point of going to see him.
Tomorrow night, I’ll be seeing him yet again at a venerable venue called The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, California, not far from the famous mission. This one promises to be special because it will be the first time I’ve had a chance to attend an Al Stewart concert with my future, second and final wife, Michelle.
It’s hard to believe that more than 14 years have passed since I wrote the following concert preview story. It’s even harder to believe that almost 39 years have passed since I attended my first Al Stewart concert.
But this “blast from the past” includes enough “wine stuff” that I thought it might be fun to share it with you here. So here it is — from the February 1-7, 2001 edition of the Northern California Bohemian…
SAN RAFAEL SINGER/SONGWRITER AL STEWART
GIVES HOMAGE TO THE FERMENTED GRAPE
Summer 1976
Universal Amphitheater
Los Angeles
Nearly every seat of this magnificent, open-air concert venue has been filled for a performance by Al Stewart, whose “Year of the Cat” single and album has instantly transformed a Scottish folk singer into an American pop icon.
I am 18 years old, and my date for the evening is a stunningly beautiful 17-year-old blonde named Sheryl. It had taken me a full year to muster the courage to ask Sheryl out. When she readily accepted my offer, I was flabbergasted.
Stewart and his band put on a memorable show, blending love songs from his early recording days with the history-tinged folk/pop/rock tunes of “Year of the Cat.”
By the time we make the drive back from L.A. to Sheryl’s bayside home on Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula, it is a quarter past 1 a.m. We exit my forest green Ford Pinto hatchback and walk to the wood and stained-glass front door of the house.
Without saying a word, and with no prompting (other than telepathic) from me, she leans in and kisses me on the lips. She then looks in my eyes and quietly says five words that have haunted me ever since: “That could become habit forming.”
I smiled sheepishly, told her I had a great time, returned to my car and drove the remaining half-mile to my home. I did not sleep at all that night. Torn between a burning desire to develop a new “habit” and the teenage anxiety that I may not live up to her expectations, I never asked Sheryl out on a second date.
And she looked in my eyes but I turned them away
Finding no words fit to say
And I hated myself, but could not move,
I was shattered in my confidence,
But it was no sense at all, but too much sense
That took me to the bridge of impotence.
— From Al Stewart’s “Love Chronicles,” 1969
– – – – –
Fall 1989
Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Dana Point, Calif.
Now divorced for three years and the father of a stunningly beautiful 10-year-old daughter, I have been enjoying wine for about five years, and writing about it for two. But I have never tasted the heady, sweet, European elixir known as Port.
That changes on a hillside garden terrace overlooking the Pacific, where I join several hundred fellow imbibers at a three-hour vino free-for-all involving more than a hundred wineries from around the world.
Up until now, my wine experiences have been limited to California bottlings, with the odd French Burgundy or Bordeaux added to the mix on special occasions. As I sample one Port after another, of varying vintages and pedigrees, my mind and taste buds are awakened to a vast new world of possibilities.
Then it seemed that I was traveling
Through the granite hills of Dao
With a vineyard spread in front of me
In a carriage headed south.
Night came with the skies aflame
And all that I saw
Was all mine to claim.
— From Al Stewart’s “King of Portugal,” 1988
– – – – –
July 18, 1999
Conejo Creek Park
Thousand Oaks, Calif.
It’s about an hour before Al Stewart is due to take the stage for a now all-too-rare performance. The sound-check completed, Stewart joins me for a pre-arranged interview on the splintered seats of a park picnic table.
Knowing that he has discussed and dissected his songs with countless journalists over the years, I decide to focus on another topic of mutual interest: wine. Inevitably, there is a musical link.
“We’re all familiar with Andy Warhol’s observation about everyone getting 15 minutes of fame,” Stewart says. “For me, in retrospect, it was ‘Year of the Cat.’”
And that remains the one song fans expect him to play at every concert. But Stewart says he doesn’t mind, because it provided the wherewithal for him to invest heavily in wine.
He has spent untold hours exploring the cellars of historic French wineries, and today, as a resident of San Rafael, lives just a stone’s throw from the Sonoma County and Napa Valley wine regions.
Stewart has been collecting wine for more than three decades, and is amused by the fact he now gets more ink in wine publications than in music periodicals. “When the Wine Spectator devotes a whole page to you, but you’re not in the music magazines anymore, it’s kind of odd,” he says.
Odd? Perhaps. But there is no denying the artistic link between making good music and crafting fine wine. Even though technology is used in both pursuits, nothing gets done without human intervention, interpretation and passion. Nothing of any lasting worth, anyway.
Stewart says his wine collection has dwindled to “a little over a thousand bottles” in recent years, but he figures that’s plenty to carry him “happily into senility.”
I’m sometimes trapped by the close confines
Of the age I’m born into
Though there were others worse than mine
Well I miss what I can’t do.
Join the feast of Ancient Greece
See Alexander’s library
Maybe clink a Champagne toast
With a jazz age dancing queen.
— From Al Stewart’s “Josephine Baker,” 1988
– – – – –
Jan. 28, 2000
The Palms Playhouse
Davis, Calif.
On a brisk, breezy evening, not far from the university that has educated countless winemakers and grape growers, a capacity-and-then-some crowd patiently waits for Al Stewart to take the stage.
When introduced, he is greeted warmly. On this night, he begins his performance with an apology. He says he has been battling the flu, and his voice is a bit raspy.
“But after eight bottles of Evian and two bottles of wine,” he says, “here I am.”
At one point between songs, he speaks of just returning from Los Angeles, where he had been recording with guitarist Laurence Juber, an alumnus of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles Wings band (on the run).
“A record company approached me about making an album about wine,” he says. “I remember pausing for a moment and thinking, ‘This must be a dream.’”
By the end of the year, the dream had become reality in the form of “Down in the Cellar,” a 13-cut CD devoted almost entirely to fermented grapes.
“Touts Les Etoiles,” an ode to Dom Perignon, is sung partially in French, while “The Shiraz Shuffle” pays homage to the wines of Australia. Most of the tunes embrace Stewart’s trademark historical perspective.
And one, in particular, takes me back nearly a quarter of a century to an unforgettable kiss.
You’ve got this impulsive nature
Maybe you were born that way
Sometimes it leads you into danger
Sometimes you can make it pay
On a night like this one
Fly a red balloon
On an endless beach of summer
Under a wine-stained moon.
— From Al Stewart’s “Under a Wine-Stained Moon,” 2000
– – – – –
That’s the end of that story, but it is not the end of this story.
You may have noticed that when I wrote about the wine-tasting event that took place at the Ritz-Carlton in the fall of 1989, there was no mention of having a date that night.
That is because just a few days before the event, the woman I had asked to accompany me called and let me know she couldn’t go. I would not hear from her again until two summers ago, after we’d each raised our children, lived our lives and endured unhappy marriages.
Today, that woman is my fiancée. And knowing her as I do now, all I can say is she would have loved the Port that was served that night, twenty-five-and-a-half years ago. I hope she loves tomorrow night’s Al Stewart concert just as much.
