(I Know) I’m Losing You

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on Rod Stewart tearing through "(I Know) I'm Losing You," and if you have ever stood in a room while that drum break opens up, you already know why the Zoo Freaks lean in. This is the cut that landed on Every Picture Tells a Story, the 1971 record that shoved the raspy North Londoner from the clubs into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. It started life as a Temptations single in 1966, David Ruffin out front, Norman Whitfield and Eddie Holland writing a man who can feel the floor going out from under him. Rod did not pretty it up. He and the Faces dragged it into a bar-band stomp, Ronnie Wood slashing on guitar, Ian McLagan punching the piano, Ronnie Lane on bass, and Kenney Jones behind the kit, and they left the bruises on it.

Kenney has told the story more than once, and it still sounds like the way those sessions actually ran. He was home in Hampstead watching Sink the Bismarck when the call came. The studio was about five minutes away. He did not even haul his own drums over. He sat down on the kit that was already there, the one Mickey Waller had been using, played the number, and got back in time to see the ship go down. They knew the tune. The break in the middle was supposed to be a short drum figure with Rod chanting over the top. On the record it is already a statement. Out on the road with the Faces it grew and grew until Kenney would admit, with a laugh, that it got too bloody long. Halfway through he would start showing off, all the tricky stuff, and the rooms went with him. That is the version the Zoo Freaks still chase when the band is loose and the beer is warm.

Ian McLagan had his own scar on the track. He cocked up the piano intro the first time through, and instead of fixing it he kept cocking it up every time they played it live, on purpose, because the mistake had a swing to it. Rod wanted the song because he thought David Ruffin was the best singer walking. The Faces were not especially keen on cutting a Motown cover for one of Rod's solo dates, so he took it anyway. Contract ink kept the group name off the single. People heard a Rod Stewart record. The men who played it knew better. McLagan later said that if Rod called a song like that in the room, you went, because it would have been great if the Faces had cut it, and then you realized you had cut it, only on his time.

There is a better story than the studio math, and it comes out of an old Zigzag interview. Rod had put the word out in Rolling Stone that he would love to produce David Ruffin, who had been putting out some strange records and needed a direction. Ruffin sent a telegram. When the Faces hit Detroit, Ruffin's wife, his sisters, his bass player, his mum, everybody but the man himself, turned up. The house was full and the door did not know who David Ruffin was, so they would not let him in. After the show his wife came around and said she had cried when they did "Losing You," because David had missed it. Back at the hotel Rod had already gone to bed when somebody knocked and said big David was in the hall. And there he was. They talked. That is the kind of circuit this song ran on, from a Motown stage to a London studio to a Detroit hallway, and it still carries that charge when the Crew spins it for the folks tuned to THE ZOO.

The man doing the singing did not arrive with a plan. Roderick David Stewart was born in Highgate, North London, in January 1945, the youngest of five, Scottish father, English mother. His old man bought him a guitar and told him there was money in it. The first tune he learned was a folk number, the first record he bought was Eddie Cochran. He had already been knocked sideways by Little Richard and by seeing Bill Haley. School did not hold him. He left around fifteen, tried out as an apprentice footballer with Brentford, and when that went pear-shaped he took whatever work was going. Screen printing wallpaper. Delivering papers. Digging graves and laboring at a funeral parlor in North Finchley, which he has never been shy about. Fence erecting. Sign writing. A silk-screen job in Kentish Town that he hated. On the ride to work he held a transistor to his ear and found Sam Cooke, and that voice stayed in his throat for good.

The door opened the way those doors used to open. Early in 1964 he was waiting at Twickenham station after a Long John Baldry show at Eel Pie Island, blowing "Smokestack Lightning" on harmonica. Baldry heard him, found out he could sing, checked with Rod's mother, and put him on wages with the Hoochie Coochie Men. From there it was Steampacket, the big revue band that supported the Rolling Stones and the Walker Brothers, then a short hitch with Shotgun Express. None of it made him famous. It made him ready. At the end of 1966 Jeff Beck pulled him into the Jeff Beck Group alongside Ronnie Wood. Truth, in 1968, was the first time the rest of the world had to deal with that rasp over heavy blues. Beck-Ola followed. When that band came apart in 1969, Wood, who had been shown the door by Beck, talked Rod into the Faces, the old Small Faces with Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and Kenney Jones still aboard.

That is the gang you are hearing under this track. The Faces were a democratic wrecking crew on the road, same toilets, five-way split, no special dressing room for the singer, and a habit of kicking a microphone stand until it bent. Rod ran a solo career in parallel because he was not going to be fenced in by the group, and he has said straight out that he kept some of the commercial stuff for himself. "(I Know) I'm Losing You" is the proof and the argument. It is a soul record played by a rock and roll band that drank like a rock and roll band, fronted by a folkie who had come up through skiffle, R&B clubs, and a graveyard shift. The Zoo Crew will tell you the same thing the room tells you. When the break hits, you are not losing the song. You are in it.

Rod keeps the porch light on at his own place, rodstewart.com, where the early-years timeline still logs the single and the Every Picture Tells a Story track list with this number sitting right where it belongs. He posts as himself on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. The long-running fan club SMILER, going since 1981 and still writing about the Faces years and the solo records, lives at rodstewartfanclub.com. Spin it again if the room can take it. The man is still losing you, and the band is still not sorry.