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Rod Stewart may have begun his career as a respected singer, yet that critical respect eroded as he got older, as he became more concerned with stardom and adult contemporary songcraft than the rock music that launched him. While he has recorded some terrible albums -- and he would admit that freely -- Stewart was once rock & roll's best interpretive singer as well as an accomplished songwriter, creating a raw combination of folk, rock, blues, and country that sounded like no other folk-rock or country-rock material. Instead of finding the folk in rock, he found how folk rocked like hell on its own. After Stewart became successful, he began to lose the rootsier elements of his music, yet he remained a superb singer, even as he abandoned his own artistic path in favor of following pop trends. Stewart began his musical career after spending some time as an apprentice with the Brentford Football Club, touring Europe with folksinger Wizz Jones in the early '60s; during this time he was de...