“Lovely song, isn’t it?” That was Rod Stewart, onstage at the Nokia Theater on Monday night. And he wasn’t being immodest: he had just sung “Father and Son,” by the singer-songwriter formerly known as Cat Stevens, and he was giving credit where it was due.
Rod Stewart in concert at the Nokia Theater on Monday night.
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This was a concert only a C.P.A. could love. The site was a former movie theater operated by the live-entertainment company AEG Live and named for a cellphone company. The occasion was the release of “Still the Same ... Great Rock Classics of Our Time,” an album of covers by Mr. Stewart, on J Records, a subsidiary of Sony BMG.
The show was produced by Control Room, formerly known as Network Live, which packages concerts for electronic distribution. Control Room has a deal with MSN, the Microsoft portal, which broadcast the concert online. And Control Room also joined with Big Screen Concerts, owned by a consortium of movie theater owners, National CineMedia, which was scheduled to beam Mr. Stewart’s crooning and preening into 117 movie theaters, at a cost of $15 a ticket. (That broadcast started nationwide at 9:30 Eastern time, about an hour after the concert.)
This thicket of contracts and subsidiaries says something, perhaps, about the music industry’s current transitional phase. Companies are scrambling to figure out new ways to make money from old assets. (Or, as Mr. Stewart and lots of optimistic executives would probably put it, “forever young” assets.) It says something, too, about Mr. Stewart himself, a genial veteran who sees no reason that an aging rock star has to be a crank.
Mr. Stewart seems happy to be a working singer, with the emphasis on working. In a recent Billboard interview, he said, “When you get too old, people don’t want to play your songs on the radio.” And instead of complaining about this state of affairs, he has shrugged and adapted to it. He sang standards on his four “Great American Songbook” albums. Now comes “Still the Same,” advertised as his “first rock album in over eight years,” though in a sense these are standards too.
The songs are well chosen, though not all shone during Monday’s decidedly casual performance. Mr. Stewart glided through John Fogerty’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and added some pantomime to John Waite’s 1984 hit, “Missing You,” singing one stanza while holding up a thumb and pinkie (the universal sign for “I’m talking on the telephone”). And though he didn’t quite get the better of the Pretenders’ “I’ll Stand by You,” he didn’t seem too rattled, either. When it was done, he asked, “Any good?”
Still, considering all the corporate interests involved, it seemed strange that this show wasn’t more impressive. There were a few miscues and hardly any moments of high drama (or even high camp); the whole thing felt more like a dress rehearsal than a real concert. But Mr. Stewart’s good cheer never faded. He even sang the final chorus of “Rhythm of My Heart” while gamely holding a gift bag that had been tossed onstage.
Then, after 16 songs, it was finally time for “Maggie May.” Mr. Stewart said, “We’ve got one more to do, then we’re going off the air.” When it was over, the house lights came on, and the recorded background music faded up. Fans stuck around anyway, hoping for an encore. But the screen — that is, the stage — went blank and stayed blank, and the crowd slowly dispersed.
