“Instead of getting married again,” Rod Stewart, a fellow who has been married thrice, once said: “I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and just give her a house”. Since then, however, he has matured his stance on the subject and subsequently proclaimed: “I’ve been out with some extremely beautiful women who have had no sex appeal whatsoever. It really is a lot more than skin deep.”
These quotes are not merely clever quips but also stark indicators of how open the gravel-voiced, tight-trousered rocker really he is—he frankly couldn’t give a shit. Thus, it seems fitting that his biggest hit and magnum opus is a track that hints at the momentous moment that the self-proclaimed sexy Scot lost his virginity.
“‘Maggie May’ was more or less a true story, about the first woman I had sex with, at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival,” he told Q Magazine. Detailing in a typically earnest fashion that the whole thing was over “in a few seconds”.
He expounds on this story in his comical memoir – a memoir that also sees him denounce ‘that’ sailor rumour – Rod: The Autobiography, writing: “At 16, I went to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the New Forest. I’d snuck in with some mates via an overflow sewage pipe. And there on a secluded patch of grass, I lost my not-remotely-prized virginity with an older (and larger) woman who’d come on to me very strongly in the beer tent. How much older, I can’t tell you – but old enough to be highly disappointed by the brevity of the experience.”
And yet, this all too fleeting counter was enough to wear Rod out and later write a masterful pop hit about it. He didn’t know the name of his mature lady love but opted for the name Maggie May after the classic folk song ‘Maggie Mae’ that recounts the life of a Liverpool-based sex worker whose trade on Lime Street was renowned in Mersey beat circles. However, there is no indication that money changed hands at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival, and Rod’s ‘Maggie’ was no more than a lusty cougar.
Furthermore, there is even footage of Rod as a ‘young fan’ at the festival below. While we can’t be certain where these shots lie within the sequence of events that day, the grin on his face is rather notable. Either way, it seems that day may well have set the course for the rest of his life as his young mind conflated the marriage of rock ‘n’ roll and rolling around that has been a central focus of his back catalogue ever since.
Although his virginity tale might not sound ideal in the Byryonian sense, the track it spawned went on to reach 182 in the US Billboard Charts all-time rundown (1958-2018), so it was a hell of a lot more successful than most fumbling first attempts.
