(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records)
Thu 18 December 2025 7:00, UK
As we all know by now, whether for better or for worse, Rod Stewart is a bit of a law unto himself.
Regardless of whether it’s being blitzed drunk on live TV or some of his more unhinged rants, it’s clear that Stewart lives life by the standards set by his own rule book – and always has done. No matter whether you may agree or disagree with his principles, there is something you have to respect about his entirely brazen attitude.
But maybe just don’t get in a car with him. That was a lesson very quickly learned by one Carmine Appice, the prolific American session drummer who has worked with everyone from Vanilla Fudge to Ozzy Osbourne. But none of this might have been the case if he hadn’t avoided a brush with death by getting behind one of Stewart’s wheels.
Indeed, compared to some of Appice’s other previous bosses, the Faces frontman is no Prince of Darkness, even back in his heyday. Yet even still, there was no escaping that he was just as much of a rock and roll hedonist as the next man. And when that potentially meant taking your life into your own hands – well, that was all just part of the mantra.
Over the course of their seven-year tenure together, Appice was instrumental to Stewart’s career in more ways than one, not least coming up with the genesis for his smash hit ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’. But it was outside of the studio where the drummer got to see the real man behind the mask: not just a musician, but a thrill seeker with a need for speed.
“Rod was a really cool guy,” Appice later recalled. “I remember one night he lent me his Lamborghini Miura – I had a bunch of classic cars and had problems with all of them. We were rehearsing, and he said, ‘Why don’t you borrow my Lamborghini Miura, and you can use that for two weeks until your cars get fixed?’”
It seemed a generous enough offer, and one that Appice indulged until he realised there was one rather ominous catch: “I remember racing around in Beverly Hills – me and him, and two Lamborghinis. And he had no side mirrors on the car. I said, ‘Rod, how do you drive that car? There’s no side mirrors.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter what’s behind you – all that matters is what’s ahead of you.’”
That motto may work for the philosophers of the world, but maybe not so much the Highway Code, nor the resuscitation room of a hospital. However, it was one that Stewart clearly, and miraculously, has lived by for all his days, and has even somehow managed to scrape out of the other side. After all, who needs safety when you’ve got money?
Maybe Stewart has always had more of a dark edge than what we give him credit for. On the outside, he’s more into schmoozing and having hair that would give Einstein a run for his money, but inwardly, he keeps secrets. Perhaps that’s the secret to why he’s lasted all this time: that he has indeed never looked back, and will crash through every single obstacle that gets in his way.
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