Why Stewart is so thrifty

last updated 8 January 2015

Rod Stewart has always appreciated the value of money, said Cal Fussman in Esquire. The 67-year-old rock singer grew up in a poor district of north London, in a rented house whose windows had been blown out so many times during World War II that his father had boarded them up. “You want to know what it was like back then?” he says. “There’s a great [photo] of me and my pals Kevin and Clive proudly displaying our harmonica. Our harmonica. Our one-shilling harmonica. It was the only one we had. We shared it! We cherished it!” Poverty left an indelible impression on Stewart. Even after his success gave him rock-star wealth in the 1970s, he kept a tight grip on his wallet. While touring with the Faces, he says, he “perfected the art of getting to the bar door first and opening it to allow everyone else through,” sparing him from buying a round of drinks. He even managed to have a cocaine habit for several decades without squandering his money: Various people, he says, gave him the drug. But Stewart insists that he’s not a miser. “I’m shrewd,” he says. “Some people may call me tight. My old [guitarist] Ronnie Wood loves making jokes about it. ‘Tight as two coats of paint,’ he calls me. Tight as two coats of paint!”