Rod Stewart – Some Guys Have All the Luck

The man who wrote it walked away from music to become a clinical psychologist — and never saw his name on the hit, which by 1984 had already been a lonely R&B ballad, a Jamaican reggae tune, and a Robert Palmer record before Rod Stewart made it sound like a celebration.

By the time Rod Stewart got to Some Guys Have All the Luck in 1984, the song had already lived three or four lives without ever quite becoming a standard. It had been an aching soul ballad, a reggae cover, and a slinky new-wave single — and the man who wrote it had long since left the music business behind. Stewart’s version, all bounce and swagger, was the one that finally lodged it in the pop canon, but the story behind it is stranger and sadder than the breezy hit lets on.

The song was written by Jeff Fortgang, a Yale graduate who had been musical director of the university’s famed a cappella group the Whiffenpoofs. Sometime around 1972 or 1973, on a drive to visit a friend in Massachusetts, Fortgang found the song in a pang of loneliness and envy — the friend had a happy marriage, and Fortgang, single, turned the feeling into a lyric about watching other people get the love that keeps eluding you. He gave it to a New York R&B group called The Persuaders, best known for “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” and their 1973 recording reached No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 7 on the R&B chart. It was their last top-40 hit. Fortgang made almost no money from it and soon left music entirely, becoming a respected clinical psychologist in the Boston area.

From a Yale a cappella director to a Jamaican reggae hit to Rod

The song refused to stay buried. After The Persuaders’ version, it became unexpectedly popular in Jamaica, where reggae artists Derrick Harriott and Inner Circle both cut it in 1974, and an American reggae band, The Shakers, followed in 1976. Then, in 1982, the English singer Robert Palmer — recording at Compass Point in the Bahamas — reworked it into an electro, new-wave shape, changing some of the lyrics and taking it to No. 16 in the UK. It was Palmer’s version that caught Rod Stewart’s ear. A friend handed Stewart the Persuaders’ original as well, and Stewart set about building something of his own.

Some Guys Have All the Luck became the second single from Camouflage, Stewart’s thirteenth studio album, released in 1984 on Warner Bros. and produced by Michael Omartian. The record was notable for reuniting Stewart with guitarist Jeff Beck, his old bandmate from The Jeff Beck Group, who played on several tracks. Stewart cut the single in July 1984, adding lyrics that weren’t in the original — including the bit about the car overheating — and folding in a vocal refrain borrowed from Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home.” His version ran some 45 seconds longer than the Persuaders’ and traded their heartache for something almost giddy.

Rod made it sound like winning

That tonal switch was the trick of it. Fortgang’s lyric is genuinely lorn — a man cataloguing everyone else’s good fortune — but Stewart sang it with a wink and a grin, so that a song about romantic bad luck came out sounding like a party. It worked. The single reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1984 and No. 15 in the UK, the most successful version the song has ever had. The accompanying video, directed by Wayne Isham and Jerry Kramer, showed Stewart mugging through a parade of backdrops and outfits, and got heavy MTV rotation at the height of Stewart’s reign on the channel.

There’s a neat symmetry to the song’s two lives: a top-40 hit on the same Hot 100 twice, eleven years apart, by two completely different artists in two completely different styles. Stewart later paid his own tribute to the chain of voices that carried the song to him — after Robert Palmer’s death in 2003, he began performing it live in Palmer’s arrangement, complete with identically dressed backing singers echoing Palmer’s famous videos. The writer, meanwhile, has spent his life as a psychologist, his one great pop song out in the world without his name attached to most pressings — a quiet irony for a tune about watching the good things land on everybody else.