As music memoirs go, Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ Cat on the Road to Findout couldn’t have been more aptly titled. Over the last nearly 60 years, few in pop have traveled such a twisty path, as the bearded pop troubadour went from Cat Stevens, teen idol, to Cat Stevens, becalmed balladeer, to Yusuf Islam, man of religion and occasional music. Along the way, he battled tuberculosis, almost drowned, had a fling with Carly Simon, and became one of the first major pop stars to be canceled after he weighed in (in ways he felt were misunderstood, mishandled, or misinterpreted) on the Ayatollah Khomeini declaring a fatwah against writer Salman Rushdie in 1989.
That tale is laid out in the book, published Thursday in the U.K. and Oct. 7 in this country. Below, some tea from the tillerman.
There’s a connection between Cat Stevens’ stage name and his first major girlfriend.
How did Steven Georgiou become Cat Stevens in 1965? As he writes, part of the inspiration came from then-current film titles like Cat Ballou and What’s New Pussycat? and partly from a hit at the time called “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog.” A girlfriend also told him he looked like a cat when she saw him reclining on a couch. As he says, “All I did was add ‘Cat’ to my first name, shifting Steven from head to tail: Hey-ho! ‘Cat Stevens’ was born.” That girlfriend — Christine, whom he calls his first “real love” — would also inspire the decidedly non-catty classic “The First Cut Is the Deepest.”
In 1966, Yusuf scored his first hit with the whimsical symphonic pop of “I Love My Dog.” There was only one problem: He didn’t own such an animal. “Journalists were certain to pounce on me with probing questions about my own fluffy, beloved friend,” Yusuf writes. Luckily, he was walking the streets of London’s Soho district one night and came upon a stray black dachshund tied to a street post. Yusuf quickly adopted the dog, whom he named Willemina, and now had an actual pet he could talk about while promoting the record.
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“Anticipation” isn’t the only Carly Simon song that may have been written about him.
In 1971, Yusuf met Carly Simon, who was booked to open his show at the Troubadour club in L.A. “Touring puts you in sensitive, close contact with those journeying with you,” he writes, adding, “It was difficult to keep away from Carly,” and the two “got to know each other extremely well.” In her own memoir, Simon confirmed that “Anticipation” arose from the time she was waiting for him to show up at her place for a date. She’s never revealed the inspiration behind “You’re So Vain” (only to a TV executive who paid $50,000 to charity to find out), but Yusuf, jokingly or not, thinks he knows. “I never understood the endless hide-and-seek of finding out who ‘You’re So Vain’ was about, bro! Naturally, I knew it was me!” (Bonus info: We also learn from his book that Yusuf is not immune to using the term “bro.”)
He could have been nicknamed Splat Stevens.
As Cat Stevens, Yusuf came to embody the peace-loving, soul-searching stereotype of the Seventies troubadour. But as a child, he writes, he admits he “gravitated toward any danger-filled subjects of a magnetic, action-driven nature involving as much violence, destruction, and death as possible,” like horror films. After seeing the film version of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, set during the French Revolution, Yusuf recalls building miniature balsa-wood guillotines as a hobby. (They could have come in handy for hard-headed women … and men.) This odd pastime did also serve to bond him with music, though: He says he would listen to his sister’s LP collection while making them.
He almost gave “Wild World” away to another artist.
After he finished Tea for the Tillerman, the album that installed him in the soft-rock pantheon along with Simon, James Taylor, and a select few others, Yusuf was informed by label head Chris Blackwell that “Wild World” was an obvious hit. But Yusuf says he felt the song was too “verse and chorus,” and thought someone else, namely reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, should record it instead, with Yusuf himself as producer. Cliff was up for it, but apparently nothing more came of the idea, and Yusuf’s original version of the song wound up going top 20.
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His new songs in Harold and Maude, the super-dark comedy cult classic, weren’t finished.
Yusuf writes that he was approached by director Hal Ashby about contributing songs to his 1971 movie about the bond between a young guy obsessed with death and a quirky elderly woman who loved life. Yusuf says that in addition to hearing some of his songs in a rough edit of the film, he was asked to write new ones and dashed off demos of two semi-competed tunes — “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out” and “Don’t Be Shy” — with the idea of finishing them later. Instead, Ashby loved the raw takes and used those instead.
Why didn’t a soundtrack with all his songs appear until 2022, more than 50 years later? As Yusuf writes, he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of a premature hits package, so he and his lawyers decided not to give the go-ahead for a companion album. (As far as lead actress Ruth Gordon singing “Sing Out” and playing piano, he writes, “She sounded dreadfully out of tune, but that was the way Hal wanted. So be it.”)
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His mid-Seventies stage show could have given Spinal Tap a run for their set-design money.
To support his mathematically baffling concept album Numbers, Stevens, then at the peak of his pop moment, went on the road with an elaborate set that included what he calls a “white sail backdrop,” a “sparkly red-top piano and automatic pop-up stool.” The concerts would open with Stevens popping out of four colored boxes. He hired magicians to open the shows (whose tricks, he says, included “sawing a luscious blonde lady in half”). The final touring troupe included not just musicians, crew, and magicians but “countless doves and rabbits.” And let’s not forget about the tiger that would “dramatically appear” in a cage on the stage.
His conversion to Islam had a few bumps in the road.
Following a near-drowning incident in Malibu in 1975, Yusuf began his road to a new faith, which, as he writes, involved adjustments for everyone. His name change to Yusuf Islam wasn’t too difficult: “That would be easy for my family and English-speaking friends to pronounce,” he writes. But his on-the-road rock & roll lifestyle took a hit: “There was no more room for ‘Freelove & Goodbye’ relationships, that sort of idea was not allowed in Islam.” While making Back to Earth, his last “Cat Stevens” album, he would take prayer breaks, which was “quite tough, especially if something was really cooking, musically.”
For that album cover, he also decided to announce his conversion by way of using a “decorative gold Arabic calligraphy” for the credits. But, as he writes, the government of Malaysia was not thrilled with seeing “Allah” in calligraphy on the cover and asked for it to be removed. At his urging, Yusuf’s record company slapped a sticker over that part of the cover and removed it from later pressings. Collector’s item alert!
Elton John accidentally screwed him over at Live Aid.
According to Yusuf, he was invited to participate in the 1985 all-star charity concert, in London. By then. he had given away his musical instruments, hadn’t performed live in years, and admits he was “scared witless” when he arrived at Wembley. Still, he prepped a new song, “In the End,” that he would perform a cappella. As the day dragged on, he was told that John’s set was running longer than anyone had expected, and Yusuf’s song was cut from the lineup. As he writes, “My heart sank like a rock.” When he arrived back home and watched the end of the broadcast thanks to a time delay, he saw his name listed in the closing credits.
The incident that Yusuf writes would be a “blistering asteroid” in his life started with an Islamic scholar who shared portions of Rushdie’s book, which the singer found to be “unbelievably rude and offensive.” Yusuf writes that he contacted the book’s publisher, asking for it be pulled from circulation and also spoke with Islamic scholars, who told him that any retribution would not involve vigilantism.
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During a subsequent public talk about this conversation, he writes that an “undercover journalist” from a tabloid asked him if thought Rushdie should be put to death for his book. Yusuf writes that he addressed the question “as openly as possible” but “forgot to mention the questionability of the dreaded fatwah.” In the book, Yusuf feels a public apology he wrote was largely ignored and that the press went with its take that he was “an unrepentant supporter of the ayatollah and his fatwah.… Alas, I was not knowledgeable or eloquent enough to explain my stance on the matter as clearly at the time.”
According to his memoir, what he calls a “shadow banning” by some journalists simply pushed him into even greater devotion to his faith and studying “the status of fatwahs.” But Yusuf still looks back at that incident as “an onslaught of misunderstanding and hatred like nothing I’d ever experienced — before or since that day.”
