Songfacts®:

• One of Rod Stewart's favorite tracks, he calls "Gasoline Alley" a "longing-for-home song."
  
  By this time, Stewart had traveled the world, mostly as a member of The Jeff Beck Group and Faces. This song finds him nostalgic for his teenage years in the early '60s growing up in and around London.
• Gasoline Alley was the name of a long-running American comic strip about a working-class family in the fictional town of Gasoline Alley. The title was suggested to Stewart by a girl he met at a show at the Fillmore West in San Francisco in 1968. It evokes a place with tight-knit bonds, perfect for a song about missing home.
• The mandolin, played by Stanley Matthews, is front and center on this song, foreshadowing the use of the instrument on Stewart's hit "Maggie May," released the following year.
• Stewart wrote the song with Ronnie Wood, his bandmate in the Faces who was his right-hand man on his early solo material. Wood also played guitar on the song.
• "Gasoline Alley" is the title track to Stewart's second solo album, released in 1970, the same year his band Faces issued their debut album, First Step. The next few years were pretty intense for Stewart, as both Faces and his solo career took off. He stayed with the group until they split in 1975.