Ian McLagan

And don't underestimate the Faces musically

By Todd Leopold
CNN
Friday, September 10, 2004 Posted:
The Faces: Kenney Jones, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Lane, Ron Wood and Ian McLagan.

(CNN) -- The stories about the Faces are numerous, colorful and legendary. The band members liked their drink, liked to play and liked to have a good time.

And they liked to -- in keyboardist Ian McLagan's words -- "personalize" their hotel rooms, which were often at roadside Holiday Inns.

"You couldn't go from one town to another and not walk into the identical room in every town," he says, jovially, in a phone interview from his home in Austin, Texas. "So we hurt them."

Guitarist Ron Wood puts it more gently. "We used to put in quality additions," he says from Los Angeles, California. "Some of [the rooms] got quite predictable. We'd spice them up."

OK. So they wrecked a few. Wood, an accomplished artist, would add drawings of bicycles or airplanes to bucolic and generic Holiday Inn paintings over the bed.

And, in the early days before they became successful, they all roomed together, something McLagan -- in his liner notes to a new boxed set, "Five Guys Walk Into a Bar ..." (Rhino) -- doesn't recommend. "We all kept different hours, so none of us were happy with it," he writes. No wonder the rooms came in for a beating.

But oh, they could play.

'We paced ourselves'

Now that the haze of alcohol has worn off and the mists of time have come on, it's often assumed the Faces were a sloppy band, liquored up and tripping all over each other's beats. McLagan begs to differ, and the boxed set bears him out.

"We had the reputation of big drinkers, but we paced ourselves," he notes. "We all knew our limits."

Besides, nothing got in the way of the music. "I'm now fighting this reputation of being sloppy, but listen [to the record]," he says.

Indeed, anyone listening to "Five Guys Walk Into a Bar ..." finds a band with range and depth, capable of bluesy belting, folkie moodiness and full-tilt boogie. Yes, they were loose and larkish, but steady with the beat.

It helps that the Faces had a strong pedigree.

McLagan, bassist Ronnie Lane and drummer Kenney Jones were in the Small Faces together. Despite only one American hit, "Itchycoo Park," the band was huge in England and was coming off a 1968 No. 1 album, "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake," when lead singer Steve Marriott announced to the others he was leaving to start a band with Peter Frampton. McLagan, Lane and Jones were at a loss.

Then Lane talked to his friend Ron Wood, late of the Jeff Beck Group, and Wood started jamming with the three musicians. Eventually, he brought along his friend, former Beck lead singer Rod Stewart, and in 1969 the Faces were born.

Stewart had already started his solo career at the time, and he was only to get bigger in the early '70s, but McLagan says Stewart's success never got in the way.

"His solo career kept us together. When we toured, we'd reach more people, and with his success, it was now our success," he says, especially after Stewart hit No. 1 with his song "Maggie May" and album "Every Picture Tells a Story." "What eventually drove us apart was that the manager wanted to headline the group with Rod over the Faces. We thought, why change that? And I read that Rod hated that, too."

Bassist Lane was 'sadly ignored'

But before the breakup -- Lane left the band in 1973 -- the band produced a handful of fine albums, notably "A Nod Is as Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse" and "Ooh La La," and two hit singles, "Stay With Me" and "Cindy Incidentally."

"Five Guys" also collects a number of live performances and rehearsals, including versions of Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain" (popularized by Wood's soon-to-be cohorts, the Rolling Stones), Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" and Etta James' "I'd Rather Go Blind."

The members of the Faces eventually went on to greater success separately. Wood joined the Stones; Jones became the Who's drummer after the death of Keith Moon; Stewart has dozens of hits under his belt. McLagan has been a session keyboardist for years, and is part of Billy Bragg's group, the Blokes. (He jokes that he's only one of the Faces who's not a millionaire.)

And then there was bassist Lane, who developed multiple sclerosis and died in 1997. Acknowledged as one of the great bassists in rock history -- his album collaboration with Pete Townshend, "Rough Mix," is a classic -- his understated work was generally overshadowed by more famous colleagues.

That's another thing McLagan, who assembled "Five Guys," wants to address.

"He's been sadly ignored," McLagan says. "I'd love to have a Ronnie Lane boxed set. It would do him justice."

"He was a damned good bassist, very melodic," agrees Wood.

In the meantime, there's "Five Guys," the story of a working band that enjoyed every minute of its music-making. McLagan knew it was good from the moment Stewart picked up a microphone.

- CNN.com

As is the case with so many immortal rock & roll acts, the Faces only lasted a few years, but one spin through Rhino's new 4-CD box set, Five Guys Walk Into a Bar ..., proves that, like the Kinks, Rolling Stones, or any number of first- and second-wave British Invasion bands, they were a band without equal. Then or now.

In 1969, former Jeff Beck Group vocalist Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood joined what was left of the Small Faces, keyboardist Ian McLagan, drummer Kenney Jones, and bass player Ronnie Lane, after singer Steve Marriott left the band. The result was a wild rock & roll ride that produced four albums and tours that have become the stuff of legend.

The Faces were renowned for their flamboyance and the nearly constant party that surrounded them. At one point, they went so far as to have a bar and a bartender with them onstage. With their foppish fashion sense and brave mix of rock and soul, they became one of the most seminal bands of the Seventies.

After their breakup in 1975, Stewart transformed himself into an international playboy, Wood joined the Rolling Stones, and Jones became Keith Moon's replacement in the Who. Lane, the band's heart and soul, as well as its most prolific songwriter, actually left the group in 1973, embarking on a solo career that landed him in Austin in the mid-Eighties ["Here Comes the Nice," Music, December 8, 2000]. By then, Lane had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which never stopped him from rocking the local scene before moving to Colorado in 1995. Two years later, he passed on to a higher Hall of Fame.

Meanwhile, McLagan, now a veteran Austinite himself, became a super sideman, performing and making records with the Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, Thin Lizzy, Paul Weller, the Stray Cats, Joe Cocker, Melissa Etheridge, Taj Mahal, Billy Bragg, Ryan Adams, and Buddy Guy, among many others. Even with that dizzying résumé, however, rock & roll fans the world over still identify Mac first and foremost as a Face. As Five Guys proves in glorious technicolor, there's ample reason for that.

Over the course of 67 tracks, Five Guys sprawls enough blues, soul, funk, boogie, and country to prompt Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke to write in his liner notes, "They played it as if the world was their bar stool and it was never closing time." The truly amazing thing about Five Guys is that a similar box has never appeared before now.

In fact, until the release of 1999's best-of, Good Boys ... When They're Asleep, no one had attempted to give the Faces their due. Up to that point, the band's four albums, First Step, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink ... to a Blind Horse, Long Player, and Ooh La La, had been given shoddy treatment on CD, with poor-quality graphics and less than brilliant sound. McLagan, therefore, took it upon himself to commit this labor of love, which has produced one of the all-time great box sets, quite a feat in this day and age when such collections of some bands have been done several times over.

Chatting over some Tex-Mex at a South Congress bistro, Mac is positively giddy with the results. He's a charmer with a near-white shag who moved to Austin in 1994 to escape the earthquakes, crime, and high cost of living in Los Angeles. He minces no words in explaining that since the band broke up, few in the band or larger music industry itself felt the urgency for such a set.

"Rod never talks about the Faces," he shrugs. "Well, he is now. He's loving this. But he's always been hesitant to do anything Faces, because his solo career has been more important to him. Nobody had the time to do it, so it had to be me."

At first, Mac's idea was to release every track from all four albums along with every single and B-side. Instead, digitally remastered BBC sessions, alternate takes, outtakes, hotel room tapes, along with album tracks and B-sides prompted a radically different outcome. The fact that there are 31 previously unreleased tracks makes Five Guys a remarkably fresh listen. Even lifelong fans of the band are likely to feel they're discovering the Faces all over again.

Naturally, there are the better known tunes, like the steamrolling "Stay With Me," melancholy "Ooh La La," eerie "Flying," and rollicking "Cindy Incidentally." Joining them are some surprising, previously unheard covers: John Lennon's "Jealous Guy," Free's "Stealer," the Temptations' "I Wish It Would Rain," and Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed." There's even a live take of Stewart's "Maggie May" that might just outclass the radio staple. Plus, where one might expect this all to be sequenced chronologically, McLagan tried a different strategy, even though initially he took the traditional route.

"There were too many rehearsal tapes at the beginning; it put me to sleep," he laughs. "So I had a party. I'm a fan of deejays. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, I used to make cassettes of all my favorite blues records - Jim Caligiuri