Rod: The Autobiography (18 page)

With Mac I always sensed there was an undercurrent, something that prevented us from relaxing entirely in each other’s company. We would laugh at the same things, but I always felt there was a slight edge. I think Marriott’s departure and the end of the Small Faces had hit him hardest of all and he could be pretty sour and chippy. The key thing, though, was that the humour that Ronnie and I had got off on in the Jeff Beck Group days – the peculiar mix of British 1950s radio comedy, dark sarcasm and basic schoolboy inanity – turned out to be shared by Mac and Ronnie Lane and, to a lesser extent, when he wasn’t curling his hair, by Kenney. Accordingly, a bond was forged. We were a brotherhood – very quickly and very surprisingly. Put simply, in the crudest terms, and as everyone in the business of rock ’n’ roll knows, the rule is as follows: in bands there’s always one cunt who no one gets on with. In the glory days of the Faces, this time-honoured truth simply didn’t apply. And that was so refreshing, it made us stick at it. We were having a good time, so why not?

Soon enough we were ready to try a few tentative gigs, including one at an American airbase in Cambridgeshire, where suited airmen and their wives sat round tables and looked on in stunned and deafened silence as we blundered our way through ‘Around the Plynth’, a re-fashioned version of the number that Woody and I had written for Jeff Beck, and ‘Shake, Shudder, Shiver’ and ‘Three Button Hand Me Down’, a song
put together by Mac and me. Everyone was chipping in and we were all coming up with stuff in different combinations, which was very pleasing, even if the American air force didn’t find it appropriate for dinner-dance purposes.

The Faces’ manager – installed after Marriott left – was Billy Gaff, a short, mildly spoken and plausible-seeming Irishman with a fast-receding hairline who had worked as a band-booker for the Robert Stigwood Organisation. While he was there, in the mid sixties, Stigwood invited him to be tour manager for Cream. Gaff said he didn’t think he was qualified for the job because he had no experience of going out on the road with a rock band and wouldn’t have any of the necessary skills. At this, Stigwood paused and then replied, ‘Have you ever looked after children?’

The truth of this summary of the tour management experience would be brought home to Gaff on an almost daily basis during his years with the Faces.

Gaff managed to get the band a recording contract with Warner Bros., who didn’t exactly have to beat off a thousand rival bidders for the privilege. Most people thought that Marriott’s departure had dealt the Small Faces a terminal blow, and that my addition, particularly as I’d hardly been pulling up trees for the last decade, was unlikely to change anything. Still, Warner Bros., God bless them, were ready to lob in some money. Flush with their record company advances, the other members of the band all rushed out and bought sports cars. Ronnie bought a silver Mercedes 190SL, Kenney an MGA, Woody a red Jaguar and Mac a Triumph TR6. I, of course, already had my Marcos, courtesy of my solo deal. So now we were all Flash Harrys with flash cars.

We pretty quickly recorded a debut album,
First Step
, which came out in 1970 and sounded exactly like that: a debut album pretty quickly recorded. The fact that there are two instrumentals among those ten tracks gives some indication of the extent to which it was a work in progress rather than a polished jewel. But then we got out on the road, and that’s where it really
started to come alive. It was almost instantly apparent that this was not a band built for dreary rehearsal rooms and tiresome studios. This was a band built for the stage.

We weren’t, by any means, a musically accomplished outfit. We were sloppy and loose, which took the band naturally in the direction of good-time rock ’n’ roll. But our sloppiness and our looseness – and, more importantly our attitude towards it – turned out to be the thing that made us vulnerable and appealing, and, in the end, entertaining. You wanted an entertainer to give the impression of being capable of a fuck-up. Even today I love it when my band goes wrong: if someone drops a clanger, I stop everything and point it out and the audience adores it. There’s nothing like a grade-A musical howler for warming the room up, and the Faces, as much as any group in history, understood this – understood the timeless community value of going for an E chord, missing and playing an F sharp instead.

Similarly, clothes were very important to the Faces because we realised that our musical qualities weren’t, perhaps, up to much. We thought that if we could be Flash Harrys, people might be distracted by it. My own style of dress became more flamboyant as the Faces took off – far more glam, which was the emerging taste of the time. We all wore crêpes and satins, bright colours, exotic prints, scarves, sashes. And we all went in for over-layering. I look back now at photos of the Faces onstage, and for some shows we seemed to be answering a challenge to wear as much as it was humanly possible to wear at any one time. Totally impractical, of course. It could be steamingly hot in some of those get-ups. Carrying 200lb of velvet and satin around a stage for ninety minutes – that’s man’s work, let me tell you.

And just as we used clothes to mask our insecurity, so we used alcohol for the same purpose. The Faces were prodigious drinkers. Drink gave you the necessary courage to go slightly under-rehearsed into that good night. Spirits and wine were especially helpful in this regard. If you could have bottled the
energy the Faces had . . . actually, forget it, because the Mateus wine company had already done so. And even when the backstage tables had been exhausted of their bottles of Newcastle Brown and rum, or if supplies weren’t otherwise freely available, we knew a method for getting smashed on a single twelve-ounce can of beer. Here is that method in full, developed, I believe, in a motel in Tucson, Arizona:

1. Fill a one-ounce shot glass with beer.
   
2. Neck beer.
   
3. Wait exactly one minute.
   
4. Refill glass and repeat process.
   
5. Continue repeating process until can is empty.
   
6. Feel pissed.
   

Now, the alcohol ended up costing us dearly, certainly in terms of the recordings the band made. There were four studio albums in total – the aforementioned
First Step
;
Long Player
and
A Nod Is as Good as a Wink . . . to a Blind Horse
, both in 1971; and
Ooh La La
in 1973 – none of which, to my mind, really did us justice or brought the energy of which we were capable onto a record. But what did we expect? Recording sessions with the Faces always started out in the pub. Quite often we were in the pub longer than we were in the studio. You believed that nothing would get the creative process flowing like a round of rum and Cokes – except possibly another round of rum and Cokes. Especially if it wasn’t your round. (I had perfected the art of getting to the bar door first and opening it to allow everyone else through, which will normally spare you from having to buy the first batch of drinks. Bending over in the car park to tie up your shoelace is another good money-saving device in this area.) Unfortunately, the rum-and-Coke theory of creativity turns out to be bollocks. Glyn Johns, as he had shown with the Stones, was a producer bordering on genius when it came to getting a band’s sound down on tape, and he did his best with us. But there were too many people throwing
in ideas at the same time. And nearly all those people had had too much rum and Coke.

On the stage, though – that was different. True, to be in the Faces, you needed to be able to perform while lying down, but that was nothing to do with drunkenness. Or not completely to do with drunkenness. It was because big old human pile-ups were a regular feature of the act – Woody falling on top of Ronnie, me lying on top of Woody, Mac coming off the piano to jump on top of all of us – and we used to feel it hadn’t been a particularly good show if we didn’t end up lying in a mound in the middle of the stage at the end of it.

We were the first band to kick footballs out into the audience – that was my idea, of course, and I’m proud to say I’m still doing it. (Good-quality match balls, too. None of your cheap plastic rubbish.) And we were the first band to have a bar on stage, with a waiter, in full livery, serving us. It saved the time and energy wasted hopping into the wings for refreshments. It also gave us somewhere to go during Kenney’s interminable drum solos. We could sit there while Kenney blatted himself into oblivion. One of us would say, ‘Do you think we should be getting back on?’ And another would say, ‘Let’s just have one more.’

It was such a different thing for the times. You have to remember how serious rock music was becoming at this time. The rise of the Faces pretty much paralleled the rise of progressive rock – with po-faced guitarists furrowing their brows over nine-minute solos on twin-neck guitars and keyboard players working mock-symphonies out of banks of synthesisers for hours on end. And let’s not forget to factor in, too, what a grim place Britain was in the early 1970s – in a slump, economically hammered, riven by strikes, its streets stacked with uncleared litter, the land of the government-enforced power cut. Those were a brown and dingy few years, and the Faces, down to earth but not downcast, brightly attired and three sheets to the wind, couldn’t help but look like a rainbow in the drabness.

Yet, ironically, it was a potentially austere, daringly naked
set-up that we had. Every band in the world at this time deployed at least two guitars. We only had one, played by Woody. And he did a fabulous job of it, too. But, again, just as in the Jeff Beck Group, the presence of just the single guitar left plenty of space in which I could sing.

I also had a lot of space in which to move – less so, perhaps, at the Croydon Greyhound or the Trentham Gardens Ballroom in Stoke-on-Trent, which were the kind of venues where we spent a fair amount of our career in Britain, but certainly on the big American stages to which the Faces very quickly graduated. And suddenly the showman that had been slowly and awkwardly emerging for almost a decade came pouring out of me. Pretty soon I had developed a whole new repertoire of tricks with that trusty prop, the microphone stand – setting it up high so I would have to crane up into it, swinging it about like a military baton, trailing it behind me across the stage, flicking it up so that it was directly above my head, or sweeping it into my arms and forcing it downwards like a tango partner. And then I learned to throw it, lobbing it with increasing confidence and catching it (with any luck) on the way down. The fact that, in nearly five years with the Faces, I didn’t remove either my own eye or anyone else’s must be accounted some sort of miracle. One night in Detroit I overcooked the move, flung the microphone stand upwards and never saw it again. It got stuck in the lighting rig, I guess. It may still be there.

Typically, we would troop on, Ronnie Lane would say something like, ‘Sorry we’re late – Rod’s hairdryer broke,’ and off we’d go, storming into Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ more often than not, which, if played right, could slam an audience right in the tender parts. It was always a wonderful feeling to hear that song set off and to plough in after it.

A set list? Set lists were for wimps. Wimps and professionals. Better to just get out there and communicate the set by shouting the old Faces’ battle cry: ‘What number are we doing?’ All we knew was that at some stage we’d get round to playing ‘Cindy Incidentally’, say, or ‘Sweet Lady Mary’, or Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘I
Feel So Good’, and that at some other stage we’d stick Ronnie Lane up on an orange box so he could sing the first verse of Paul McCartney’s ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, a song we adored and were deeply jealous of. Why couldn’t
we
have written that?

The gaps between numbers, meanwhile, could be preposterously long, and not just because the message had to get round about which song was coming next. If Woody wanted to change the tuning of his guitar, he wouldn’t reach offstage for another instrument, he would stand there and detune the guitar he was wearing. That’s where I finally learned the art of talking to an audience: in Faces shows, in those aching gaps of nothingness while Woody was shifting into an open E. That was where I learned to say something other than the traditional ‘Talk amongst yourselves’. Long John Baldry had planted the seeds of it: he was always very good at filling in for a minute or two, or telling the history of a song before he sang it. But it was in the Faces that I properly began to convert his lessons into practice.

In March 1970 we left Britain for a 38-date tour of North America, coinciding with the release there of the
First Step
album, and starting in Toronto, Canada. Once again, as with the Jeff Beck Group, the feeling was that Britain would be tough to crack, but that America was wide open if you were prepared to work at it and put in the miles. There was felt to be an appetite there for blatant, punchy, British rock ’n’ roll. And once again, the feeling proved to be completely right. In Toronto, at the Varsity Arena, we opened for the MC5 and Canned Heat and held our own. The next day we were meant to fly down to Boston to do three nights as a support act at the Boston Tea Party, a 1,500-capacity adapted warehouse on Lansdowne Street, and at the time the city’s most happening rock club. But fog around Boston meant our plane was cancelled. Billy Gaff told us we would have to blow out the first show, and instead he booked us onto the only flight we could get out of Toronto, which was bound for New York. We were all sitting there on the plane, feeling a bit glum about the lost show,
when the voice of the captain came over the intercom. ‘We regret that, owing to fog in the New York area, this flight is diverting to Boston.’ Cue loud cheers. The fates seemed to be on our side.

Boston was freezing cold. Because Woody and I had been before, we had sensibly brought overcoats. The rest of the band, on their first proper trip to America, were shivering in their jackets. Up to now, my and Woody’s tales of what to expect while touring America had been greeted by the others with slightly patronised ‘Yeah, yeahs’, but now it was all, ‘You might have warned us.’