Rod: The Autobiography (20 page)

My dad rather frowned on the Faces altogether, though – even when we weren’t photographing groupies and showing the results to journalists with national newspapers. He was pleased, for my sake, with the band’s success, but as he didn’t drink I don’t think he thought too highly of the Faces’ overt alcohol consumption and of the behaviour arising. He certainly didn’t approve of the hotel pranks. I know that because my brothers and I tried one out on him one night, in a terrible misreading of the mood.

This was in Edinburgh, where we had gone with my dad and uncles the night before a Scotland football match. The hotel we were staying in was being decorated and, in the night, pissed as farts, my brothers and I took some ladders and some planking, tiptoed into the room where my dad was sleeping, and set them up around his bed. Then my brother Don climbed up onto the plank suspended between the ladders and pretended to be painting the ceiling as we switched on the overhead light to wake up my dad. Far from finding this surreal tableau amusing, as intended, he was furious – angry enough to chase us all out and down the corridor. I never sought to involve him in that kind of business again.

The Faces’ legend grew, even in England. We played the
Weeley Festival in 1971, supporting Marc Bolan, and blew the poor chap away. The audience wouldn’t let him play. And then, in September of that year, we appeared at an outdoor show at the Oval cricket ground, Kennington, in a concert for Bangladesh on a bill featuring the Who.

I was rarely in a position to drive myself to a gig, in my own car, but this time I could. Accordingly, I arrived that afternoon in a white Lamborghini, recently bought with the earnings from my solo albums, in my stage outfit: leopard-skin coat and matching trousers that I had bought for the occasion from the Granny Takes a Trip boutique on the King’s Road. All of us musicians used to shop at the same place in those days, which worked out very well from the point of view of avoiding fashion clash disasters: the assistants would see you pick something off the rail and gently say, ‘Oh, Mick’s got that one,’ or, ‘You probably don’t want that, because Bowie’s just been in and bought it.’

Anyway, I remember swinging into the Oval car park behind the scenes, and climbing out of the Lambo, dressed as a leopard from head to toe, with my girlfriend, Dee Harrington, who was wearing a tiny skirt, legs up to her neck, and the two of us setting off for the dressing room, arm in arm. And right there, as we walked, I had this overwhelming sensation of having arrived – not just at the Oval, but at a certain point in life, and thinking to myself, ‘Bloody hell – you’re quite the rock star, aren’t you, son?’

One other thing about that Oval show: I did the gig, drinking onstage, police everywhere; I came off, had another drink with the lads; and then I got in the Lamborghini and drove home, waved cheerfully on my way by the police officers at the gate. And nobody thought anything of it. ‘Cheerio, Mr Stewart, sir. Safe home.’ Staggering. Very different times.

* * *

The downside of the Faces’ casual approach was that, when it came to the business side, no one in the band had their eye
on the ball. No one took control financially: it all seemed to be cash in shoeboxes and envelopes, and Billy Gaff telling us not to worry about it. There was no proper accounting, so far as I was aware: just the occasional tally of expenses on a napkin. And no one took control in terms of planning our lives, either, and ensuring we had enough time off. Tours would be thrust upon us, and we’d all complain and say we weren’t doing them – only for Old Mother Gaff to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid you
are
doing it, because the deposits have already been sent.’

And thanks to the money generated by the touring in America, we were all living extravagant lifestyles: all rushing off to buy houses and cars or, in Woody’s case, rushing off to buy his dad a big colour television set (which his dad promptly chained to the radiator so that no one could steal it). We were young and foolish and nobody bothered with the details because we were all rich beyond our dreams. It’s only natural in your twenties, but no one was giving a thought to the fact that it could all go tits-up at some stage.

And lo and behold, it all went tits-up. The problems were political, and slow burning, and mostly arose as a result of the success I was having with my own records, which created all sorts of complicated tensions and anxieties. At first the balance between my life as a solo artist and my life in the Faces seemed blissfully simple. I had the band, in which I could be a lawless, knock-about rock ’n’ roller. And I had the solo albums, on which I could do rock ’n’ roll as well, but where I could also express my other passions: the folk and soul influences. And there didn’t seem to be any conflict between these interests. On the contrary, they rubbed along together perfectly happily.

In 1971, when ‘Maggie May’ came out and I had to go on
Top of the Pops
to promote it, the Faces came along for the laugh. Backstage beforehand, we tried – and failed – to break into the dressing room of Pan’s People, the show’s resident female dance troupe, and settled instead for a highly competitive game of football in a BBC corridor against Slade, the glam rock band, the Faces running out 2–0 winners. For the recording,
everybody dressed to the nines, and John Peel, our DJ and champion, sat on a stool and very self-consciously pretended to play mandolin (an instrument on which he had less than no experience) while Ronnie, Woody and I hopped off the back of the stage and kicked a football around, not unduly concerned about exposing the golden trade secret of
Top of the Pops
– that the bands on Britain’s favourite music show were miming. We would go further the following year, when ‘Angel’ was in the charts and Ronnie Lane couldn’t make it along, so we replaced him on the stage with a cardboard cut-out. But the ‘Maggie May’ appearance was truly an emblematic moment, both for me and for the Faces. It forged an image of us as anarchic, silly, rather loveable if we said so ourselves. At that innocent early point, you would have struggled to see how my success could have been anything but good for the Faces, nor how the Faces could have been anything but good for my success.

The waters grew muddier, though. Ronnie and Mac were clearly constantly asking themselves suspicious, vexed questions: what was I giving more time to? Where were my best energies going? Was the band my priority, or me? And all those nights spent playing ‘Maggie May’ and ‘You Wear It Well’ – was that to their advantage or solely mine? Clearly their female partners were joining in on these discussions, too, which was never going to lessen the intensity of the debate. It didn’t help that sometimes, at airports, Warner Bros. would send a car for the Faces, and Mercury Records, with whom I had my solo deal, would send a car for me. Suddenly we were travelling in separate limos: very divisive. Or sometimes Warner would book the band regular hotel rooms and Mercury would book me a suite.

Of course, I could have refused the key and insisted on downgrading. But then . . . well, I wouldn’t have had a suite, would I?

I have to say, these logistical details never seemed to come between me and Woody. In New York for a show at Madison Square Garden in February 1975, I found myself booked into the Sherry Netherland, with Woody staying opposite, across
Fifth Avenue, in the Plaza. And he called my room and said, ‘Which floor are you on?’ I said I was on the fifteenth. He said, ‘Brilliant. I’m on the seventeenth. Let’s see if we can see each other.’ We both looked out: nothing. I said, ‘Woody, I don’t think this is going to work.’ He said, ‘Hold on.’ I looked out again, and there, leaning right out of the window, a mile above the street, was a distant, hairy figure, holding a lit newspaper as a beacon.

What niggled Mac and Ronnie most of all, though, was if there was any chance that they could be construed as my backing band. Now, that grievance I really did understand, although there was precious little I could do to control it. Promoters were under strict instruction, from the start, to bill the group on posters or marquees as ‘The Faces’. But in America, even at the beginning, in 1970, I had an album out,
Gasoline Alley
, that had sold 250,000 copies, and whatever you want to say about American concert promoters, they aren’t stupid. Consequently, we would turn up at venues, and there, in big letters, it would say, ‘Rod Stewart and the Faces’. At which point, Mac and Ronnie would do their nuts. Ronnie was so furious about it one time, he clunked Billy Gaff around the head with a bottle. Invariably, at theatres which had offended in this way, the dressing room would be royally trashed on the way out as an act of vengeance.

Bickering increasingly prevailed. I didn’t particularly help the deteriorating atmosphere within the band when, in an interview, I described the Faces’ third album,
Ooh La La
, as ‘a bloody mess’. I guess that was me and my previously noted tendency to turn against things I had recently done. But it was not the most helpful thing you could hope to hear from a lead singer on the eve of an album’s release – although a true enough reflection of my feelings. I did apologise to the guys, but Mac was clearly thinking, ‘Typical bloody singer.’

Before long, I was being accused of keeping the best songs for myself – of holding back the juiciest material for my own solo albums, and offering up leftovers for the Faces’ records.
That was never the case, and logically it couldn’t have been, because I didn’t write songs all the time, like a proper songwriter – like a Ronnie Lane, indeed. I only wrote when I got into the studio, under near-emergency conditions, when there were recordings to be made and songs were needed. I wasn’t continuously preparing a catalogue of finished items to thumb through and dip back into when I chose.

Near the end of his life, when he was ill with multiple sclerosis, Ronnie took to claiming that I had stolen the song ‘Mandolin Wind’ from him. It was untrue. And, really, the proof of the untruth is the nature of Ronnie himself: he was hardly someone who would stand by, uncomplainingly, while someone purloined one of his songs and not even mention it until years afterwards. He would have fronted it up with me there and then.

Ronnie left in 1973. Nobody thought he was serious at first because ‘I’m leaving the band’ was a group catchphrase: the stock Faces response to any disappointment or setback. If you got slightly rained on between the hotel porch and the limo, you would automatically say, ‘I’m leaving the band.’ It had about as much content as that other favourite Faces expression: ‘Bollocks, you cunt.’ But this time, before a show at Roanoke in North Carolina, Ronnie meant it. I think he thought the rest of the band would go with him, leaving me isolated. Instead, the four of us called a band meeting and sat around trying to think whom we could bring in as a replacement – which I think we all knew was a doomed idea, given what Ronnie had brought to the group, but what else could we do?

My first thought was to ask Andy Fraser, who had been the bass player with Free, a band whose early albums I really respected and listened to a lot while we were on tour. Andy wasn’t interested, so we then approached Tetsu Yamauchi, who had replaced Andy in Free and was a sweet Japanese guy who barely spoke English. Tetsu appeared to be going through some emotional difficulties at the time, but because he didn’t speak English we never really found out what those emotional
difficulties were. We did, however, notice that he was a man who could hold his drink. I remember seeing his breakfast go by on a tray in a hotel one morning: sausage, beans, fried egg, rasher of bacon and two shots of whisky. The drink did get the better of him occasionally, though. There was one gig, on his first tour with us, where Tetsu had to spend the show leaning against the bass stack at the back of the stage, with a roadie behind the cabinets reaching round to hold on to his legs and keep him upright.

That, I hardly need add, was during the band’s long, slow decline. Mac was going off me big time. Much as Ronnie had done, Mac thought I was permanently on the verge of leaving and destroying the band, and he seemed determined to feel resentful about it in advance. In fact the thing that triggered my exit was the long-expected decision of Woody to take a job with the Rolling Stones – the band, let’s face it, that he was born to be in. That, for me, was the killer blow. To lose Ronnie was bad enough, but to lose Woody as well . . . The jig was well and truly up.

The Stones had courted Woody for ages, and their interest in him was no secret. I don’t think anyone was surprised that eventually he couldn’t resist, or blamed him for succumbing. How many guitarists wouldn’t have wanted to join the Rolling Stones? But Woody found it hard to make a clean break. For a while he thought he could work for both bands and keep everyone happy, but that was never going to be practical. Woody finished a tour with the Stones, and then came out on the final Faces tour, which took place in the autumn of 1975. We had a big orchestra and a fancy Italian-style balustrade constructed on the stage set, to help with four numbers that I wanted us to play off my new
Atlantic Crossing
album – all my idea (and paid for by me, I might add), but the rest of the band, and especially Mac, clearly thought it sucked.

Mac wouldn’t believe it, but right to the end, right until it became clear that Woody was off, I wanted to be in the Faces – wanted to continue to be part of it. I always had. I didn’t
want to strike out on my own. Striking out on my own wasn’t really in my nature. If I could have been a member of the Faces for the rest of my life, I would have been happy. But the grim fact was, by 1975 the Faces were no longer really there to be a member of. People had been in my ear for ages, trying to erode my position, bit by bit, and I hadn’t succumbed. Now Billy Gaff and the record company were at it again, saying, ‘You must be mad, this is over, get yourself a band, do the solo career, do what you want, it’s time.’ And eventually, in December 1975, I conceded that it was.

So the Faces were gone – but never to be forgotten. Eleven years on, in July 1986, at the end of a show I did in the pelting rain at Wembley Stadium, on came Woody, Mac and Kenney, and on came Ronnie, terribly frail now and with a cane, but smartly suited and happy and literally cheered on by the crowd, who, at the first glimpse of him, broke into a chorus of ‘We love you, Ronnie, we do.’ And Ronnie sat on a stool, and I gave the microphone stand a ceremonial fling into the sky, almost impaling myself in the process, and we all then roistered our way, in a near-perfect replica of the old disorder, through ‘(I Know) I’m Losing You’, ‘Twisting the Night Away’ and ‘Stay with Me’.