Faces: A Nod Is As Good As A Wink … To A Blind Horse
Posted: 03.19.2012 Filed under: 1971, Faces Leave a comment »
Being a high schooler in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the early – very early – 2000s wasn’t easy. As a budding drummer, I drew influences from the classics instead of the contemporaries, so while bands like Blink 182 and Green Day might have had pretty good skin-smackers, I would dismiss the bands outright, saying, “Gimme Bonham or Moon any day!” This was a point of amusement to my friends, who would snicker outright at some of my music purchases; I can distinctly recall going to a Best Buy to pass some time with a friend, and the amount of ribbing I got for acquiring the Rolling Stones’ Dirty Work and the Faces’ A Nod Is As Good As A Wink … To A Blind Horse was relentless. “Oh, is this ‘Miss Judy’s Farm’?” he asked, completely straight-faced, as I drove us back home. Incredulous that he would know this, let alone before I did, I responded in the affirmative. “Oh, I love this song.” He repeated this once more before I caught on: he was simply eyeing the back of the CD case.
My tastes have since matured, but – as much as I like them – the Black Crowes don’t have the same joie de vivre as the Faces (and whoever the modern day Black Crowes is, well, I don’t even want to know), and when I listen to any of the Black Crowes’ albums, I can hear traces of certain bands – Faces, the Rolling Stones, some Little Feat – but I too often get frustrated and simply go for the originals.
Needless to say, I spend several minutes in my car before heading out for a destination in search of the perfect album to listen to, before throwing my hands up in frustration and saying, “I have no idea what I want to listen to!”
In the increasingly rare instances when I fall back on the Faces, I find myself gravitating toward this, their seminal break-out album. They’d released two albums before this – their self-titled debut and Long Player – but both were received somewhat tepidly, which brings me to an interesting point: there was a time when Rod Stewart wasn’t as well-known (or well-regarded) as he is today. Hard to believe, but the Faces struggled to find an audience, especially in England, their home country, though America embraced them more warmly. So Wink was their first, most cohesive album, due in no small part to production wonderboy Glyn Johns. There’s a fair amount of grit with just a pinch of ramshackle, striking the perfect balance that was so sorely lacking on their first two albums. It’s evident in particular on opener ‘Miss Judy’s Farm’, with a dirty guitar riff from Ronnie Wood before Stewart howls on about being a submissive sex slave to a dominatrix named Judy. (This ain’t no ‘Maggie’s Farm’!) The band locks into a groove for a minute or two before Wood brings things to a halt, Kenney Jones’ drums clatter in, and the quintet barely makes it into the double-time coda, with Ian McLagan’s electric piano well to the fore.
Ronnie Lane turns up the charm and the humor with ‘You’re So Rude’, a delightful song about sexytimes with his ladyfriend, who – in a rare display of role reversal – is the prime mover in the act, hoping to be done before her family gets home. ‘Love Lives Here’ is a surprisingly slow song that touches on nostalgia, with the physical destruction of a house serving as a metaphor for a crumbling relationship. Stewart dials back the gruff growl from the album opener, even allowing a tinge of sadness to infiltrate his good natured bonhomie, while Wood’s and McLagan’s guitar/keyboard interplay is delightful. It leads into ‘Last Orders Please’, penned solely by Lane, which takes the nostalgia and sadness from ‘Love Lives Here’ and amplifies it into the next part of the grieving process: the drunk stage. While propping up a bar, the protagonist runs into his ex; the two engage in a bit of emotional foreplay before she leaves him high and dry once again. Has he learned his lesson? (The song was derived from an earlier song titled ‘I Came Looking For You’, which, apart from the melody, has little in common with the finished version.)
Then we get to the song that everyone came for: ‘Stay With Me’, a raunchy, good-timin’ rocker that everyone who knows anything about the Faces – or even Rod Stewart – is familiar with. Written about a reveler who had a bit too much to drink and takes a random woman upstairs for a few seconds of pleasure, the protagonist preemptively rejects any outpouring of emotion, making it strictly clear that this was a one night stand, and nothing more. There’s some fine slide guitar work from Wood, and the instrumental coda, with each band member getting a few bars to solo in, before it all comes to a glorious, crashing close. ‘Stay With Me’ gave the Faces their one and only US single, and was instrumental in providing its sister album some much-needed sales.
Side Two isn’t as outstanding as Side One, though Lane’s ‘Debris’, obliquely written about his father, is perhaps his finest song ever written, and the others provide a gorgeous, restrained backing, letting Lane pour his heart out, though Stewart harmonizes beautifully with him on the choruses. The Faces weren’t well-known for their ballads, but this rivals only ‘Ooh La La’ as the top of the heap. It’s followed clumsily by a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, which benefits somewhat from Johns’ production, but it’s a fairly mundane version that would have been better released as a B-side instead of occupying precious album space. ‘Too Bad’ returns us to the well-worn exuberance of a Faces show, with Stewart lamenting their poor treatment by the upper crust at a party they crashed. Their inebriation – and Stewart’s regional tongue – was their downfall, and the worst part about it was that he didn’t even get to shake a leg. The album closes with ‘That’s All You Need’, a slide guitar workout with lyrics about Stewart’s musician brother, run down by the pressures of reality. Stewart offers him a “cup of coke” and shows him a good time out on the town – a simple solution indeed. Wood’s deft guitar work is the star of the show, though the others get a chance to play in the extended instrumental outro, which even includes some steel drums from Harry Fowler.
I’m having a hard time trying to decide which Faces album is their best – is it Wink or the well-polished follow-up, Ooh La La? While both have their fair share of excellent tracks – and one duff track each (‘Memphis, Tennessee’ on Wink, ‘Fly In The Ointment’ on Ooh La La) – my decision is gravitating towards Wink, as it’s a cohesive, fun, and well-oiled album. Ooh La La may have been more mature, with better songwriting all around, but the Faces sound like they’re having a blast here, as if they were recording this album simply as an excuse to go out on the road and have a good time with anyone who’s willing to partake.
Essential listening: Miss Judy’s Farm, You’re So Rude, Stay With Me, Debris, Too Bad, That’s All You Need
Faces: Ooh La La
Posted: 11.12.2008 Filed under: 1973, Faces Leave a comment »
It’s often forgotten that Rod Stewart was running a simultaneous career in the early 1970s: not only was he a famous solo musician, but he was also fronting the criminally underrated Faces, a boozy pub rock band who captivated the United States while flying just enough under the radar to never have had a big enough hit for major exposure. What’s also forgotten is that this line-up often performed on many of Stewart’s most beloved hits, with guitarist Ron Wood even cowriting many of them.
With Stewart’s profile rising, he began to focus more of his attention on his solo career, leaving his good-natured band members (bassist Ronnie Lane; guitarist Ron Wood; keyboardist Ian McLagan; and drummer Kenny Jones) not-so-quietly fuming to themselves and anyone who would listen. Lane, McLagan, and Jones had been through it all before with former Small Faces vocalist and guitarist Steve Marriott, whose ego inflated to the point that he was unable to front the band seriously and instead branched out on his own. The same fate was about to befall the Faces, and their final studio album suffers slightly because of it.
There’s a layer of poignancy and melancholy to many of the songs, though that can’t be said of opener ‘Silicone Grown’, a rollicking pub rocker with McLagan and Wood trading licks while Stewart howls his way through the joyful lyrics of a buxom beauty who’s not entirely natural (if you catch my drift). ‘Cindy Incidentally’ sounds like an attempt to remake ‘Maggie May’, the massively popular Rod Stewart single released in 1971, though it’s saved from being a mediocre rock song by McLagan, who helped write the song and adds some much-needed melody with some languid ivory tickling.
Lane had been fighting for more exposure on Faces albums, often preferring to sing them himself instead of Stewart. While he wrote or cowrote five of the ten songs on the album (not including the four-way instrumental ‘Fly In The Ointment’), he only sang lead vocals on two of the songs. Lane’s songs were often more introspective than the usual lustuous overtones of the Stewart/Wood cowrites, offering a deeper side to a rock ‘n’ roll bassist that few would ever have seen otherwise. ‘Flags And Banners’ is one of the most memorable and poignant songs to have come from Lane’s pen, and he gets a chance to sing here, his frail voice straining to reach many of the notes, but adding that much more to the intimacy of the piece. Stewart even contributes instrumentally here, playing banjo (or, if you were to believe the liner notes, “resonator guitar” … though it sounds a lot like a banjo, really), but otherwise leaving it all to Lane.
The bluesy ‘My Fault’ serves as a neat counterpart to the previous song, with plenty of raunchy guitar and fine piano work, though it’s ‘Borstal Boys’ that’s the most memorable rock song here, written as an update to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and opening with the sound of a claxon, alerting the wardens of the impending escape. It sums up nicely the attitude of the Faces in under three minutes: brash and ballsy, with an undercurrent of beer fuelling it all. And just as quickly as they took you up, they bring you back down again with ‘If I’m On The Late Side’, another Lane/Stewart cowrite (like ‘Flags And Banners’) that features the rooster-maned pop star on vocals, even though the words were seemingly written about him out of frustration by Lane. (It’s been widely reported by everyone in the band that Stewart was rarely around for the recording of the album, showing up occasionally to record his vocals but otherwise remaining absent and letting the others get on with it.)
‘Glad And Sorry’ is the first of two solo Lane compositions on the album (though vocal duties seem to be shared by him and perhaps Wood) and nicely sums up the always-thinking bassist: “If I’m not smiling / I’m just thinking”. ‘Just Another Honky’ is set to a gorgeous piano-dominated melody with Stewart’s distinctive gravelly growl taking over in Lane’s stead. Much like the earlier ‘If I’m On The Late Side’, Lane seems to be addressing Stewart once again: “You can go if you want to / I don’t own you, go be wild / Leave my hand, it’s wide open / So’s the door evermore”. Incidentally, Lane would be the first Face to say farewell, leaving shortly after the album’s release in order to pursue a solo career that never quite took off. The band would recruit former Free bassist Tetsu Yamauchi, himself a replacement for founding member Andy Fraser, and while recording sessions were held periodically between 1973 and 1975 and a handful of singles were released, the band never released another studio album. Stewart, of course, went on to some kind of fame; Wood joined the Rolling Stones; Jones joined The Who after Keith Moon’s death; and McLagan became a successful session musician and performer in his own right.
The final song is the most touching, and the most well-known. Written by Lane with assistance from Wood, ‘Ooh La La’ contains the prophetic refrain “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger / I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was stronger”. Set to a lazy acoustic shuffle, the song is notable for its vocal performance, coming not from Stewart (who complained that it was in a key unsuitable for his voice) or Lane (who wrote it specifically for Stewart to sing), but from Wood, thus achieving his first – and only – lead vocal on a Faces album. Though he too struggles to hit the right notes, Wood adds a touch of sentimentality to the sound, while an old-timey honky tonk piano solo from McLagan drives home the ambience and atmosphere of nostalgia. Ironically, Stewart covered this song later in his career, on his 1998 solo album When We Were The New Boys.
Though it lacks the grinning charm of A Nod’s As Good As A Wink … To A Blind Horse, or the misguided glee of First Step and Long Player, Ooh La La is a mature way to bow out from one of the most unfortunate and ill-timed finales of rock history: the Faces were at last on their way to success, with the album hitting #1 in the UK and charting respectably in the US, but Lane had had enough of Stewart’s preening and pomp, and some disparaging comments about the album uttered by the vocalist (“it’s a stinking rotten album”) contributed to Lane’s departure, thus adding a whole other level of poignancy to the album’s parting words. Other bands could only have wished to have ended their career in such a graceful manner.
Essential listening: Silicone Grown, Flags And Banners, Borstal Boys, If I’m On The Late Side, Ooh La La
