CREEM—November 1975
by Barbara Charone

Rod Stewart Jumps Teams


"Is he a movie star?" the newspaper photographer wondered out loud, pointing to an 8x10 glossy of Rod Stewart and Britt Ecklund, casually positioned behind a scenic garden landscape, arms intertwined, eyes locked tightly together by adoring glances. "Oh well," he sighed, packing up his camera cases because Rod Stewart, the singer, did not want his picture taken. "I don't usually do this kind of work anyway."

It was easy to understand the photographer's confusion, for these days Rod Stewart is a changed man. Sitting in his Chicago hotel suite listening to a test pressing of his new album Atlantic Crossing, Rod seemed incredibly subdued. That cocky rock 'n' roll flamboyance was now replaced by an eerie smugness. Outrageous conceits no longer decorated his conversation while passionate conviction no longer held up his bold statements. The only time he raised his voice was to put the Faces down.

"You're talking to a new man now, " Rod proudly announced, apparently pleased with the changes. "The world is a lot bigger than Great Britain and the Faces. A lot bigger."

Reasons behind this revelation were twofold. Recording the album in America under the wings of producer Tom Dowd, aided by Muscle Shoals musicians, Stewart realized he no longer needed the usual well-known Faces he'd used on previous solo albums.

CREEM—November 1975 by Lester Bangs Faces Huddle For Defensive Play: It's Last Bash On The Gridiron Thus it was that, armed with my own reservations and a transcript of Barbara Charone's interview with Rod, I went up to yet another blandly plush hotel room to call on the Faces. Or at least Ron Wood and Ian MacLagan, the two more voluble cornerstones of this organization. Here in 1975, the time of the bland-out, rock 'n' roll was at a dreary pass, and the Faces seemed to be suffering by it no less than everybody else. I'd talked to them on their last Stateside tour, in February, and despite their show of good cheer, they'd seemed pretty down at that time if you peered through the wisecracks. The oddity was that in spite of their questionable corporate status the band was playing better than ever. Now things had, on the surface at least, taken an even darker turn: Wood had been loaned out to the Stones for their summer tour, and amid myriad rumors of permanent defection; meanwhile Rod had sought professional help in Muscle Shoals (Steve Cropper, Al Jackson, etc ) for the recording of  his latest solo album, and realized it accompanied by a fusillade of personal and professional insults aimed at his long-time cohorts, whom he seemed ready to write off as punchup drinking buddies and nothing more. I asked them if the Faces, as presently constituted, had a future. "Future?" said Mac, feigning surprise. "It's ripe, it's rich." He looked me in the eye, speaking slowly and leaving measured spaces between his sentences for emphasis. "It's not over, mate, the band ain't split up." A beat. "That's a fact." I told them what Rod had said in the interview, and Wood leaned forward with a smirk on his face. "Now Lester, come on, you know that's a pure shit story, scraping the barrel to a terrible degree…just because what Rod says is true, and... May change the next day." He was still smiling. I had never conducted an interview in a room whose atmosphere was dead in quite the way this was. I and I have been in some flat places. I told them Rod had called them sloppy musicians. "Yeah, that hurt," said Mac. "We asked him about that and he said he didn't say it. We read it in an interview it may have been something that's going across his mind and it's just been blown up. I think the whole thing was really because Rod wasn't in contact with us for such a long time—he was surrounded by Hollywood and all that. Rod shouldn't have said those things because if the band's gonna split up, surely the band should know about it. If Rod's gonna leave the band, then Rod's gonna leave the band… we wouldn't necessarily know about it…" Confused, I asked him if he thought it beyond Rod to simply walk out. "I don't know, I class these latest remarks exactly as when he passed all those comments on Ooh La La. Remember?" The bitterness beneath the deliberate vagueness began to assert itself. "We were all very proud of what we'd done, and then he came out and slayed it… At the time we were fuckin' happy, because we'd spent a lot of time on it and finally it was finished. Wood jumped in and set about cover up the wounds MacLagan had begun to open. "When 'e came home, he hadn't seen us in so long and his imagination was starting to get the better of him." I said that I thought his latest move was symptomatic of white singers (Janis Joplin, for instance) who want to "legitimize" themselves and that the Faces were the compliment to Rod's singing. "Yeah," said Mac. "it's a necessary bit of roughage." The crux of this matter, it seems to your reporter, is that there is a certain school of journeyman musician who can be plugged into any session, and then there are people like the Faces who may be only good at one thing, but have mastered that style so intuitively that they create their own magic that no amount of professionalism can copy. Besides which professionalism is no way synonymous with inspiration. I think the truth at this point is that even the Faces don't know whether they're going to last or not. Rod may see the band as chattel or at least a convenience, but there's a certain professionalism—"The Faces' last tour was the most competent, blockbusting tour we ever did, at a time when there was real depression and bad outlooks," Mac told me earlier—that carries them through both Rod's temperamental thrashings and their own uncertainty and apparent recording stagnation. But all the swallowed price and best-of albums and friends-writing-lyrics in the world won't pull them out of their very real quandary. Meanwhile, it's thrilling and frustrating to watch them stave off the day of reckoning. That night on a football field in Jersey they took to the boards again, and surprised a jaded press junket by delivering a piledriving performance that, for the Faces, was downright savage. Rod, in spite of the fact that he was sporting what appeared to be a Davy Crockett haircut, sang with a fury that made you wonder exactly who all that bitter edginess was aimed at: and it was obvious that, for all his rather insipid affectations of the latter's blowzy wastedness, Wood had siphoned some dilute guitar fire out of Keith Richard. Simply, the whole band played with a vengeance… The band may be working so hard for a change because they know that this is the last round before final dissolution. Or perhaps they are out to show Rod, by force if necessary, that they can cut anybody at his riffs; perhaps they will all shove each other into renewed love and inspired interaction. Nah, you know they hate his guts. But the Faces party never seemed so close to exploding into gridiron carnage before. If you made this one, you were lucky. It won't come again.

without Woody but it wasn't," Rod inhaled the next sentence quickly. "I must have had blinkers on these last five years. I must have been mad using the same musicians over and over again. I should have branched out a long time ago."