Faces

Early Steps RHINO/WARNER BROS.

Flying from birth; first rehearsals and previously unknown first recording session.

The coupling of Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood from Jeff Beck’s band with abandoned Small Faces Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones was not exactly smooth.

Woody had switched from bass to guitar when he started rehearsing with the trio still smarting after Steve Marriott’s departure to form Humble Pie at the Stones’ Bermondsey rehearsal space (allowed by a benevolent Ian Stewart) in summer 1969. When his former bandmate started hanging at sessions, watching from the control room, the band-in-waiting clicked at uproarious post-rehearsal sessions in the pub. But, fearing another Steve Marriott scenario, McLagan and Lane initially resisted Stewart joining up, and he was shyly reticent about suggesting it. Finally, Kenney Jones asked him, the magic flowed instantly, Faces signed to Warner Bros. and First Step was recorded.

While the Bermondsey sessions are Faces lore, the major surprise on this miraculous document is the previously undocumented tracks recorded at Olympic Studios that September with Glyn Johns, who famously chose Humble Pie to produce and has never mentioned them.

Archivist Rob Caiger discovered the first Faces recording session among Small Faces master tapes recovered in Germany – among those chucked in a skip when Olympic was refurbished in 1987. From Stewart’s searing vocal entry on Shake, Shudder And Shiver sending chills, these rough mixes are a revelation, capturing Faces tangibly finding their feet, groove and repertoire. Shake, Flying and sepulchral blues ballad Devotion show the group already hitting the glorious stride that would place them among the early 70s’ most exciting live bands; skintight rhythm section, Mac’s whirling organ and Woody’s jagged slide now lathered with Rod’s raw-throated blues holler, erupting with an energy diluted on First Step by period stereo effects. Exploratory locomotive blues Train sadly didn’t develop beyond the session.

The Bermondsey tracks kick off with I Feel So Good, Evil, and Shake, Shudder, Shiver, familiar from 2004’s Five Guys Walk Into A Bar box set, after Woody’s roughhouse Booker T-homaging instrumental Pineapple And The Monkey, Stone - added on CD along with churchlike Devotion backing track – catches Lane’s song based on Meher Baba’s theory of creation before it morphed into First Step’s strangest departure. Jones’s thwacking beat and Woody’s scything slide barely resemble the album’s back-porch hillbilly romp with Rod on banjo.