Rod: The Autobiography (17 page)

It worked. The reviews were even better than for the first album. According to
Melody Maker
, ‘Rod’s voice is an extraordinary tool, seemingly shot to pieces and at times barely seeming to exist, yet retaining a power and depth of communication with which few can compare.’ In
Rolling Stone
, meanwhile, I found myself hailed as ‘a supremely fine artist’. That made me very proud. Not bad for a bloke with a frog in his throat.

Gasoline Alley
very quickly sold 250,000 copies in the US and went into the Billboard Top 30. That was a huge breakthrough. Britain, on the other hand, the land of my birth, still remained stoically immune to my charms. The album crawled into the UK album chart somewhere in the high sixties and crawled out again a week later.

Third time lucky, though.
Every Picture Tells a Story
was recorded in 1971. This time it really was just me producing – left entirely alone to get on with it. Whether that’s because Lou Reizner had another wedding to go to, or because I was now considered competent, I’m not sure. But let’s go with the latter.

By now, at the third time of asking, the band really knew each other’s playing, and you could hear it in the recordings. There was the usual mix-up of styles. I wanted to record ‘Amazing Grace’ and maybe use that as the title of the album, but Judy Collins beat me to it. We also did the now obligatory Dylan cover, ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’; Tim Hardin’s ‘Reason to Believe; a touch of gospel on ‘Seems Like a Long Time’, which was originally a folk tune; Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right’, which had given Elvis a hit, although we did it country-style; and a version of the Temptations’ ‘(I Know) I’m Losing You’.

And then there were the three original songs: ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’, ‘Mandolin Wind’ and ‘Maggie May’ – a loose recounting, as we noted earlier, of the loss of my virginity in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it encounter with an older woman at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival of 1961. And ‘Maggie May’, of course, changed everything.

Good job I didn’t throw it away, really – which looked like an option at one point. I co-wrote the song with the aforementioned Martin Quittenton, a gentle chap, very quiet and studious with a permanently furrowed brow (and a lovely girlfriend), who was about the most inventive acoustic guitarist I had come across at that point, and had a head full of chords like I had never imagined, let alone been able to get my fingers around in my own stilted strummings. Martin, who lived in Sussex, stayed over at my house during the recording sessions for the album and we worked out the basic structure of ‘Maggie May’ one evening in the sitting room.

The whole song was recorded in two takes – not including cymbals. When The Beatles finished ‘Please Please Me’, George Martin allegedly clicked on the talkback and said, ‘Congratulations, boys, you’ve just recorded your first number one.’ What would I have said, had I spoken to the studio after finishing ‘Maggie May’? Probably, ‘Well, that’s sort of OK, I suppose. Drink, anyone?’

I mean, nice enough song, obviously. Good little tale. Nice mandolin part, played by Ray Jackson from the folk-rock group Lindisfarne – and you don’t often hear mandolin on a pop song, but it was a texture I had always loved in folk music. I certainly didn’t think it should be a single, though. Actually, I even wondered for a while about leaving it off the album. It didn’t have a chorus. It just had these rambling verses. It didn’t really have a hook. How could you hope to have a hit single with a song that was all verse and no chorus and no hook? And it went on a bit: it was more than five minutes long, for God’s sake, which was pretty much operatic by the standards of the pop single. In the end, it got shoved on the B-side of
‘Reason to Believe’, which seemed to me the best place for it. ‘Reason to Believe’ was much more like the kind of thing that might get on the radio.

And then, of course, what happens is that some DJ on an American radio station, allegedly in Cleveland, Ohio, plays ‘Maggie May’ instead of ‘Reason to Believe’. Either he preferred ‘Maggie May’ or he simply had the single on the deck the wrong way up. It doesn’t really matter. Within a matter of weeks, DJs everywhere, in the US and the UK alike, were doing the same thing, forcing the record company to reclassify ‘Maggie’ as the A-side.

Maybe I should have known from listening to Bob Dylan that a song didn’t have to have a catchy phrase in the middle to be popular: that there was room for a good old rambling song. Yet in a way that I didn’t predict, something in the story of the lyric and the flow of the song and the feel of the arrangement – all these things bundled together reached people. An awful lot of people. In October 1971, ‘Maggie May’ went to number one in the UK charts. It did the same thing, at the same time, in the US charts. And as a consequence of the curiosity sparked off by ‘Maggie May’,
Every Picture Tells a Story
simultaneously went to the top of the album charts, in both countries. To my own dizzy amazement, and not inconsiderable pride, I suddenly had the number one single and the number one album, at the same time, on both sides of the Atlantic. It was like all the planets aligning. Nobody had ever done that: not even Presley, not even the Beatles.

The album got dislodged eventually by John Lennon’s
Imagine
. The following week,
Every Picture
upped and dislodged
Imagine
and was back at the top again. The only album that outsold
Every Picture
in 1971 was
Bridge over Troubled Water
. The only single that outsold ‘Maggie May’ was George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’.

And suddenly it was raining fame and money. How would I cope? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t wait to find out.

Two more albums for Mercury would follow those first three:
Never a Dull Moment
in 1972 and
Smiler
in 1974. Busy, busy times. Hectically busy. Impractically busy, you could even say. Especially when you factor in the other little detail, which is that, for the whole of this period, I was also in a band. Quite a good one.

IN 1969, WITH
a solo record deal under my belt, a debut album recorded and about to be released, and with individual success on both sides of the Atlantic a tantalising possibility if I simply put in some dedicated hard graft, I once again confounded my advisers by running headlong for the comfort blanket of a band. Call me a bundle of insecurity, call me a mess of contradictions or call me a plain old scaredy-cat – it’s immaterial to me, because the band was the Faces, we were together for five years and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

On a good night, the Faces were something special. On a bad night, we were bloody awful. But with the Faces, being bloody awful could sometimes be even more special than being good. And the feeling between the five of us – me, Ronnie Wood, Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones – when we were onstage was hard to surpass. Outside of certain football teams, I don’t think it would be possible to experience camaraderie like it. By the end, of course, bands being bands, we’d all be travelling in separate limos, staying in separate hotels, threatening to quit every five minutes and squabbling like cats in a sack. But while it worked – God, it was brilliant.

That said, I couldn’t have joined a band that was less enchanted by the idea of having a lead singer – not just me, but any lead singer. When Steve Marriott walked out on the
Small Faces in 1969 and went away to form Humble Pie, the rest of the band were left with a mistrust of front-men that would last them for the rest of their days. They had been bowling along, making some of the most iconic pop music of the 1960s (‘All or Nothing’, ‘Itchycoo Park’, ‘Tin Soldier’, all of
The Autumn Stone
album, which Ronnie Wood and I listened to all the time), and then Marriott had pulled the plug on them. Lead vocalists (or LVs) were, in the sneering phrase used by the band, ‘Luncheon Vouchers’. The automatic suspicion was that singers were on the make, permanently alert to the main chance and out for themselves; that if they invited another one to join them, he would come in, take over the band and then walk out leaving everyone else in the lurch. And given the way it eventually panned out with me, Ronnie Lane and Mac, in particular, would probably have felt their suspicion was triumphantly vindicated. Well, they took a view. But I will always argue that it wasn’t like that.

The remains of the Small Faces were rehearsing in a studio in the basement of a warehouse at 47 Bermondsey Street that belonged to the Rolling Stones, who used the place principally as a storage facility. You would walk in and there would be all these boxed two-inch tapes and quarter-inch masters on the shelves with things like ‘Honky Tonk Women’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ written on them. And we all loved the Stones, and thought there was no rhythm section like theirs in the world when they were on song, so you couldn’t help but feel the hairs go up on your neck slightly at the sight of that. The Stones were very good to the Faces in those early days: they never charged us for the use of the room. They were mentors of sorts and there was a good spirit between the bands – at least until the Stones purloined Ronnie Wood, when relations were put on hold for a while.

I was at a party with Mick Jagger in 1974, when the rumours of Ronnie leaving the Faces were beginning to bubble.

Me: ‘Are you going to nick Woody from us?’

Mick: ‘I would never do that. I would never break up the Faces.’

Oh yes you would, Mick.

But that was at the end. At the beginning was this basement where Ronnie Lane, Mac and Kenney were knocking around, trying to find a new direction. And then Ronnie Wood, at a loose end after the demise of the Jeff Beck Group, started going down there with his guitar to join in, and I went along there with him a few times, just to have some drinks and stand around listening – mostly looking forward to the moment in the evening when we would all go to the King’s Arms pub up the road. The landlord there thought we were ‘nice boys’ on account of the fact that we drank pricy spirits – rum and Cokes, mostly – rather than cheaply nursing half a pint of beer all night. That’s a landlord’s definition of ‘nice’ for you.

At the studio, I mostly stayed upstairs in the control room, keeping out of the way, listening. And I wasn’t particularly impressed with what I heard – or certainly not at first. It all sounded a bit aimless to me. They seemed to have two original songs: ‘Shake, Shudder, Shiver’, which was a swaggering blues number with a lyric by Ronnie Lane about how cold his flat was, and ‘Flying’, a slow and brooding rock song, built on descending chords. Ronnie would be doing the singing and he had a nice voice, but he was no Steve Marriott. And Mac would sing a bit too, but he wasn’t even as good as Ronnie. There was obviously a singer-shaped hole, but their notion was that they would carry on rehearsing for now and sort the vocals out later.

One night I was standing in the control room as usual and Kenney said, ‘Rod, why don’t you come in and have a shout?’ So I left the security of my spot upstairs and went down into the hot and slightly sweaty-smelling room with the band and picked up a microphone.

I said, ‘What shall we do?’

Ronnie said, ‘Bit of Muddy Waters?’

Everybody knew the
At Newport
album, so we blasted through ‘I Got My Brand on You’, and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and then ‘I Feel So Good’. And it was pretty clear that we sounded good
together. (Some rough tapes of those early rehearsals are on
Five Guys Walk into a Bar
, the Faces’ box set, so you can judge for yourself.)

Even then, no immediate invitation to join the band was forthcoming. It took several sessions like this before anything happened. Kenney and Woody would have had me in the band like a shot, but they had to melt down the resistance of Ronnie and Mac, who were still nursing the bruises inflicted by Marriott – not wanting to invite in a front-man and then end up playing backing band to him. I wasn’t party to these sensitive intra-band negotiations, obviously enough. But some kind of board meeting took place in my absence and the board decided in favour of my appointment. Thus, in October 1969, were born the Faces – who continued to be the Small Faces for a while, for continuity’s sake, although the ‘Small’ had to go because Ronnie and I took the average height up to the point where it no longer applied.

As rehearsals continued, I still had plenty of doubts. Was this a pop group? A blues band? What was it? Some nights I would leave Bermondsey with Woody and say, ‘We’d better phone Jeff Beck and see if he’ll have us back.’ At the same time, I looked around that room and saw, unarguably, a decent bunch of geezers to hang out with. Woody, of course, was virtually a brother as far as I was concerned and the perfect band-mate for me. Kenney Jones, the drummer, was a Stepney boy, very quiet, easy-going – altogether lovely. That said – and this might sound a bit rich coming from me – the amount of time he spent doing his hair would come to annoy me. He liked it turned under nicely at the bottom, and curlers were involved. He could be hours getting it right. He was as tough as a nut, though. One night Kenney poked himself in the eye with a drumstick and, in agony, fell off the back of the drum riser. Did it stop him? No. He just got back up, weathered the backache and did the rest of the gig with the use of his remaining eye.

He was the third drummer I had seen drop backwards off a
stage by the age of twenty-five. I was starting to wonder whether it was me.

As for Ronnie Lane, I adored him, odd fellow though he could be from time to time. He was a very creative guy, tender and poetic in many ways, but he was always absolutely straight up as well. If he didn’t like something I was doing he would tell me and not beat around the bush. When he eventually upped and left the band, Ronnie Wood and I talked about it and agreed that was probably the engine gone. The fact the band struggled on for another eighteen months doesn’t mean we were wrong.