faces

    The Small Faces were nobodies in the States; I never heard of them myself until Paul Weller brought them to my attention in 1979. I was twelve years old. I thought rock was just gonna keep getting better and better.

     Weller had also sent me to the used-album bins to look up Curtis Mayfield, so I trusted his judgement. But I never had to leave the house to get charged by Stevie Marriot and his mates. Lo and fucking behold, there in my old Dad's Peaches record crate (Peaches was a local record store there in Detroit) I found it: Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, with the incredible track, "Afterglow."

     Like so many of my love affairs, this one started with fifty consecutive equatorial circumnavigations of the lover's body. Here's me wallowing in the adrenalicious Hammond organ of Ian McLagan; here's Stevie wailing like a boy possessed; there's my mom banging on the bedroom door for the last fifteen spins. That cut grabbed me by the duodenum and shook me around like a ragdoll, and I believe I might have had my first orgasm that afternoon.

     Part of the initial appeal of "Afterglow" was its similarity to a tune I just couldn't put my finger on--something I had heard on the radio when I was a little kid. It wasn't until 1983 that someone turned me on to the Raspberries, and I rediscovered "Tonight." Although that track is the kind of loving tribute that transcends ripoff and achieves a soul of its own, it started life as an exercise, like when you're sent to the museum with a sketchbook and graphite to learn your craft by reproducing the lines of Maillol or Matisse over and over until their RNA has occupied your cells and then one day you can approximate Matisse or Maillol without help. Carmen's tribute, his homage, was indeed a great single. But it's no "Afterglow."

     Mostly it's Little Stevie Marriot's voice that sets the Faces track on a higher plane. Where Carmen is cloying, crooning, showing off his McCartneyesque smooooooothness, Marriot is wailing, gnashing, throwing his entire tiny body behind every note of the chorus. And he was a natural soul shouter--no Otis Redding, mind you, but a damned soulful presence for a little English kid. He wiped the floor with wannabees like Eric Burdon or Keith Relf. Then there's the matter of Ian McLagan's enormous organ: there's something about the way Mac set his sliders that turned his Hammond into a tearing, wrenching rock'n'roll weapon. The Small Faces had a fine guitarist in Steve Marriot, but the Hammond takes center stage on all their best tracks. "Afterglow" starts huge but quickly settles into a quiet first verse--Stevie, his guitar turning out curlicue arpeggios, over Kenny Jones' fourtothebar rimshots. But halfway through the verse, Mac cascades in, and by the time the first chorus hits, all bets are off. It's his show from here on in.

     Mac's Hammond on that cut (and other anthems like "Tin Soldier") is the sound of an adolescent girl's heart and gut being raked over the cheesegrater of love and lust and pain. The first time I heard him wail that simple ur-Hammond lick right after Stevie sang the gloriously simple and obvious "I'm happy just to be with you," my soul did handstands of joy. I knew that these four little English boys would stand by me in the dark hours that were to come. And they came into my life not a minute too soon. The eighties soon came tumbling down around my shoulders, bringing with them not only the crappy gravel center of my adolescence, but a vast radio wasteland that sickened me to the core. I clung to my Buzzcocks, Sweet and Faces while the winds of fakery, fluffery and irrelevancy buffeted me from all sides. In the mid-90s I found my beloved Vandalias, but even then it seemed obvious that rock had played itself out in the '70s, letting one last mighty wail with London Calling. The grunge and Britpop bands of the 90s tried to lay claim to rock legitimacy, but to anyone paying attention it was clear that all there was to look forward to was mimicry and necrophilia.