A Nod Is As Good As A Wink is the first signal that the Faces have matured as a band. Their infatuation with variations on similar themes has finally borne fruit, they have come to terms with their roots, their sound is self-defined.

Most important, the Faces have finally been able to deal with Rod Stewart as a member of the group. In the past, Stewart either laid out, or, came in and dominated totally: the Faces had two separate identities, with Rod and without him, and the effect was to leave us with no real idea of who they were at all.

Even though Stewart lays out on three songs here, he is not so conspicuously absent as in the past. In large part, this is a reflection of the improvement in Ron Lane’s songwriting, but it is also an indication of how well Rod is integrated into the sound of the rest of the record.

Bob Dylan and the Hawks, had they made a series of albums together, would have had to face the same problem; if Chuck Berry had ever had a band with a distinct identity, so would he.

Neither of them bothered to deal with the idea of the songwriter/singer as a member of a band. Neither has anyone else really: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ brilliance as composers drove Brian Jones out of the Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend dominates the Who at John Entwistle’s expense (so Entwistle makes, solo albums). It was in large part conflicts over whose material to perform that rent the Beatles - who hadn’t been a real band in five years anyway. (Neither had the Stones, but they were always threatening to be.)

Rod Stewart is probably the only rock and roll songwriter who has come into his own in the 70s, and he deals with the problem by taking a typically 70s approach: he has his cake and eats it too, records with the Faces and solo. He hasn’t tried to perform as a solo act yet, though, thank the good lord. There are probably a lot of good reasons for that, including the reality that as a folksinger Rod Stewart is a great bluesman; but there is more to it. The Faces aren’t just Rod Stewart’s backup band, and he’s gone out of his way to make that clear.

The easiest thing to do would be to double-bill the group (Rod Stewart and the Faces, Rod Stewart with the Faces). Instead, they have resorted to this only where necessary and it is the Faces who are of paramount importance (The Faces — with Rod Stewart).

In order to make this stick, though, the Faces have to sound like the Faces (with Rod Stewart) on the radio (whi'ch is to say, on records) too. One of the reasons that Rod’s most brilliant work so far (“Every Picture Tells A Story,” “Maggie May,” “I Know I’m Losin’ You,” a couple other tracks from the first two solo albums) has been done on his own is that he didn’t hesitate about taking charge on those records. With the Faces he has always almost had to; it wasn’t until “Maybe I’m Amazed” on Long Player that the Faces did anything that sounded like a great group.

Nod is different however. The Faces have never been a band that was pure joy to hear; even live, where they are one of the two or three most exciting rock bands around, they have always suffered from a variety of problems.

Much of this goes right down to bad production, just as it does on the record. You often can’t hear that Kenny Jones is a truly powerful drummer, for instance, and there’s been no real way to know that Ian MacLagen is a tasteful, understated keyboard artist.

The band’s sound has suffered because of this. Glyn Johns has cleaned up Nod so that all of this is apparent and we can only hope that the Faces will find someone equally competent to work on their live act’s technology problems. (This is not a rare occurence: the Who faced the same thing for some time, before they were able to afford the solutions.) Nonetheless, credit must be given to Johns for bringing out what was already there. Even Ron Wood’s slide guitar playing, which I’ve always considered a treat, sounds less derivative, if only because it doesn’t stick out like a fancy but mutilated thumb. It suddenly has a powerful context.

That is what “Stay With Me” is all about. It is the One track here that comes up to the best stuff (“Maggie May,” “Every Picture”) on Every Picture Tells A Story. It is the archetypal Faces tune: the humor, the zingy guitar playing, the thundering drumming, the subtle bass and piano fills, Stewart’s vocal riding in the mix, leaping out for one or two lines in every verse, everything combining to make you want to hear it again and again. The idea of establishing a sound for the group is essential: the best AM groups, like the Stones, are identifiable in under ten seconds.

“Stay With Me” is better than the mold, of course, which is one reason it helps so much in creating it. It works the way “Satisfaction” did for the Stones; and even offers the same possibilities for variation (e.g., “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Get Off Of My Cloud,” “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows?”)

Stewart belongs in this kind of a band, one which can be expected to come up with great single after great single. The reason Rod is the most powerful figure in all of rock at the moment is because he has been able to spread his charisma across so many boundaries. Older audiences are always going to want to hear the solo albums, I think, simply because they like the added sophistication, which I — and I think, younger, or less sophisticated — audiences find a veneer over the core. The Faces will capture that younger, less sophisticated audience though, because they are almost the ultimate good time British rock and roll band, and because five sexy young men are better than one. (It is, undeniably, the younger audience who have brought the Faces, and even Rod alone, this far; they are the ones who stuck by them in the ballrooms and clubs. Thus, Stewart’s superb opening comment at the band’s Madison Square Garden concert: “Remember, we’re the same blokes wot played Ungano’s eighteen months ago.”)

In a way, Stewart and the Faces — who have so much in common with Jagger and the Stones - are reversing the process of the Stones’ degeneration. The Rolling Stones, in their initial incarnation, were a band, for which Mick Jagger was the archetype. The Stones have wound up being mostly a backing group for Jagger with Keith Richard as the leader of the Stones, per se. Whether this is true or not, a lot of people are beginning to see it this way, if not verbalize it like that, and that explains some of the anti-Rolling Stones reaction since their ’69 tour. (I might add that that anti-Stones attitude is almost universally an anti-Jagger attitude, which is both proof and amplification of the point.)

There is a good reason for this: solo artists do not have the intuitive sense of community that bands have, nor do they foster it. Grand Funk, Black Sabbath and the rest, as groups, are the force posited, consciously or no, against the seperatism of the solo artist; because we still recognize individuals within this context, though the sight of Stewart doing solo albums is not only allowable, it is even welcomed. Grand Funk, save Farner, are individually virtually faceless, for instance.

Nod is archetypal group rock, or more precisely British group rock. The Faces have always presented us this visage on stage, but this is the first time they have been able to do it on record. Because they are British, and don’t have to deal with America and all that that implies, they can get down to other concerns that they hold in common with their audience, and that is what A Nod Is As Good As A Wink is about: entertainment, fucking, partying, nostalgia, and finally, the idea of fun itself.

The style they have developed in which to place all of this presents its own problems, of course. “Stay With Me” is almost mysogynist in its sexism:

Won’t need too much persuadin’

I don’t mean to sound degradin’

With a face like that you got nothing to laugh about Red lips hair fingernails I hear you’re a mean old Jezebel*

Even so, the song is so manipulative that it is hilarious. It parodies all the attitudes towards women that British rock stars hold in legend, and even if Stewart and the Faces don’t know it, it shows those attitudes up for what they are.

All of the Faces’ sex is ridiculous: “Miss Judy she could have me/Any hour of the working day/Sent me in the cornfield/Midafternoon/Said son it’s all part of your job.” In Ronnie Lane’s “Last Orders Please,” even the tragedy of the broken love affair is played for a joke; the words are tragic (“Listen, they’re playing ‘Tracks of My Tears’ ”) because they manage to give a sense of what it is like to be young and out-of-', love. But they are also a parody of the situation, both because we’re theoretically old enough to know better and because of the uniquely British way Lane has of singing them. His voice is perfect for the kind of nostalgic songs he writes, just because we can’t take it altogether seriously. Only on “You’re So Rude,” which is a pretty common locker-room joke anyway, do the words and the voice really fit. Even “Debris,” which is a song about a probably literal fatherfigure for whom Lane has much affection is somehow alleviated of its maudlin tendencies by the implicit sarcasm of that (is it cockney?) accent.

The rest of the songs, written by Rod or by Stewart in tandem with Ronnie Wood, are fragments of “Memphis,” the weakest cut, and in a way the most necessary. Snatches of its music are all over the place: “Stay With Me” is almost “Memphis” rewritten with a thematic reversal. The cadence of “Memphis” rules “Too Bad,” just as Berry’s melody dominates “That’s All You Need.”

Chuck Berry has as much to do with the Faces as Bob Dylan has to do with Rod Stewart as a solo artist. It isn’t only that Berry virtually invented the most concrete myth-form in rock, the story song, which both Dylan and Stewart have developed far beyond anything Berry ever conceived. There is also an inherent spirit in the Faces, maybe just one of frivolity, that provides a linkage: Berry’s songs weren’t about partying, or sexuality or going to school half so much as they were about fun and the absence of it. The Beach Boys understood this perfectly: Brian Wilson changed “Johnny B. Goode” into “Fun Fun Fun.”

Rod’s big advantage over Wilson is crucial of course — he knows how to think. Since he can write a song that is both serious and fun, he can take “Fun Fun Fun,” improve and update the story, keep its wit, and leave you with something to think about. He does just that with “That’s All You Need.”

“That’s All You Need” is the most important song here, because the theme of Nod is fun. “That’s All You Need” comes to terms, or makes an attempt to, with the one thing almost no one in rock has ever considered coming to •terms with: rock’s sense of fun-as-anend-in-itself. The song is both anti-intellectual and laissez-faire in the way that hip culture has always been those things, but Stewart attempts to rationalize them. If Sly Stone’s musical question on There’s A Riot Goin’ On is “So what?” (in response to “Hot Fun in the Summertime”?) Stewart’s answer is “That’s all you need.”

Sly’s point is precisely the opposite, of course — it isn’t all you need. Nonetheless, Stewart has managed to clarify the nihilism inherent in the counterculture, if only for a brief moment, and then ambiguiously (“Maybe that’s all you need”). The song is both tragic and comic, while Sly is only tragic, and that is both the bane and the fortune of the Faces.

The Faces, like any British band, will never have to deal with America as American songwriters of equal talent will. Robbie Robertson, Sly Stone, John Fogerty and Bob Seger will all have to take some sort of stand about America, and what is happening here in the next few years. Rod Stewart and the Faces may be capable of avoiding it. Aside from a couple of brief flickers, the Stones have. The Faces wouldn’t be the better for having done so, but they can do it. That is the paradox they are trapped in: whether ’tis nobler, in the end, to stick your nose in it, now, or have it rubbed in your face, later.

Based on “Every Picture Tells A Story,” I’m betting Rod and the Faces both decide that there are heavier things that they want to talk about. (Like a real discussion of sexuality for a change, which might be nice for such potentially androgynous characters.) Even if they don’t though, A Nod Is As Good As A Wink passes the Faces on the first test of a great rock and roll band. As they rock on by, they do leave something behind them.