The last week of April, the American Retreaders Association shared the Executive Inn, Louisville, Ky., with a collection of dwarves, freaks, dope dealers, high wire acts, aerial motorcyclists, a few journalists, a mother and son balancing act, a Chinese woman who dangles from arena ceilings “suspended only by the hair of her head,” and a couple of rock and roll bands.

This is the Rock & Roll Circus .. . Side show. The Main Event takes place only once each evening, and that is what we are here for. Step right this way, friends, and have a look inside:

“In the center ring, for your enjoyment, ladies, gentlemen and children of all ages, we present an act beyond mortal belief This evening only, flown DIRECT from London. England, the Rock & Roll Rooster & his famous friends, the nimble, amazing Briton-chimpanzees! See them walk and strut and kick out the very jams you’ve come to witness! Watch as they tread a path ’cross stages braver men have feared to tread.

Please direct your attention to the center ring, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome:

Rod Stewart and the Faces!

In the cavernous hallways of the Inn, it is cool and dark. The Faces have not yet arrived to threaten it, add specific tension to its Duro-plush-plastic comforts. The rooms are filled with much veneer, carpets with a design, immaculate baths. No ring in the tub.

When the band arrives, around four o’clock, the soap operas of the day aren’t quite over. “The Days of Our Lives” is featuring the attempted rape of a (female) social worker by a (male) junkie. He can’t get it up without a fix; pop reversal.

At five o’clock, it is time to eat dinner, in the Colonial Bar and Grill. The Colonial is a spacious room, filled with a sense of middle-brow aristocracy that fits' only in the late lamented Confederacy. Chintz royalty. . ■, .

At a back table sit Billy Gatf, the F.aces manager, Ronnie Lane, their bass player-songwriter-singer, publicist Pat Costello, photographer Peter Hujar, and the CREE-M team. Costello is verbose. Hujar is reserved, the way only a New Yorker can be reserved. Gaff is hyper, the paragon of British rock management. Tonight the pressure’s on for him: tickets for the show haven’t sold well in advance, and he’s worried that they’ll be playing to a half-empty house. Lane is quiet, reserved, the way only a professional British rock star can be reserved.

“Well,” lie says, “What are you doing here?” *If*“They

The hand was supposed to know . . . Oh, fuck ... ,

... , Gaff is bubbling over. He raves about the quality of the food. Then, with a swoop of his fork, lie begins to describe his plans for upping ticket sales tonight.

“I don’t understand it. Tickets just aren’t moving. Did you see the plane hired? Had a streamer behind it, to advertise the show. And we did tv spots.”

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town.**

Enter the Rock and Roll Rooster. lie’s bedecked in a white suit which epitomises British punque. He is sunburnt, angular, looking very tall, very lean.

• “I’ve just been to the Bahamas,” Rod Stewart says, and bends, the way he sways like a sapling on stage, to speak for a moment to Gaff,

Rod leaves quickly; Gaff and Lane follow momentarily. Costello and Hujar begin to regale us with details of the previous days’ debauch in Clemson, S.C.

“I can’t understand it,” Hujar, who is not, precisely, a rock & roll person, is saying. “Why would anyone destroy something, just to destroy it?

expect to have to pay for it, too. Which is o.k. I guess . . . but even if you had the money ...”

They’re a lot like the Who, someone suggests. Not exactly, but . . .

There is a story aibout the previous day, lounging on a Clemson beach. The band had decided to cut a boat loose from its moorings - just to cut it loose, No ulterior motive.

There are also stories about: broken lamps; banana-fucked groupies; two members who wanted adjoining rooms and couldn’t get them..Quick as a wink, they’d created a suite themselves. Hotel bills for damages alone of $250 a day.

“But why?”

Well . . . theatre? Decadence? Fun? Assert ion of success?

“Naw,” Charley says, “It’s the old biker idea. It's class. Like, it ’s class to be totally outrageous. Piss in your best friend’s living room. It’s just . . . It’s total gross-out. ”

The arena is huge. It is so large that if the show is not a big success there will be problems, severe problems. Like about 300% too much natural echo.

But the place begins to fill up nicely as the recently re-formed F'ree open the show. By the end of their brief but monotonous set, the house is about half full and the crowd is still coming in.

Free don’t sound poor, but they don’t do anything to assert the brilliance of either Paul Rodgers, their lead vocalist or Paul Kossof, their lead guitarist. Rodgers, for instance, might have a technically “better” voice than Stewart’s, but he could sure take lessons from Rod in stage presence.

During the set, the Circus Proper sets up. Behind'the stage and to its side, high wires go up. The trapeze act, a crew of Chileans' (who escaped Allende, the way Cubans escaped Castro?) is to go on first but it isn’t much. One of the connections is missed and the trouper falls but he is back up in a second, and one has the feeling that it is set up.

This is the first night that the circus has been presented in its entirety. The problem, according to Faces, is that most of the arenas on tour have restrictive fire-laws, or inadequate facilities, for the whole show. Louisville is the fourth night of the tour, but it is the first night for the entire circus,

As it turns out, the most interesting thing about the Circus is its announcer, a red-blazered midget, looking like a five-year-old dressed for church by his mother. He js charming, but not particularly funny, and that is an indication of what a low-level this show works at.

The crowd likes it. The Louisville papers will like it the next day. But it is not what anyone came for, and like so many things connected with rock these days, the kids know and accept that it is bogus but . . . entertaining. Not engrossing, but a good backdrop to smoke dope and drop sopors.

There’s the dull-o mother and child balancing act. The most interesting thing about it is the 8-track tape which plays as reinforcement: it is ■soft-rock, running to CSN&Y, with “Layla” thrown in for grit. If this were a set-up to make the Faces look more powerful, it couldn’t have been more perfect.

But most of all, the circus is depressing because it is the Rock and Roll Circus only by proximity with the real thing. There isn’t anything rock-‘n’rolly about it nothing. There are certain things show-biz about it but there is nothing that rocks. This is nuclear family entertainment for audiences used to nuclear explosion performances.

The real rock & roll circus goes something like this:

Run away with the Rock & Roll Circus And leaving all your troubles behind Run away with the Rock & Roll Circus And have a good time*

But the only thing that comes close in this one' is the finale: a demented La Chinoise.

The motorcycle high-wire act over it was just as adequate as the rest, and nothing more - out walks Princess Fong. She looks 30ish, as tall as Yoko, but more interestingly proportioned. She is awash in kimono, or whatever her particular Oriental ethnicity terms what she is wearing.

Suddenly, yet with great dignity and ceremony, she is yanked aloft by her two foot pig-tail. As La Chinoise is suspended from the ceiling, one has time to ponder the veracity of her hair. But, on the other hand, if it isn’t her hair, then what’s the wig attached to?

It’s that sense of inscrutability that makes La Chinoise such a wonderfully sexy, mysterious performer. There is no way to tell if she is truly as beautiful as she seems or if it is really only what amounts to “her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls.”

There is awe on the crowd as she is pulled up, up, up, while a spotlight dazzles her in its glow. Ten, twenty, thirty feet, maybe even higher.

La Chinoise does a kip up, then “skins the cat” and drops down so that she is again suspended “only by the hair on her head,” and the real attraction begins. One by one, she drops a couple dozen vari-colored kimonos which plummet to the arms of a stage-hand waiting below.

And, then, twenty kimonos later, she is fully revealed to us in a two piece outfit that yet leaves much to imagination.

She is lpwered back down to thunderous applause, then goes back up for a cup of tea, which is not yet in the cup. La Chinoise balances the silver tray, and pours the tea and there Is never a moment’s hesitation, none of the cheap near-miss/false-start theatrics of the trapeze act, or the save-the-hit-for-last jive of Free. In her own way, La Chinoise is as talented, as professional and as engrossing as the Faces.

And that was that.

Now take all your troubles and all your dirty laundry and throw it up to the wind! Come along with us and dig the rock and roll music You may never have the chance again.

If you had been standing in front of the stage when Rod Stewart came out that night, you’d have been best advised to move.

The Faces came out, as they always do, and simply plugged in and started to blow. Rod leaned over, touched the mike and the entire situation immediately exploded. In less than fifteen seconds, the center of the arena powered its way past the guards into the ten foot deep shell in front of the stage, where the circus acts had been performing only a few moments earlier. The cops didn’t bother to make a move.

The Faces had never played Louisville (or most of the South)-before, but it didn’t seem to matter. Their audience reacted as if they had been waiting for this show for years. If that isn’t true, it’s at least an indication.

Ian MacLaglen: It’s strange. If you get to town the day before a gig, people who would recognize you the day of a gig, or the day after a gig, don’t even know who you are for some reason ... I get taken for a redneck everywhere, anyhow.

The band was full on from the beginning. No sucking and jiving, no stops to tune, no delays. This is not just great rock'n’roll — and it is that, for the Faces have one of the two or three best rock shows of the ’70s — it is professional rock'n’roll, with all the concomitant drawbacks and advantages.

The sound was almost perfect: each instrument could be heard clearly, MacLaglen’s organ and Jones’ powerful drumming coming through especially well in light of the way they have been buried in the past.

The Faces work perfectly with Rod. It is not a mistake to ’ say that they couldn’t make it without him, I suppose, but it is also not a mistake to think that Rod couldn’t make it without the band.

Ron Wood: At the beginning it’s (husky whisper) “C’mon, Rod.’”But by the end (he chirps) Hey they all got it on. ”

In the middle of the set, just as they are beginning to settle into the groove that could carry the show to only a middle-height, the band breaks into the crusher. Stewart steps to the mike with one of the rare grins he allows himself, and begins to sing, as Wood plays the absolutely heartrending guitar lead-in:

Wake up Maggie, I think I. .. Before the rest of the line is out, the stage begins to be covered with bodies. Perhaps 200 actually make it to the apron of the stage, so that the musicians have less room, forcing Rod to diminish his Groucho walk with the mike. The uninitiated experience an intuitive fear.

“Aren*t you scared?”

Wood: Naw man. They came but they just stayed there.

MacLaglen: They probably would get really silly, but they don’t want to hurt you, they just want to be ctose, and be part of the party.

Wood: I did feel a few fingers on the knee last night. ..

Incredibly, the music is even better live. “Maggie May,” at least that evening, was one of the premiere experiences of rock. It ranks with few others. Dylan, the Stones on a rare evening, the Who. Perhaps the Band when they’re on, or the Beatles, if they got back together.

Stewart’s singing was predictably fantastic, but it was the Faces who held your awe. Even knowing how good “Maggie May” is, the live arrangement is textured so perfectly, arranged so beautifully, the interplay and dynamics of the situation — not just the music — are so right, that it is hard to believe.

Here is a dimension of interplay between “star” and band that is altogether rare. The music is precise and skillful, but not tight, or constricted.

Finally, what makes the show so exciting and impressive is that the Faces, and perhaps Rod most of all, really do understand what theatre is. The circus is malarkey next to this.

Stewart bounds across the stage with his Groucho walk, leaning into the mike and crooning like some obscene parody of Bing Crosby; Wood has all the perfectly timed and intuitively choreographed moves of the best British guitarists; Lane tromps about like a drunken sailor. MacLaglen and Jones don’t do much, but they provide the backbeat that’s a necessity as back-drop for the theatre.

The show, is so finely tuned that it even works where once it was weakest: when Stewart hands the vocal mike to Ron Lane.

Continued on page 73.

Lane is a good singer, but he’s not Rod and always before it has seemed like he was merely giving Rod a break. No more. His songs are good, and his ideas about how to present them are fine. He mocks himself so well you’re never sure how serious he is.

Lane: Are they true? Yeah! They’re all true stories.

Rod: I’m not a natural songwriter ... like Ronnie Lane. (Brief snicker) Well, he is. Songs flow out of him. It’s a struggle for me. I’m lucky to get one a month.

Wood (a little earlier): The nice thing about Rod was that Rod was there all the time. Even when Ron was doing his vocals, Rod was there.

Lane: Generally, to the laymen in the street, we’re always going to be Rod’s back-up band. But to anyone who takes a little more interest, the truth will be obvious.

They are into “Losin’ You” now. It is thundering just as nicely as “Maggie May,” powering the kids into crawling further and further onto the stage, pushing more and more of them up there.

The strain is on Rod’s face. When he takes a break for a moment, turns his back to the audience and gets a drink, you can see it. It is not a pretty sight — it isn’t surliness or anger. Just weariness and tension.

Rod: There’s too much work... It’s draining on the brain all the time. Fucking writing songs and getting them together. . . I don’t know, maybe I’m just lazy but it seems like too much work.

There wasn't the pressure there before “Maggie May” or Every Picture that there is now. If they actually want a record by a certain day, I suppose they mutst have it. That’s the drawback — if I could finish the album when I wanted to it’d be all right.

“Losin’ You” is the pseudo-last number, but — though it goes on for the best part of ten minutes — there is never any question about whether it ends there. The band couldn’t get out of here with their necks at the moment.

"Is it the public?”

Rod: No, they don’t ask me when I’m gonna bring an album out. They just presume.

But its affecting me health. And there isn’t any break, because we’ve got to start working on the group’s album when this one’s done.

The encore is “Stay With Me,” and it’s amazing. It is easily the best number they do: Wood is astounding on slide guitar, better than anyone currently playing it. The song rocks (as a warning for afterward, maybe) and then Rod kicks out the twenty footballs (which are actually what we call beachballs but football’s a different matter in Britain). Then it’s over, and the crowd disperses, about an hour later and the band can jam past what’s left into a pair of limousines and get back to the hotel.

It’s only eleven o’clock and the evening has just begun.

Back at the hotel, everyone comes down stairs for food. It’s not so much a meal as a drama.

In the corner, crunched in but removed from everyone, Sits Rod Stewart. He is looking even more dour than usual. The rest of the band haven’t arrived yet.

As they come in, the coffee shop of the Executive grows more and more boisterous. Orders are taken with the usual confusion of a 40 year old waitress trying to cope with the desires of a pack of 25 year old hippies. Dozens of cups of coffee are ordered, bunches of sandwiches, and a pair of fruit salads because they have whole strawberries. Rod settles for bacon and eggs.

The rest of the Faces are acting like the chipped monkies they are, bounding in one and two at a time, surrounded by “fans and groupies” if there is a distinction. Each of them bounds to a seat, in two back to back booths, and the siege of the Executive Inn is on.

Someone (maybe Jeff Franklin, the group’s booking agent, and the guy whoseklea the Rock & Roll Circus originally was) begins to toss certain items of their meal they aren’t particularly interested in eating, at the other members of the Faces’ entourage.

The adjoining booth is — obviously — constrained to respond. On and on it goes, with much shouting and gleeful bellows of outrage from either side when a particularly excellent hit is scored. It’s beginning to get a bit messy, when the proprietress steps in:

If you boys don’t stop throwing food RIGHT NOW, I’m going to make all of you clean it up yourselves.

As this is said in the most matronly Southern middle-class manner imaginable, it is doubly hilarious. But the laughter is restrained — if not a few smirks — in order to see what goes down next.

“Oh, we’ll stop, right away, mum,” assures Stewart, sticking one of those bony fingered, enormous hands in front of his face and tossing a bite of food straight into the back of MacLaglen’s head.

But it really does settle down after that. At least the food-throwing does. Other numbers run rampant.

Groupies: it’s just like “Stay With Me.” The girls come around to be battered perhaps. One says, “We got a party in room 13xx.” And so Lane, MacLaglen, Wood and a bunch of others head there.

The room, which is operated at the moment by a trio of demented downer freaks, is hidden in the very bowels of the Executive Inn. When we finally find it, only one of the Sopor Three is there, and he is in bed, asleep. We’re about to leave when the female partner shows up. (The third has been pulling Wood’s coat sleeve all evening while looking like he is about to puke or pass out, babbling inchoherently about how great the Faces are/were.)

She opens the door and we enter. From out of the chest of drawers she pulls one of the most massive assortments of pills I have ever seen in my life: “Let’s see... we got some qualude, some mescaline, a little acid. Anybody want some speed?”

Everyone blanches. Suddenly, we notice that we are the only four present “Hey,” someone asks, “where’s everyone else?”

“Oh there are three or four guys in the bathroom,” she says gleefully. “Uhhhh . .. maybe you oughta look inside?”

Water is seeping under the bathroom door. Ms. Sopor looks inside. Someone has stopped up both tub and toilet, and water is pouring out. We look at each other and race from the room, giggling. “Well,” someone says, “I guess we know who was there. ”

Back upstairs, Rod leads a pack of boys and girls around and around the second floor corridors. He looks slightly drunk, although it might just be the awkward/agile stance he adopts on stage. Of the Faces, only Lane is with him — the rest have retreated to their rooms, to some much needed rest.

Stewart doesn’t look like he is having much fun. Aside from the hour or so he spent on stage, he has smiled only once or twice all evening, opened up verbally only when he was given some pictures of himself with David Ruffin.

In front of the elevator is a colonial cradenza — one of those bureau-like do-dads, that aren’t really there except for decoration. Stewart half-stumbles/ half dumps it over, and it clatters to the floor. Suddenly, the elevator doors open and three of the biggest cops I’ve ever seen in my life emerge.

“Y’all better just get on back to yer rooms. And if you ain’t registahed, ya better git OUT.” They are not threatening.,

Franklin pulls the sheriff over to the side. “Listen, if you arrest Rod (who has been giving him some lip) these kids are gonna take this place apart. Now, we’ll get everyone out of the hotel and you don’t need to worry anymore.”

Everyone is freaked by all of this. And that makes it a night.

The next day, we all get together to talk, while the Faces prepare to get on a plane to go even further south.

The band is jovial, even the abnormally reiticent Ken Jones climbing up to the ledge near the ceiling to shoot some photos. (Ken, the rest of the band claim, “doesn’t know what city he’s in until the day after we get there. He doesn’t like to travel.”)

Everyone shows up but Rod. We go through all the motions, coming out with most of the material in here and a little more.

Wood and Lane are working on a film score for a movie being shot in Canada, Mahoney’s Estate. It is the first time the two of them have collaborated and they are working with not just Jones and MacLaglen on the project but also with Ric Grech. “Yeah, he’s playing violin. And even drums!”

Central to the discussion is Stewart, who is conspicously absent.

“It could’ve been a problem,” says Ron Lane, “if it had gotten to Rod’s head. It doesn’t affect us ... we all work together anyway. There are lots of people askin’ us, “What about . . . ’ But it doesn’t apply somehow.”

Still, it was Rod and the group’s management who had made such a big deal of the group being included in all the Stewart stories.

Maybe because of his involvement with Jeff Beck, maybe just instinctively, Stewart knows he needs this group.

He is not equipped for stardom. We talked for a while a little later, but he seemed more depressed and moody than any other time I’ve ever seen him.

As an after-thought, I asked about his marriage. “I’m not.”

How’d the rumors get started? “Probably because I got engaged . . . Don’t know why the fuck I did that.”

The rest of the band are sympathetic. Lane offers, “He probably feels more responsibility if the show’s going wrong than say, I would. I’d probably just turn around and say, ‘Oh fuck it!’ you know.

Rod Stewart isn’t really capable of doing that. It’s that sort of drive that has made him the biggest rock star of the moment, but it’s also the kind of thing that is flipping him out.

He?s doing the vocals for the next album in Paris as I write this. He’s probably not enjoying it much, at least not when he stops to think about it. But — he’s not thinkiiig about it while he’s doing it. Rod Stewart is one of the most completely professional entertainers I’ve ever met, and everything good and bad about that phrase applies.

He stared out the window of the limousine.

“Well, would you prefer that it just were .. . over??

A long pause. He sucked in his breath, and then almost exploded. No. Christ no.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. All the while those lines from “Maggie May” kept ringing in my ear:

I suppose l could collect my books and get on back to school Or steal my daddy ’s cue and make a livin ’ out of playin ’ pool Or find a rock and roll band that needs a helpin ’ hand Oh Maggie, / wish I’d never seen your face