Faces. Perfect name, dilating like Lit tle Orphan Annie's pupils into four cheery offwhite nubbins bouncing around in back of an amiably fey horse, who prances and preens and pulls up his baggy silk trousers like Charlie Chaplin, amazingly enough, just in time to run his bony fingers back through his hair and fling the sweat off with a bal lerina bow. Rod Stewart still sings with the same grainy grace and hard-knocks sensitivity, and the band is tighter than they used to be. Ron Wood is still chopping out those same chunks of Chuck Berry and Keith Richard with that cigar ette screwed in his mouth like a peg. Tetsu is looser than Free ever allowed, Ian MacLagan is comping and whomp ing with characteristic insouciance, and Kenny Jones has a new haircut that makes him look even more like a shop clerk trying to go hip.

These are the Faces, banging around on their umptieth American tour, doing basically the same set in the same way that they have been all these years, and if you think I like them you're right. I like them because they have the most per fect balance of sloppiness and discipline I have ever seen in a working band, and I like them because they're nice guys, and you don't have to personally know or be around them to know and appre ciate that fact. I like them because the first time I saw them they returned for their encore and said, "Listen, one thing you're going to have to get straight with us is that if you ask for an encore, you can't have one. You have to take three. So don't anybody try to leave." I like them because on their early 74 visit to my home town they were obviously exhausted, wasted from the road - at one point Rod bowed in one of his patented plies, and having come so close to the floor stayed in that elegant squat for just a moment too long, obviously resting -but put on a hell of a show anyway that had me dancing on my seat by the time they got to "Twisting the Night Away."

I like the Faces but I don't love them, and I'm not sure why. I heard a plump teenage muffin saying the same thing about Rod Stewart as I was coming out of the Detroit concert the other night, so I whirled on her and demanded: "Why?"

"Because I'm not of age yet!" she snapped.

Somehow I couldn't quite see that as my excuse, so I went on the road with them to perhaps get at the root of this curious form of affectionate disillusionment. Suspecting all the time, of course, that it might just be plain dissolution.

• • •

The last time I saw Ron Wood a Warner bearer was toting him around the country promoting his solo album, I've Got My Own Album To Do. We greeted each other effusively, I told him that I thought that was the stupidest title for an album I had ever heard, and then asked him, "What would you do if you woke up one day and discovered that your whole career had been a tax writeoff for Warner Brothers records?"

"I'd go back to art school," he shrugged benevolently.

He complemented me on my recent article slagging Emerson, Lake & Palmer; then he asked me what I thought of his solo bow. "Do you want me to be really frank with you?" I asked. He said sure.

I looked him straight in the eye and said, slowly and evenly, "You can't sing."

Didn't bat an eyelash. "Do you think I'll ever be able to?"

Sure, I said, and gave him a rap about David JoHansen, rock 'n' roll is an attitude and talent as traditionally understood has nothing to do with it, etc. etc. He then complemented me on my taste in women, referring to my friend Esther, who was my dinner date. I told him that she was not my girlfriend, that in fact and coincidentally my girlfriend was in England at this very moment.

He smiled. "Probably balling Emerson, Lake & Palmer," he said.

• • •

It's Saturday morning after the Detroit concert and I'm driving sullen and numb to interview the Faces at their hotel. There are lots of reasons why I am numb, but one of the reasons I am sullen is that I was told the night before by Tony Toon, their road manager and a possible paralysis agitans victim, that I could talk to Ron and the rest of "the boys," but Rod would simply not do any interviews at all. Later it was explained to me by Toon and longtime Faces shepherd Billy Gaff that Rod was paranoid because of possible press flap over his rumored affair, or soiree, or date, or teatime with Susan Ford. Behind his perennially amiable facade there was rust and disappointment, you could read it in his face as Toon and I arrived on the fourteenth floor in an elevator and found him posing in a dead hotel corrider outside his room, leaning up against the wall with one knee out, looking every inch the dapper transatlantic popstar in an empty tunnel. Toon had told me upon my arrival that the boys weren't up yet; now he was rousing them, time was running out before they had to be at the airport, and they were grousing because they had to pack. I suggested that one possible way to dispose of this odious botheration would be to hire a crew of nannies to go on tour with them, uniforms and all. "Then you could be full-time geniuses!" 1 said.

Ian MacLagan pulled a Firesign Theatre on me: "A nanny in sheep's clothing."

I dilated upon the fantasy, telling Rod that he could have one stationed at the side of the stage to beef up the act: "She stands there dressed like either Mary Poppins or a World War II army nurse, stiff at attention, and midway in the concert you fake a swoon and collapse on the boards! The crowd gasps in horror! Then she comes out and gently wraps a shawl around your shoulders, picks you up and leads your stooped and trembling frame off, patting you soothingly. Then, at the last possible instant before plunging into the dank backstage blackness, you wrench out of her tender ministrations, yell "No!," whirl violently and hurl yourself with the charismatic determination of the true tragic hero back to the mike for ONE MORE CHORUS!"

He sniffed tiredly, smiled, and said: "James Brown already did it."

"Don't worry about that, Rod, that was years ago, and besides nobody in your audience knows or gives a damn who the hell James Brown is anyway, and even if they do their minds are so splattered by drugs and alcohol they don't remember him or the TAMI show or any of that shit. Just do what I tell you and don't ask questions!"

He turned to Tony Toon. "Do you have any idea what this man is talking about?"

• • •

Cincinnati. Dead time, waiting on the band. I'm sitting in a hotel room watching Pickup on South Street with Richard Widmark. I popped the tube on just in time to see him picking a girl's pocketbook out of her purse. She gets scared and he starts slapping her around. Then the next thing you know he's got his hand on her cheek leering at her with those reptilian radium eyes, she's gazing back tremulously and telling him she loves him! Then next thing she says, "But I can't love you, I can't, I can't, because you're a commie!" Ron Wood told me later that this was the second movie he ever saw and one of his all-time favorites. It was certainly one of my all-time favorite time killers,.

Later we're at the concert and I'm drinking and horsing around with the boys, while Rod sits quite large and somewhat haggard in a chair, not giving off the vibrations of a particularly happy man at all. I talk to him a bit about Bobby Womack, whom 1 declare my affectionate disappointment in for much the same reason that I have been disappointed in the Faces: he's intermittently magical, but he just can't seem to make an album that's as masterful all the way through as "Harry Hippie" or "I Can Understand It." We agree that, contrary to purist convention, we prefer Bobby's new version of "Lookin' For a Love" to the Valentinos' classic, and Rod says that he thinks Facts of Life is a great album. It never ceases to amaze me how musicians have the worst taste in music: earlier Mac had told me he considered Walls and Bridges some kind of masterpiece. Billy Gaff and Tony Toon discuss their coming vacations. "I can't wait to get to Rio," says Tony.

... but what I was wondering is, do you ever have to engage in the art of seduction... ¶¶

"Well, I shall be going to Acapulco," says Billy. "You should come too. Oh Rod, would you like to go to Acapulco at the end of the tour?"

The show was great as usual, tight and strong if a bit predictable. But there was an air of palpable gloom in the limo on the way back. Rod sat hunkered over, sombre, and even Ronnie Wood was tundras distant from his usual animation. They compared minor technical deficiencies in low voices, as if conspiratorial in defeat. The Faces perfectionists?

Back at the hotel I asked Kenny Jones if they were going to the bar after freshening up, he assented vaguely, and I headed in that direction myself, where I ordered a beer and made an unsuccessful attempt to pick up one of the local girls. Rod and the others eventually arrived, and after last call I wandered down the corridor with him, a beer in my hand, tape recorder out of sight, relaxed at last where he had been friendly consistently. He had goosed me as I'd walked in the bar, which any liberal man would interpret as a friendly gesture. Now I regaled him with my missed patootie: "Rod, I thought I had it in the bag: we talked rock 'n' roll talk, we talked intellectual talk, I suavely suggested that I had some beer in my room, and just at the last minute her damn boyfriend comes up and takes her away. Now, I know you guys travel around the country being exotic and you get a lot of the girls, well..." I winked, doing my best Martin Mull imitation, "but what I was wondering is, do you ever have to engage in the art of seduction?"

I was hoping maybe he could give me some pointers, but he just stared at me blankly, tiredly. "What's that?" he said.

"You just answered my question," I said. Poor guy, maybe he thought I was talking about Betty I mean Susan Ford. Then again, maybe he really didn't know.

• • •

Ian MacLagan knows everything. How much to drink before a concert. How to shave without cutting himself. Better than to get fatheaded or disillusioned or disconnected from objective reality due to being a popstar. How, in short, to stay healthy in a situation that turns most other people into grotesque approximations of (supposedly supra-) humanity. We're kicked back with our legs over the arms of the chairs of Ron Wood's hotel room, where there is a little framed picture of Eric Clapton that he carries around with him placed reverently above the mirror, we're drinking Teacher's and beer and I'm asking them if they ever get a little weirded out by the contrast between their purportedly glamorous image and the reality of their physical selves.

"It's strange sometimes," said Mac. "We'll be coming back from a gig, you're all drrm-drrm-drrm," he varoomed, puffing himself up, "and you see some people at the reception that you think are coming from the gig, and you say 'Hi.' You don't want to blow 'em out, or walk by rudely, so you look at them, and then you realize that they don't know who you are, they're not there for anything to do with you. They're just staying at the hotel, or they work there. It can be embarassing."

"You preen yourself for the wrong person," I offer.

"Yeah. Or the reverse. You leaves the gig, and someone comes up to the car, and bangs on the window and yells, 'You useless bitch, get the hell out of here!' "

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"It strikes me as a little strange," said Wood, "which I can't play up to, or play along with. I could come onstage dressed as Gregg Allman, but I'd probably get the Iggy Pop award of the year. As far as stagewear or image, I never have any kind of regrets, because my playing would probably fall apart if I became self-conscious on that level."

"One thing I've always noticed," I said, "is that the Faces pulled some of the scummiest groupies this side of the New York Dolls."

MacLagan popped his eyes out. "Well, thanks a hell of a lot! Scummy? That's rjo way to talk about President Ford's daughter. ((At the time I didn't know what he was talking about and thought that this was some bozo non sequitur. I hadn't yet been apprised of the juicy gossip by Mssrs. Gaff and Toon.)) In England we used to get some real classics, if you think they're bad over here. Most of 'em I've crossed on this tour, they seem to get just younger and younger. I'm thirty this year."

"Ever feel like an old man in a young man's game?"

"Yeah, occasionally. Other times I feel like I'm sixteen or seventeen. When I start thinking about being thirty, I start thinking that I should be behaving like a thirty year old. Whatever that is . . ." Then he almost started feeling sorry for himself: "Why can't it be like the old days, when one band broke through really big, and sod the competition ..."

One guess who he was thinking this band should be, no I take that back, because part of the reason I am here is to find out if the Faces really do care, if they in fact have a future. They haven't had a new album out in two years. They just keep touring and touring, with basically the same show. They put up a marvelous show of good cheer. I asked Ron if he ever got bored with the whole idea of the band, and he came back with a standard musician's answer: "Although it seems like the same show, I know what you mean. We often get flashes of 'Are we giving them value,' you know. Of 'Oh, we can't play this again!' But it usually ends up that the extra numbers or the extra bits we put into the old numbers carry us through. We can thrive for twenty dates on one new number, and some of the old ones we wanted to kick out we may say, well, let's just do it for tonight, that may take on a great new feel and we'll keep it for the whole tour. Because although we're still doing 'It's All Over Now' and 'Losing You,' they're great warm-up numbers for the audience."

Uh huh. But he's right, and I had to admit that I had not seen the tiredness in the onstage Faces that I expected from this tour. I'd been amazed, in fact, at how tight and excited they continued to manage to be. It just may be that the Faces are the last of the great rock 'n' roll bands, in the sense that the Stones were a bunch of roughnecks who hung out together and didn't need Bobby Keyes' phone number, in the sense that you can have an organic band that's out for good times and hard kicks instead of being a set-up, as on one level or another every band that's come to prominence in the Seventies, from Roxy Music to the Blue Oyster Cult, has been a set-up. It just may be that the Faces have seen their day because they're too natural. Or maybe they haven't, and I'm more paranoid than Rod.

I asked why there had beeri no new album since early 1973's Ooh La La, and Kenny Jones delivered the expected answer: "Everybody's been working on different things."

"But doesn't that detract from the energy of the concentration of forces?"

"Funny thing, it made it better. Because we had that time off, we could get into different things at home. For some reason, when we came back together we played in a slightly different wayBefore we played so much that it got to be a bit too much of a regular thing."

"Well, why has it taken so long to get your new album together?"

"Well, when you take into consideration that everyone's been doing so many different things, and Rod makes his albums and we make our albums"

"Two years between Rod's albums, you know," I nagged.

"When we took a layoff between tours," said Kenny, "Wood did his album, Rod did his album, the Faces got left behind. And then back touring, and fitting in studio time was hard again. If we wanted it to work out really well, then we wouldn't really tour as much."

It's no secret that the Faces' albums have suffered in comparison to Rod's or the band's live show. And the live album was the worst. I asked them if they didn't feel a certain dissatisfaction in the spottiness of their records.

"I feel we could have done a lot better as a band," said Kenny.

"Ooh La La wasn't as good as it might have been," admitted Mac, "and the live album was nowhere near as good as it sounded when we listened to the playbacks fresh off making it, when we were still geared up from the gig, got very excited and said, 'Yeah, put it out!' Then later we heard it, and of course it didn't sound that good. But by that time it was too late. The things we've got now on cassette, just tapes of shows, are so much better than the live album.

"Ooh La La started out that we did a lot of songs really quick, and then found out that the keys were wrong for Rod, or that Rod and Ronnie Lane both wrote words for the same track, and there were disagreements about that. We spent too long on that album, it could have been really tight and really quick."

I was about to say that they were contradicting themselves, when Kenny got to the essence of the predicament: "You see, when everybody records on his own, and then comes to do the band's album, the ideas are not therp. They've all been used."

"Isn't that what destroys a lot of really good groups?" I asked, voicing my worst fears. Kenny had previously told me about his planned solo album, which I refuse to discuss here because I like him and because it has Tom Scott on it.

"With us I think it'll work now," said Mac. "It's like having affairs on the side. I think that the new one will be one of the best, for the Faces anyway, because we still haven't done the best we can do."

Obviously. But then, they have the out that there are certain cuts that exist in a sort of twilight zone betweeen Faces and Stewart albums, a seemingly irresoluble contradiction. Kenny: "There are tracks, like 'Natural Man' on Rod's album, the group did down in Australia. 'True Blue' on Rod's album was done by the band during the sessions for a Faces album. 'Losing You' . . . it's all there."

"Don't you ever feel a certain resentment that these were tracks that could have been on Faces albums?"

"No," averred Kenny. "They were his ideas, so he snapped,'em up for his album. I mean, that's fair enough . . ."

We spoke a bit about Eric Clapton, whom they all worshipped. I said that in my opinion his post-Cream playing was cold, that the same coldness had crept into the Stones, most likely for the same reason, and that anyway there were some people who were just better as sidemen. "Mick Ronson shouldn't make solo albums," I said. "He's an incredible guitar player that needs to be in a good band. I'd like to see Mick Ronson join the Stones, if Tony DeFries wasn't such an ass. I think he'd give them some kick, some new fire."

Point being, of course, that there is really only one leader in the Faces, and even if they do stay together I would hate to see the combined effects of myriad solo ventures and personal lassitude turn them cold. There are times you should say die. The Stones refuse to even as they say die in lyrics, and the music sounds, to me, professional and serious but arthritic. I am even more confused about the Faces, because there are more side flurries going on; there's more to be ambivalent about. Do you slog on, like the Stones, putting up a certain front while remaining intensely committed (were the Faces ever intensely committed?), or do you blow the whole thing to bits and bury your separate selves in egocentric mediocrity or session work?

I am still waiting for the Faces, or perhaps Rod Stewart, to make their Exile on Main Street. I am waiting for commitment. But maybe I am expecting the wrong thing from them. Kenny walked the middle line: "My favorite Stones album was Exile. You could listen to it a year later and still hear something new. It did create an atmosphere, that album. That's the thing I wars trying to explain about Clapton. I mean, I've done sessions with him, and he wants to be so perfect that he works at it all night, you tape tracks and you tape tracks, and the track that I think is the best has got all the atmosphere on it, but he's still trying for one more, and the playing is still fantastic, but the atmosphere is gone. That's the only fault I could find in Eric: he should choose a track that he's a bit rough and ready on. I know one thing I like about the Faces is that we're not too clockwork. Because we have off nights and good nights. If we had good nights every night it would be a drag. If we get criticised we take it all together, and it gives us strength. I believe in bands."

So do I, pal. So do I. W