“It’s in the contract, you know,” says Ronnie Wood, trying to lock his features into a suitably stern Rolling Stones scowl. “You can’t be seen smiling, unless another member of the band is present.” Whereupon the baleful glare breaks ranks and Ron Wood’s mug lights up with his well-known loony-tunes grin.

The flip attitude displayed by the group’s newest member toward the sacred Rolling Stones image is just one indication that Wood isn’t about to blend quietly into the Stones fabric as an anonymous ex-Face in the new crowd. A year-and-a-half after his first spin with the Stones, Woody is making his presence felt, musically and otherwise .

“The Faces used to go on stage in any state and have such a great time,” says Wood, chatting away a misty afternoon on the patio of his beachfront home, “and the same thing basically goes with the Stones. But then in the Stones you see that everyone’s really concentrating —everyone’s ready, there’s no fucking around.

“But I think that I’ve spread a little bit of the common man there. Everyone is a bit looser. I get a lot of comfort when I’m being shoved around by Mick, or when we’re all trying to trip him up, or when he throws a bucket of water over at Bill Wyman to make him move. It’s already there. It just needs to be brought out.”

Also lying dormant, until Wood recently brought it out for the Stones’ European tour, was material of “Around and Around”/“Little Red Rooster” vintage. “It’s not only me. I thought a lot of people in general would like to hear it too,” he says. “No, I didn’t have to push hard for it at all. It was no sweat.”

Wood’s perspective as a newcomer probably helped on that angle, as did his strong memories of the early days. “The first time I saw the Stones, I think it was the Richmond Jazz Festival,” recalls Woody, who at the time was a teenage art student with his own band, the Thunderbirds. “It was great—this incredibly bulging tent rocking from side to side. Everybody was singing ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ louder than the band was playing it.

lean never really believe that fame ever came my way.

“I saw them do another gig at this club that was an old air-raid shelter. I saw them turn up in their van. They had this kind of Morris van where you open up the back and they all fell out, all in their stage outfits—creased-up shirts and tab collars. Brian Jones was the one that appeared in the wings swigging beer while the Alex Harvey band wasplaying old Jimmy Reed stuff for two-and-a-half hours.”

The connections between Wood and the Stones continued sporadically over the years. He first worked with his future partners on a Rod Stewart-Pat Arnold session, produced by Mick with Keith on guitar. Earlier, he had encountered both of his predecessors in the Stones’ second-guitar post:

“Nicky Hopkins introduced me to Brian down at Olympic Studios. I just thought, ‘I hope he doesn’t stay with the band very long.’ He’d really gone off on a tangent by then. You could tell he wasn’t thinking like they were. He was far more into that mystical side and weird instruments and trying to put it over on the band, and I thought, They ain’t gonna bite it. ’ I thought maybe one day he’d swing back round to the rock ‘n’roll way of thinking again. Then, unfortunately ...”

And with the Birds (sans Thunder-), Wood got to know the guitarist of a band called the Gods: “The Birds and the Gods played quite a few gigs together, and Mick Taylor always used to come up to me and say, ‘Oh man, you played great!’ And I said, ‘No, it’s you that played great!’ He used to go so far some nights that he couldn’t go on ... I remember going on and playin’ for him once.”

A decade later, of course, Ron Wood went on again for Mick T ay lor, in more illustrious circumstances. “I think he left the Stones because of the overpowering thing he had going with Jack Bruce,” says Wood. “He felt that the musical limits within the Stones were confining him too much. He wanted to broaden out, and that’s what he thought this big thing up in the sky with Jack Bruce was gonna allow him to do.”

On the ’75 Stones tour and during the Black and Blue sessions, Wood was still an interim Stone. As a full-time, permanent member, he can finally start to exert his musical influence, but itwasn’t always so: “At first, I didn’t really want to step on the dynamic duo’s feet. And there was always the chance that I’d present my ideas and they would get kicked out, rudely, whereupon I wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Stone. 1 wouldn’t have joined the band. But they didn’t get kicked out rudely, they got entertained straightaway.”

Although Woody’s services were solicited directly upon Taylor’s departure, there was some doubt in the mind of at least one Rolling Stone. “Keith has told me that he was a bit skeptical about having me,” Ronnie says, “because maybe our styles were too similar. But he soon found out that -there were enough differences. That was all poppycock.

“I only realized after I left the Faces and joined the Stones that I have a lot more freedom. It gave me a chance to air the lead guitar bit. With the Faces, most of it was rhythm, then again I could branch out and lead for short spasms at a time. With Keith, the balance is just right . . . The first few sessions we did, we just had a good feeling together.”

Now that Ron’s collaborating with Mick and Keith on the new material, can we expect a touch of Faces to enter the Stones sound? “Yes,” replies Woody, “I should think you could'. There are certain meters where I’ve learned a few of their techniques and introduced a few of mine. That’s where the interesting blend will come.

“I think Black and Blue is a taste of what’s to come, the start of st^ige nine or whatever of the Stones . . . We have a lot of numbers in the pot at the moment, stewing over and ready to take shape. I’m looking forward to the next lot of studio sessions.”

His hjgh-level transfer to the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band from perhaps the World’s Most Entertaining Rock ‘n’ Roll Band took Woody from one extreme to the other in the art of making records, and he appreciates the difference. “You’ve got to have a lot of patience in the Stones,” he explains, “because when we record, it’s no surprise if we’re doing one number for two days solid without a break. I love to see it through like that. A lot of dedication there.”

It wasn’t quite thatway in the Faces: “Usually there would be Mac sitting there at the piano and me still ready to go, and everyone else was gone. We didn’t have that dedication to the studio which is so necessary. I mean, you don’t have to pack up at 11 or 12 o’clock. If something ain’t there you

either beat it out till it comes or you give up and start something else.

“But we would tend to get a track down within a certain time limit, and if we went on playing it for hours afterwards, immediately/ the curtain of gloom would be pulled down over that session . . . And there was always people’s home lives, and someone having a fridge delivered in the morning or picking up a new car or something.

“A producer would have been good as well. Glyn Johns got nearest to it on ANod’sAsGoodAsA Wink, but at the time we didn’t know he was producing. Yeah,hewas there, but we were calling all the shots, so we thought. . . Toward the end of Faces, Rod was saying,

Keith has told me that he was a bit skeptical about having me, because maybe our styles were too sim liar. That was all poppycock. ‘Well, I don’t care who it is, but I’d really dig the' chance to produce an album, in conjunction with one or another of the band’—so there wouldn’t be all of these different viewpoints flying around. That was a good idea, but it never happened.”

Like all good dockside brawlers, though , the Faces went down swinging aiming till the end for that great Faces album. “Some of the best tracks that we’d ever done together were the last sessions in Air Studios,” says Wood. “But there was this definite undercurrent from Rod, like, This will never work.’ And me and Mac and Kenny and everyone, we thought, ‘It is going to work’.” Only five tracks from that early ’75 session were completed, however, and there would be no “last” Faces album.

Even after Rod’s apparent knockout punch later in the year, even with Woody heavily engaged with the Stones, the group kept at it: “I still wanted to keep Mac and Kenny and Tetsu and me going. I rang up from different points of the compass, saying, ‘Let’s make this one last album. I probably will join the Stones but meantime we’ll all really get crackin’ on this last album.’

“It nearly happened. There was some stuff in the can that never got finished. But then we were met with not too much enthusiasm from Warner Bros. With Rod gone and me about to join the Stones, they really didn’t want to know. So as soon as they knocked it on the head, 1 said, ‘Well, I can’t stand around anymore’,” Woody affects an accent that straddles the FrenchGerman border. “Goodbye to Faces, ’alio to Stones.”

The elusiveness of an album that would capture the spirit and power of the group was just one of the frustrations that culminated in the breakup. When Ron Wood talks about Rod Stewart and the Atlantic Crossing episode, a hint of lingering affection intrudes on his frankness. “He just had to get his American-musicians trip off his back,” he says. “Well, yeah, the band was upset—-when they heard what he’d done. No one liked all the clinical feels.”

But, Woody says, things were still “rosy” with the band when he came off the Stones’ ’75 jaunt and joined the Faces fall tour. By the time it reached the halfway point, though, he was in the habit of taking a pencil to the logo and changing it to “Faces Down-Fall Tour.” “Eventually,” says Ron, “all the vibes cut through. The rot had set in.” Still, he insists, there was never any onstage hostility between him and Rod: “We always had a laugh, right up to the last gig.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41

While the Faces struggled in the studio over the years, Rod Stewart turned out a string of highly-acclaimed solo albums. How did that sit with the band? “It was never shown at the time,” says Wood, “but there must have been quite a bit of resentment. It wouldn’t affect me because I was always a part of those albums. The others were sort of let in for one track... At first, he wouldn’t have put his albums above the band, but after years of pummeling down his ear by record company people and all that—‘Solo Rod’—it must have got to him a little bit.”

Wood turns diplomatic on the question of Rod’s “going Hollywood”: “He had to handle his new life in his own way, right or wrong. I don’t know. I read all these strange things and hear all these strange rumors, but when I see him he’s exactly the same as he used to be. I played football with him the other week, and he came up to me halfway through the game and said, ‘Nice to be playing with you again, Ron.’ ” Woody the rock critic deems A Night on the Town an improvement over Atlantic Crossing (“There are some sparse moments I felt could have been filled in a little bit,” he says) , but when he’s asked to evaluate Britt’s vocal contribution, Wood’s diplomacy is shattered by an explosive laugh. When his giddiness subsides, Ron recalls: “I got a private hearing of that before it came out, with Rod in his sitting room while Britt was pounding on the door to be let in. We were saying, ‘No, let us have our men’s chat.’ But in the end,” adds Wood, sounding wistful, “he had to run off and things were cut short. That’s the way it is these days with him and me. We never get a chance to talk.”

Actually, Woody’s been pretty busy himself lately, with two main preoccupations heading the list: the October 30th birth of son Jesse James Wood, and editing the hundreds of hours of recent concert tapes that will be whittled down into the next Stones release, a double live album. And just last night Mick called about'the possibility of some future touring dates, a prospect that suits Wood the trouper just fine:

“I want to tour more than we do... Yeah, I push for it. So does Keith. He says, ‘Next time you speak to Peter Rudge tell him I want a tour, and when you’ve spoken to him ring me up and then I’ll ring him up and we’ll get at it.’ It comes in spurts. I think we’re in a lull at the moment. This next one is important because it won’t be in big places. It’s gonna be smaller halls, like two or three thousand. I’d like to just spring it on people.”

As one who holds strong memories of the early Stones’ rough-and-tumble image, does Ron Wood find that the band’s jet-set associations and rockaristocracy status cut into that primary rebel mystique? “That’s all a bit new to me,” he says. “I can handle it, but I really can’t get too heavily into it. Then again, it doesn’t seem to get in the way.

“I mean,” he continues, brightening: “we still have Keith in trouble. We’re slowly crossing off countries that we can’t get into. I still think the Stones mean a lot, especially when they do turn out for live gigs. That’s when you see that people are still there with it, you know, still wondering... I speak to Keith about once a week in England, and every time I speak to him he sounds better. That’s why I think he’ll be ready to work soon.”

Woody’s most recent vinyl release was the soundtrack album for Maho-' ney’s Last Stand, which he and Ronnie Lane finally finished after starting work on it a few years ago. “It’s the sort of thing that you can put on and go about your day’s business without thinking about,” he mused.

Somehow, amid the impending Stones live album, Stones shows and Stones studio sessions, Wood expects to get his third solo album together. “I’d just like to sit back and assess the tracks that the Faces laid down that were never released, and there’s a couple of things I did on Clapton’s new album that I’d like to get back... Then again, I may shelve all those loose tracks floating about and start a brand new

thing with one producer and one set of that seems to be as much for rectifying youthful folly as for furthering a full-scale solo career. “He’s rescuing me from a lot of things that I’m up to my neck in from the past,” says Wood, flashing back to more vulnerable days.

“I got involved with lawyers in England, who were basically not out for my own good at all. It’s the usual story where you’re trying to salvage money or contracts or things they made me sign while I was in the depths of touring and sort of out of my brain. Mind you, I’m not prone to signing anything, but it’s amazing what you can do without even signing something... Yeah, you can’t help but get wiser after the fifth time your throat’s been cut.”

Ronnie Wood, the baby of the Stones at 29, can cut a striking popstar figure, but the creases in his face don’t seem the scars of hard living so much as traces'of lots of good, hard laughs. His veteran’s savvy is tempered by a rookie’s enthusiasm and, considering his prestigious position in the rock hierarchy, he’s pretty level-headed, even modest.

“I mean,” he explains, “I can’t see myself from the outside, so I can never really believe that fame ever came my way. I mean, I’ve had little bits of fame here, there and everywhere, and little touches of great moments within groups. But when you feel like hot shit, you’re usually in the middle of a tour or something, and everybody in the group is some kind of hot shit. Then as soon as the tour is over, it takes a little while to calm down, and then you’re just back to being on your own.

“I still love to party, and that’s where people impress upon you the popstar bit. Then the other thing is where you walk into a supermarket and there’s a little stirring in the corner, and finally someone comes over and they say, ‘Are you really Rod Stewart?’ that’s what really brings it down to earth.”

In the supermarket maybe, but that character with the wacky grin up on the stage sticking his foot into Mick Jagger’s path is Ronnie Wood. Definitely.