40 Years Ago Today: The Faces on BBC2

On April 1st, 1972, BBC2's "Sounds for Saturdays" aired a 43-minute performance by The Faces, then at the peak of their powers and popularity.

The Line-up:

Ronnie Wood (gtr, bvoc)
Rod Stewart (voc)
Ronnie Lane (bass, voc)
Ian McLagan (keyb, bvoc)
Kenny Jones (dr)


Here now is the concert in its entirety.

  .
- Three Button Hand Me Down (Rod Stewart/Ian McLagan)
- Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
- Too Much Woman-Street Fighting Man-Too Much Woman (Ike
Turner-Mick Jagger/Keith Richards-Ike Turner)
- Miss Judy’s Farm (Ron Wood/Rod Stewart)
- Love In Vain (Robert Johnson)
- Stay With Me (Ron Wood/Rod Stewart)
- I’m Losing You (Norman Whitfield/Eddie Holland/Cornelius Grant)

After the BBC2 show and four gigs around the UK, The Faces went on a short US tour. They spent much of 1972 on the road playing both Faces and solo Stewart tunes. "Maggie May" would usually invoke some kind of a stage rush. Stewart tried not to overshadow the rest of the band. As he told a reporter from Rolling Stone : "We're a band, and I want people to realize it's a band up there.The other guys in the band are strong, too, in what they do. I wouldn't be in this band if I didn't think they were equally strong."

Dave Marsh of Creem describes The Faces on stage:

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. McLagan and Jones don't do much, but they provide the backbeat that's a necessity as backdrop for the theater.

   "Stay With Me" began climbing the charts that summer reaching  #6 in the UK and #17 in the US. But when Stewart's Never A Dull Moment came out in July, and hit #1 in the UK and #2 in the US, tensions in the band grew. Ronnie Lane left in May of 1973. After some time off and one more album, Ooh La La,  The Faces officially broke up in late 1975.

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Deep Cuts: Pictures of Home

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For all those hours we've spent trying to dissect lyrics and admiring musicality, sometimes we just want our music to be big and stupid. With Machine Head ( released March 31, 1972), Deep Purple is all riffs, banal lyrics and instruments turned up to 11. Which is about the age you need to let yourself feel to really enjoy it.





The album kicks off with "Highway Star" which , to me at least, signifies their ambition to finally conquer the United States. After all nobody in the UK often uses the word "highway". Like T-Rex's "Jeepster" and Alice Cooper's "Under My Wheels",the rumbling "Highway Star" interweaves cars and girls to the degree they might as well be the same thing: "Nobody gonna take my car/I'm gonna race it to the ground/Nobody gonna beat my car/It's gonna break the speed of sound" Then about two minutes in, keyboardist Jon Lord plays a little Bach-esque solo ( picture Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap playing his lovely "Mach" number on piano, "Lick My Love Pump").

This monster album also contains "Smoke On The Water" ( Number 4 on Total Guitar Magazine's Greatest Guitar Riffs Ever), the hilarious sci-fi themed "Space Truckin"(We had a lot of luck on Venus/We always have a ball on Mars) and , surprisingly the first single, "Never Before", for which Deep Purple made a promo video.




But my deep cut choice is Track 3 , the driving "Pictures Of Home". Recording in Switzerland, Ian Gillian was apparently not just homesick ( and recovering from hepatitis) but feeling paranoid when he wrote the lyrics."I'm alone here/ With emptiness, eagles and snow/ Unfriendliness chilling my body/And whispering pictures of home". As if to mirror Gilllian's unease, Lord, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore  and even bassist Roger Glover all play unsettling solos.




Machine Head reached number 1 in the United Kingdom and stayed in the top 40 for 20 weeks. It reached number 7 in the United States, remaining on the Billboard 200 for 118 weeks. Heavy metal fans can all thank Deep Purple for this big, loud and dumb album. A true classic!

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Lester Bangs And The Spotlight Kid: 40 Years Ago Today

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In the March 20, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, legendary music critic Lester Bangs gave the new Captain Beefheart album, The Spotlight Kid, a rave review. Bangs said Beefheart had finally found that sweet spot where great artistry and mass appeal intersected.


He has been called everything in the past from a man wasting the clear ability to be the world's greatest white blues singer, to an impossibly complex musician who may or may not be the real avant-garde, but is certainly an elitist taste. While I have always held to the opinion that there's been nothing playing on the face of the earth as far out as Beefheart for about 3 or 4 years now, I also recognize that his former style was a bit beyond the attention span or interest of the average listener. Which is certainly not to slight mass tastes, either; after all, why should things have to be as far out as possible all the time?



Bangs singled out the single "I'm Gonna Booglarize Ya, Baby" and its B-Side "Click Clack", a train song he describes as the best thing on the album. Bangs summarizes:

There comes a time in the career of every pop musician who also happens to be a serious artist when he realizes the need for a balance between the most intensely personal type of statement and music of mass appeal. If he can strike that balance without compromising his integrity, he is probably a greater artist than even his staunchest fans previously suspected, and with any exposure at all the public would pick up immediately on the truth and beauty of what he is doing. With this album, Captain Beefheart has struck that balance with total success, and I wouldn't be surprised if he were a major star a year from now. Though you may have been a great shadow hovering over our music for half a decade now, Don, it can be said that in 1972 you've really arrived.

The Spotlight Kid was indeed Captain Beefheart's highest charting album, peaking at #131 in the Billboard Top 200. The follow-up album Clear Spot was another commercial attempt, released in October of 1972. I'll be writing about that one later this year.

Alice Cooper on the cover of the March 30, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone

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Forgotten Funk from 1972

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Southern fried stone cold afro-funksters from Louisiana pay respect to The Godfather of Soul on this cut. The whole album is full of sizzling, greasy funk.

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From Atlanta G-A comes the hot funk of Black Heat, another band featuring so many musicians ( Hammond Organ, Congas, Harmonica, horn section) you have to wonder if anybody got paid enough to buy themselves a fried chicken lunch. True phonksters say this is a must have.

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Between eight and eleven West Indian expats gathered together in the UK to record this funky/psychedelic/jazz/rootsy LP featuring "Bra", a song sampled by both Grandmaster Flash and De La Soul. The LP also includes "The Message" which went Top 40 in the US R+B charts and led to a tour with Al Green.

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These Long Island funksters moved to Paris where they tore up the scene and drew inspiration from their biggest fans, North African immigrants. The album didn't hit stateside until 1976 when disco ruled the airwaves and record stacks. Decouvrez The Lafayette Afro Rock Band! ( Their 1974 cut "Hihache" has been sampled by everybody from Biz Markie to Wu Tang Clan)

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This East L.A. latin rock band hits a funky Meters tipped groove on "Almendra". A shame they were one of a handful of Santana inspired bands who had one of those "one and done" musical careers.

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40 Years Ago Today: A Hunk, A Hunk Of Burning Love

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On this day in 1972, Elvis Presley recorded his final Top Ten hit "Burning Love". The song would rise all the way to #2 before getting blocked from the top spot by "My Ding A Ling", an egregious novelty hit by another rock n roll veteran Chuck Berry. (And yet you can buy the song on Elvis's 30#1 Hits collection.



Presley reportedly did not care for the song which was first recorded by Arthur "You Better Move On" Alexander in 1971.

The song was written by Nashville recluse Dennis Linde whose 1973 version sounds like something John Fogerty might have put out in the mid 80's. Linde played guitar on the Elvis single and alos wrote "Goodbye Earl" for the Dixie Chicks.

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40 Years Ago Today: Mott The Hoople Break Up ( Or Do They?)

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It happens more often than we'd like to remember. Great bands end not with a bang but with a whimper. And so it would have been for Mott The Hoople. On March 26, 1972 Ian Hunter and the boys decided to call it quits. Had it not been for David Bowie, Mott's last album would have been Brain Capers ( a hard rocking effort that kicks off with  "Death May Be Your Santa Claus") and their last single would have been their cover of Danny Whitten and Neil Young's "Downtown" ( aka "C'mon Baby Let's Go Downtown") which features the lead vocals of not Ian Hunter but Mick Ralphs.



It was, of course, a huge flop! But by then, so was Mott The Hoople. They rocked as hard as ever but that didn't translate in ticket or record sales. They were actually losing money on tour. In Zurich they landed a gig at a club that was once a huge gas holder As Ian Hunter remarked "If this is fame, then forget it."

When they returned to England the band members set off in their own directions with Overend Watts calling up David Bowie to see if he needed a bassist. Bowie, who had once offered Mott "Suffragette City", got the band together and played them a new song he'd written. That song was "All The Young Dudes" and it would not only revive Mott's career but would make them one of the biggest rock n roll acts in the mid-70's.

I'll post a whole lot more on  Mott The Hoople  on September 8, the 40th anniversary of All The Young Dudes.

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40 Years Ago Today : Kinks Kronikles

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      Like a lot of Americans when I thought of The Kinks I thought of "You Really Got Me", "All Day And All Of The Night" and "Lola" and not about a hell of a lot more. I was familiar with the One For The Road live album and Give The People What They Want but, added together, I wasn't getting much more than the three chord anthem side of this band. And then, in college, somebody lent me The Kink Kronikles, a bargain priced ( $5.99) double album compilation  of what at least one man, music critic John Mendelsohn, considered to be some of the best songs The Kinks recorded between 1966 and 1970. And I've been a huge fan ever since.

  Somebody with a critical ear really needed to have done a double album like this for The Beach Boys (1967-1973) but that's a topic for another post. ( What songs would I put on a Beach Boys Kronikles?)




   Of course you can take issue with some of Mendelsohn's choices. Including only the title cut from Village Green Preservation Society probably delayed my discovering my favorite Kinks album by at least two years. From Face to Face, of course you should pick "Sunny Afternoon" . I can understand "Fancy".  But "Holiday in Waikiki" over "House in the Country" or "Too Much on My Mind"? That's nuts.




  Still Kinks Kronikles, released March 25, 1972 and compiled without the assistance of The Kinks who left Reprise for RCA,  is a generous treasure chest full of gems: singles that made no impact in the US ( "Autumn Almanac", "Days") and glorious B sides ( "She's Got Everything", "Mindless Child of Motherhood").



Robert Christgau gives the compilation an A and Rolling Stone ranked the album #231 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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