“The soul of the band”: The artist Rod Stewart said broke up The Faces
Not every band is meant to be in the limelight forever. As much as people like the idea of their favourite acts going on and on for eternity, there’s bound to be those moments where things either go off the rails or they start putting out records that don’t have the same staying power as their classics. While that can only be measured over time, Rod Stewart can narrow it down to one person when talking about the breakup of The Faces.
Then again, The Faces only looks like a blip on Stewart’s radar when he peeks back at the massive career he’s had. Even though they are still known as the fixture of bluesy hard rock for their time, it’s surreal to have those records in the same discography as the man who made songs like ‘Young Turks’ or worked with someone like Jeff Beck.
While still cutting his teeth, though, Stewart took everything great about hard rock and crystallised it when he started singing with The Faces. Not every song was meant to be a hit, but listening back to every record that he worked on, their material felt like it were destined to be belted out of pubs across the world, whether that was them playing old blues tunes or Stewart trying his hand at blending Janis Joplin with John Lee Hooker on ‘Stay With Me’.
Whereas Stewart was the face of the group, the band’s spirit belonged to Ronnie Lane. While Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton were still lighting up the blues scene when The Faces began, Lane’s approach to the guitar was a signature part of their sound, always throwing in little twists on the blues formula and filling out the sound much like John Lennon did on the early Beatles recordings.
Although the band continued up until Ooh La La, Lane had started to lose interest in being a sideman. Stewart had been slowly becoming the breakout star, and by 1973, Lane figured that it would be better to strike out on his own and let Stewart be the true star of the show.
Even though Stewart would eventually transform himself into one of the greatest solo artists of the 1970s, he knew that The Faces would be a shell of what they once were when Lane left the fold, saying, “We’d lost the soul of the band when Ronnie Lane left to go and do his gypsy tour around Britain. And once we lost Ronnie, then I think the other Ronnie (Wood) was always gonna join The Stones eventually. But hey, they were five hilarious years.”
At the same time, losing Lane may have been a blessing in disguise for Stewart. Despite having to work out the bugs of his old sound during the first few years of his solo career, tunes like ‘Maggie May’ saw him getting in touch with the rootsy side of his sound a bit more and showing the world what he could sound like when he wasn’t belting at the top of his range.
Even though Lane did have a few bright spots throughout his solo career through his collaborations with Pete Townshend and Steve Marriott, some magic was left on the cutting room floor when he left the fold in 1973. It’s nice to look back on, but even Stewart probably couldn’t capture that camaraderie with his newer bands if he tried.
