The “stinking rotten album” that made Rod Stewart leave The Faces
It was inevitable that Rod Stewart was going to go off on his own after The Faces.
Even though the band was one of the greatest boozy rock and roll outfits that England had ever seen, there was always going to be something holding Stewart back if he kept playing the same kind of rock and roll songs all the time. He needed to find a better outlet, but there was a good chance that he could have seen the writing on the wall years before he started blowing up with his own classics.
But if you were to ask Stewart himself, he would have gladly kept playing with his band for the rest of his life. He never thought that going solo was an option in the early days, and since he had worked with Ronnie Wood like a brother throughout most of his career, he would have been glad to keep playing the dirtiest rock and roll that he could. But even if Jeff Beck saw something in him that no one else did, Stewart felt there was a lot of ground that wasn’t getting covered in his old band.
After all, ‘Maggie May’ was never going to work next to a song like ‘Stay With Me’, and as much as the rest of The Faces might have been thankful not to go through the embarrassing parts of his career, it’s not like they would have automatically said no to the massive hits. Being remembered for ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ may have been a mixed blessing, but the mountains of royalties that Stewart has isn’t something anyone would exactly shake a stick at when working on one of their records.
And it’s not like Stewart didn’t adapt to being a pop star in the right ways. ‘Young Turks’ and ‘Forever Young’ are some of the finest pop tunes that he ever made, and while The Faces did try their hand at making more commercial material, it wasn’t the direction that Stewart was comfortable with. He felt that the band did have a lot of potential, but when listening back to Ooh La La, he wasn’t exactly thrilled by what he heard when going through the entire album.
Which is strange to say about an album that feels like a piece of rock and roll history at this point. Ooh La La has been a staple of The Faces’ discography ever since Stewart went solo, but even when their management was toying with the idea of calling the band Rod Stewart and The Faces, Stewart felt that his last record with them left a lot to be desired when he heard it back years later.
The songs weren’t terrible by any stretch, but Stewart felt that they were capable of doing much more, especially since it would become the final album with him on vocals, saying, “I was interviewed by Melody Maker and I put down the group’s album. I said Ooh La La was a stinking rotten album. That’s what was in the paper. What I actually said was I think the band is capable of doing a better album than what they’ve done. I just don’t think we’ve found the right studio or the right formulas.”
And since Every Picture Tells a Story and Never a Dull Moment were gaining traction for years at this point, Stewart couldn’t have picked a better time to jump ship. The band weren’t floundering by any stretch, but since his solo star was on the rise, it was better for him to take a gamble and see where he would go when he started working on tracks like ‘Hot Legs’ and ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ than going back to his old ways.
Was there potential for the rest of The Faces to join him in the limelight? Definitely, but it was about more than the brotherhood whenever Stewart made his own hits. He felt that he needed a lot more areas to work in, and while anyone could have called him a sell-out for going disco in the late 1970s, the real sell-out would have been him trying to give the fans what he thought they wanted and never breaking any new ground.
