The person that made Rod Stewart leave The Faces: “I knew it was coming”
Rod Stewart was born to be a solo star, whether he knew it or not, back in the day.
Working with a band like The Jeff Beck Group is the kind of get that any vocalist would have been waiting their whole life for, but when listening to what he could do on his own, it would have been a crime if he were shackled to one group for the rest of his life. And while The Faces were a great incubator for him to hone his craft, it was only a matter of time before he started looking elsewhere once he had a few solo records under his belt.
But before he was even in The Faces, the idea of joining Beck was already a lot for Stewart to take in. The guitar genius was quickly turning into one of the most in-demand players in London, and when the band did their first tour of the US, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Stewart was allergic to stage performance, considering that he spent most of his first gig playing from behind the speakers before finally getting up onstage.
That may have been a case of stage fright, but when The Faces started, he was clearly in his element. None of them may have had the same grand dreams that the other tour-de-force bands from that time like Cream did, but they were normally out there to have a good time whenever they kicked into tunes like ‘Stay With Me’ live. But once Stewart put out records like Every Picture Tells a Story, things had started to feel a lot different.
There was no way that rustic approach to rock and roll was going to fit in with the same boozy rock and rollers in their setlist, but going solo was bound to be a much bigger jump. Stewart didn’t know if he was exactly ready for it yet, but when his confidante Ronnie Wood started to have second thoughts about staying with the group, he was practically given permission to go out on his own.
Wood had already received the call asking if he wanted to join The Rolling Stones, so if Stewart’s best friend was jumping ship, it made sense for him to search for new sounds in his solo career, saying, “I was always about [The Faces]. You’ve got to remember Woody was the one who left first – he confided in me that Mick Jagger had nicked him. I knew it was coming, and, you know, once Woody had left there was no point in me staying, but I swear to god I’d have stayed with the Faces as long as they wanted me to.
It’s not like it didn’t turn out for the best, either. The Faces could have easily been a great rock and roll outfit had they kept at it, but judging by all of the records that The Stones put out with Wood, he seemed to be the glue that held them together through their rougher periods, especially in the 1980s when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards began getting a little too testy with each other over where the band was supposed to be going.
And while Stewart’s career can be a bit of a mixed bag in some areas, he wasn’t going to live his life like a flash in the pan after The Faces. ‘Maggie May’ was only a teaser of things to come, and even when he started working with synths in the 1980s, the reason why each of those tunes worked was because of how much Stewart put into every single track, especially on songs like ‘Young Turks’.
So while it’s never an easy decision to leave a band out of the blue, Stewart’s decision was a long time coming. No one wanted to be the first one to break up the family, but if he had tried to carry on with the rest of the band, missing out on a lifetime of great music in his solo career wouldn’t have been fair on the fans.
