by Rod Stewart
But everywhere we went we were gathering fans. That first tour of America lasted ten weeks in all and properly brought the band together, both on and off the stage. Returning to England that summer was tough – down to earth with a bump. We went from acclaim in big, well-organised theatres in the States to relative indifference in places like Cooks Ferry Inn in Edmonton in London. Audiences in our homeland were far slower to warm to us. Many people clearly regarded us as drunken tarts and cockney oiks. Others were suspicious of us because they couldn’t quite make out what our connection was with the Small Faces, whose chart hits in the sixties had left them with the image, as far as some people were concerned, of a ‘teenybop’ act.
Accordingly, in June, at an outdoor show, staged in aid of the World Wildlife Fund at Dudley Zoo in the West Midlands, the Faces went on after the Edgar Broughton Band, who had gone down so well that within three numbers of our set starting we were getting jeered at and canned. It would have got much nastier if Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin hadn’t been there. He saw we were in trouble and came out on the stage and sang ‘It’s All Over Now’ with me. Because Plant was a Midlander and a local hero, his appearance turned the audience and saved us.
A key part of beginning to win British audiences over was earning the admiration of John Peel, the Radio 1 DJ. In 1970, Peel had just started hosting The Peel Sessions, which would feature a band playing live in front of a small audience, assembled at the BBC’s studios in Lower Regent Street in London. Peel loved the Faces and he had us on the show in June. We recorded ‘You’re My Girl’, ‘Wicked Messenger’, ‘Devotion’ and ‘It’s All Over Now’ and Peel said all sorts of supportive things. It really helped to get us across to people and break down some resistance. This was the beginning of my long, friendly relationship with Peel, during the course of which I was a guest at his wedding and, as I recall, fell into a lengthy conversation with an elderly aunt of his from Wales. The Faces recorded many further Peel radio sessions, when we would cause him terrible quantities of stress by keeping him in the pub opposite the studios until the very last minute before the broadcast was due to start. He would get in a right old panic and sometimes there was even a BBC heavy sent in to try to heave us across the road. We always made it, though.
In October 1970, we returned to America for twenty-eight more dates. And when we reached Milwaukee, we were told that the remaining sixteen shows on the tour were already sold out – an amazing result. We celebrated by drinking the bar dry and then, in the middle of the night, by storming Billy Gaff’s hotel bedroom, turning the bed over, removing all the light bulbs and flooding the bathroom. Gaff, by the way, was in the bed at the time.
Of course, hotel demolition was something for which the Faces very quickly became notorious. In our defence, I would point out that a lot of what we got up to in this area wasn’t so much wanton destruction as creative alteration. The removal of furnishings from a room, say, would frequently be followed by the reassembling of said furnishings, in perfect working order, in another location, such as the corridor, a balcony or the hotel garden. In our further defence, I would say that we were often extremely bored. In 1970, we spent a total of four months on the road in America, split over those two tours. Away from home for that length of time, it was inevitable that fingers would start to twitch. Somehow one found that nothing passed a dull afternoon in Pittsburgh quite so efficiently as stuffing a lift full of mattresses and sending it down to the lobby. Withdrawing the bolts holding bedframes together, so that the bed was a glorious slapstick moment waiting to happen, was also popular. The removal of the microphone from the mouthpiece of the telephone handset, to the shouty enragement of the next user, had its advocates too, me among them.
Paintings on hotel walls, of course, were very vulnerable to alteration. If there was a medieval scene, one of us might draw a jet on it, or perhaps a bicycle. Woody used to do a very good aeroplane on any kind of reproduction seventeenth-century sylvan scene hung above a hotel bed.
Or, of course, there was always the ever-popular cartoon male appendage, or knob. I was particularly fond of a drawn knob in those days, and would inscribe one upon almost anything, to order. As an artist, the early to mid 1970s were very much my ‘knob period’. And you could always tell my work, because my knobs were always ‘after the occasion’ – sloping downwards, with drips. That was my signature knob. Everybody else’s went boldly upwards, but I preferred to create something a little more poignant. That would be my artistic sensitivity coming through, I guess.
Actually, now I come to think of it, the knob-drawing went on well after the Faces, and continued deep into the 1980s. In fact, shaming to admit, even now, confronted, as one sometimes is in the more genteel kind of household, with a visitor’s book, I can still feel the instinctive urge to – as it were – produce my knob. At the raging peak of my knob-based graffiti mania, my knob was frequently turning up in people’s passports – including, as a matter of fact, really embarrassingly recently, after a shared flight from Dublin to London, the passports of all three members of the boy band McFly. ‘What am I going to do?’ people will say, in genuine panic, when they discover a phallus in Biro on the photo page of their government-issued international travel document. To which the most efficient answer is, as it always has been: turn it into a tree and say your three-year-old did it.
On top of the graffiti and the disruption, relations between the Faces and their hoteliers were not improved by our habit of inviting the entire audience back to our hotel after the show. I would issue the invitation from the stage, telling everyone where we were staying and what floor we were on. And sometimes we would have literally hundreds of people in the corridor – most of them behaving very respectfully, I should add. Kids would turn up with their own wine, and you could leave the door to your room unlocked and nothing would be missing in the morning. However, it can’t be denied that, on some occasions, in the more advanced stages of these evenings, nudity in the swimming pool was a distinct possibility, and also, back up in the bedrooms, acts of a sexual nature. For a bloke to have long hair, to be a member of a rock band and to be English was clearly a very powerful combination at this time for young American girls. None of us was especially loyal when we were on tour. But the way we looked at it, if we weren’t on tour, we wouldn’t be shagging about. A pretty feeble piece of logic, but there it was.
Incidentally, one time we were on tour with Deep Purple and I gave out the address of their hotel instead of ours. That didn’t go down well.
Of course, none of these practices were very astute from a financial point of view. The band was continually having to fork over large amounts of money to appease the managers of damaged hotels and dissuade them from involving the police. Billy Gaff would to go to check out and it wouldn’t be, ‘Anything from the mini-bar last night, sir?’ It would be, ‘Here’s your bill for the future cost of redecorating the ninth floor.’ In Cleveland one time, Gaff found his path to the exit blocked by an irate manager and the local police sheriff. It cost him $5,000 in cash to get away. It wasn’t the only time.
This behaviour eventually lost our touring outfit the use of the Holiday Inn chain. After one bathroom flood too many, we were finally blacklisted and banned from all Holiday Inn establishments – the first rock group, as far as we were aware, to whom this had happened. To beat the ban, we started booking ourselves in as Fleetwood Mac. When that was rumbled, we used the name the Grateful Dead. There is always a way around these things.
* * *
I hadn’t touched cocaine before the Faces, but on tour with them in America it became freely available. We all rather liked it. Dope was smoked in the band, too, but not by me because I was too scared of wrecking my voice. I would chew a bit, very rarely, just for a dare or to be sociable. But cocaine seemed like a better idea. And cocaine was best of all, we keenly felt, in pharmaceutical form.
The very good news about that type of cocaine, we happily discovered – quite apart from the almost immediate euphoria it
induced – was that, when you were on it, you could still get an erection. On other, less pure kinds of nasty street cocaine, it was like rowing a boat with a piece of rope, as the old saying has it. But with the pharmaceutical stuff, there appeared to be no immediate downside. Mac had a fake carnation in the buttonhole of his stage jacket which he would sprinkle with cocaine before a show, thus enabling him to tip his nose and inhale a reviving draught of powder during the performance. If the rest of us wanted a tiny snort, just to keep our danders up, we would have to pop behind the amps. And this will probably sound peculiar, from a modern perspective, but it felt like a very innocent pleasure. It was almost a schoolboy thing – silly fun. A lot of the pleasure was bound up with the thrill of getting away with it, with being naughty. It didn’t feel the way it later did, all shrouded with guilt and the feeling that you were part of the workings of some huge, monstrous, destructive industrial machine.
Mind you, the amusement slightly went out of the cocaine experience one morning in the spring of 1973. The previous night, the Faces had played a particularly storming gig at the Locarno Ballroom in Sunderland, watched by some of the players of Sunderland Football Club, who were still celebrating a victory over Arsenal the previous weekend in the semi-final of the FA Cup. (They would go on to win the cup that year, beating Leeds United against all the odds and becoming the nation’s favourite team for about ten minutes.)
A lot of footballers seemed to like the Faces. There was a sense that – give or take a bit of drug use and some hotel demolition – we were part of the same culture. The atmosphere at a Faces gig in England was like a benign and optimistic version of the atmosphere at a football stadium: lots of shouting and cheering and chanting and the hoisting aloft of tartan scarves. Football and the Faces seemed to be on common ground.
Anyway, after the show, Billy Hughes, the Scotland international, asked Woody and me if we wanted to join the Sunderland lads for training the next morning. So we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed to the ground. And it was there, in a private moment, beside the pitch, ostensibly while watching what was going on, that Woody pushed his face towards me, with his head slightly tipped back, and said, ‘Here, have a look at this, would you?’ And by adjusting the angle of my head and looking up his nose, I could make out a small ray of sunlight where, in the conventional way of things, it really shouldn’t have been, passing through his septum.
It was time, clearly, to think again about the cocaine snorting we had been doing. One idea, clearly, would have been to stop taking cocaine. Another idea, though – and for some reason this seemed to appeal to us both more – was to find another way to take it that didn’t involve the nose. So we started buying anti-cold capsules from the chemist’s, separating the two halves of the capsules, replacing their contents with a pinch of cocaine and then taking the capsules anally, where, of course, the human body being a wonderful thing, they would dissolve effortlessly into the system.
* * *
Bingo. We found that worked extremely efficiently. It was a double result because Woody’s hooter was obviously flying the flag of surrender, and I was starting to worry that cocaine, taken nasally, was affecting my voice by drying it out. Now we could just adjourn to the bathroom and insert the required medication French-style, via the Harris.
It was on one of those early Faces tours that I learned a small but important lesson about care with the press. Woody and I had been gifted Polaroid ‘instant print’ cameras, which would slide the picture out immediately after you had taken it: a seeming miracle of technology in the pre-digital era. And, because it was Woody and me, we mostly used those cameras in our hotel rooms to take pictures of girls with nothing on. It would be hard to recount the amount of pleasure the pair of us got from doing that slightly smutty ‘rubbing on the picture’ motion that you used to have to do to warm the paper and speed up the developing process.
During the tour I did an interview with a senior reporter at the Sun. He seemed like a trustworthy sort of bloke, so when he’d turned the tape machine off, I said, ‘Here, cop a look at these.’ And I produced from my pocket this rather thick stack of Polaroids of blondes, all properly catalogued, with dates and cities of origin neatly written on them. Of course, this private moment between journalist and singer ended up in the Sun under the headline ‘Rod the Polaroid Kid’. I don’t think I’d ever felt quite so mortified. I didn’t dare to go home to my parents for a while because I was worried about having to discuss the matter with my dad. Eventually, I faced the music and knew the indignity of my dad scornfully ignoring me for two whole hours.
My dad rather frowned on the Faces altogether, though – even when we weren’t photographing groupies and showing the results to journalists with national newspapers. He was pleased, for my sake, with the band’s success, but as he didn’t drink I don’t think he thought too highly of the Faces’ overt alcohol consumption and of the behaviour arising. He certainly didn’t approve of the hotel pranks. I know that because my brothers and I tried one out on him one night, in a terrible misreading of the mood.
This was in Edinburgh, where we had gone with my dad and uncles the night before a Scotland football match. The hotel we were staying in was being decorated and, in the night, pissed as farts, my brothers and I took some ladders and some planking, tiptoed into the room where my dad was sleeping, and set them up around his bed. Then my brother Don climbed up onto the plank suspended between the ladders and pretended to be painting the ceiling as we switched on the overhead light to wake up my dad. Far from finding this surreal tableau amusing, as intended, he was furious – angry enough to chase us all out and down the corridor. I never sought to involve him in that kind of business again.
The Faces’ legend grew, even in England. We played the Weeley Festival in 1971, supporting Marc Bolan, and blew the poor chap away. The audience wouldn’t let him play. And then, in September of that year, we appeared at an outdoor show at the Oval cricket ground, Kennington, in a concert for Bangladesh on a bill featuring the Who.
I was rarely in a position to drive myself to a gig, in my own car, but this time I could. Accordingly, I arrived that afternoon in a white Lamborghini, recently bought with the earnings from my solo albums, in my stage outfit: leopard-skin coat and matching trousers that I had bought for the occasion from the Granny Takes a Trip boutique on the King’s Road. All of us musicians used to shop at the same place in those days, which worked out very well from the point of view of avoiding fashion clash disasters: the assistants would see you pick something off the rail and gently say, ‘Oh, Mick’s got that one,’ or, ‘You probably don’t want that, because Bowie’s just been in and bought it.’
Anyway, I remember swinging into the Oval car park behind the scenes, and climbing out of the Lambo, dressed as a leopard from head to toe, with my girlfriend, Dee Harrington, who was wearing a tiny skirt, legs up to her neck, and the two of us setting off for the dressing room, arm in arm. And right there, as we walked, I had this overwhelming sensation of having arrived – not just at the Oval, but at a certain point in life, and thinking to myself, ‘Bloody hell – you’re quite the rock star, aren’t you, son?’
One other thing about that Oval show: I did the gig, drinking onstage, police everywhere; I came off, had another drink with the lads; and then I got in the Lamborghini and drove home, waved cheerfully on my way by the police officers at the gate. And nobody thought anything of it. ‘Cheerio, Mr Stewart, sir. Safe home.’ Staggering. Very different times.
* * *
The downside of the Faces’ casual approach was that, when it came to the business side, no one in the band had their eye on the ball. No one took control financially: it all seemed to be cash in shoeboxes and envelopes, and Billy Gaff telling us not to worry about it. There was no proper accounting, so far as I was aware: just the occasional tally of expenses on a napkin. And no one took control in terms of planning our lives, either, and ensuring we had enough time off. Tours would be thrust upon us, and we’d all complai
n and say we weren’t doing them – only for Old Mother Gaff to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid you are doing it, because the deposits have already been sent.’
And thanks to the money generated by the touring in America, we were all living extravagant lifestyles: all rushing off to buy houses and cars or, in Woody’s case, rushing off to buy his dad a big colour television set (which his dad promptly chained to the radiator so that no one could steal it). We were young and foolish and nobody bothered with the details because we were all rich beyond our dreams. It’s only natural in your twenties, but no one was giving a thought to the fact that it could all go tits-up at some stage.
And lo and behold, it all went tits-up. The problems were political, and slow burning, and mostly arose as a result of the success I was having with my own records, which created all sorts of complicated tensions and anxieties. At first the balance between my life as a solo artist and my life in the Faces seemed blissfully simple. I had the band, in which I could be a lawless, knock-about rock ’n’ roller. And I had the solo albums, on which I could do rock ’n’ roll as well, but where I could also express my other passions: the folk and soul influences. And there didn’t seem to be any conflict between these interests. On the contrary, they rubbed along together perfectly happily.