Small Faces: Small Faces

SMALL FACES: SMALL FACES (1967)

1) (Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me; 2) Something I Want To Tell You; 3) Feeling Lonely; 4) Happy Boys Happy; 5) Things Are Going To Get Better; 6) My Way Of Giving; 7) Green Circles; 8) Become Like You; 9) Get Yourself Together; 10) All Our Yesterdays; 11) Talk To You; 12) Show Me The Way; 13) Up The Wooden Hills To Bedford­shire; 14) Eddie's Dreaming.

Those who like their conceptuality mature and their maturity conceptual will always prefer Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, but to me, this is the band's unquestionable masterpiece, their only LP that deserves to be mentioned as a legitimate and fully privileged companion to all the other masterpieces from 1967. Its only flaw may be a certain lack of personality: by this time, Steve Marriott's dominance as a frontman was becoming somewhat resented by the rest of the band, and this is most evident from the fact that Ronnie Lane, a much less powerful, but a subtly charisma­tic, singer, now takes the lead on about half of the tracks — this results in a less distinctive vocal sound, and since the band never had a unique instrumental sound to speak of, Small Faces bears no easily identifiable tags on it. But then again, wasn't Sgt. Pepper, too, a conscious effort to get rid of identifiable tags and dissolve the band members' individual and collective personalities in something bigger than ourselves? The important thing is that Small Faces never sounds like a rip-off of somebody in particular — and, as a matter of fact, this is where the band most definite­ly parts ways with The Who: Small Faces has very little in common with The Who Sell Out.

Despite the American title of this album, there are, in fact, but two small faces. One is that of Steve Marriott, who has pretty much renounced his career as a Muddy Waters-adulating blues­man and is now concentrating on becoming the British equivalent of Otis Redding. The other is that of Ronnie Lane, who has developed a keen interest in those smelly old roots, and is busy incorporating folk, baroque, and music hall elements in the band's music. On the other hand, it might also be argued that the third face, the one gluing the other two together, is Ian McLagan, whose keyboards support both the soul-wailing of Marriott and the folk-burrowing of Lane. Only Kenney Jones, now that the band is no longer interested in cranking up the amps on metallized cover versions of Booker T. & The MG's, remains in the dangerous position of being left without a job, uh, I mean, a face of his own — but at least they left him one instrumental (ʽHappy Boys Happyʼ) where he can still kick some ass.

As tight, rowdy, bawdy R&B'ers, even if this style was already slightly antiquated for the boys, this is where they hit their peak, too: ʽ(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Meʼ, with its alternation between a despairing Marriott, frantically trying to knock through his loved one's skull, and the hear-hearing  boys, unsuccessfully trying to cheer him up, is instantaneously memorable — and on the second side of the album, the song is echoed by the equally frantic ʽTalk To Youʼ, where each verse-chorus bundle is a tense, sweaty, veins-bulgin' drive to the explosive final statement: "all I want to do is talk to you!", Marriott blurts out before the front door of his girlfriend (who wisely keeps it shut because with a tone like that, you never really know if the loverboy does not clutch a shotgun behind his back). But every now and then, Steve is also capable of quieting down and musing in a more optimistic manner: ʽThings Are Going To Get Betterʼ works as a becalming, self-directed lullaby, gently adorned with McLagan's harpsichord — only towards the end does Steve wind himself up in a bit of a frenzy — and, for what it's worth, since the title begs for such a comparison, this is really a song about things getting better, unlike The Beatles' ʽGet­ting Betterʼ, which is completely in the domain of King Sarcasm in comparison. (I'm not saying that Small Faces have the better song — just a happier one).

But it is the emergence of Ronnie Lane as a competent, competitive, and maybe even visionary songwriter in his own right that really sets the album apart from everything previously done. In stark contrast with the burly Marriott, Ronnie is a sweet, vulnerable soul, and although, as a sin­ger, he is professionally miles below Steve, his voice has a homely-friendly attitude that will immediately appeal to all those introverted people who can be somewhat put off by Marriott's proto-arena-rock swagger (which he would later, predictably, invest into actual arena-rock during his days in Humble Pie).

Already on his first song here, ʽSomething I Want To Tell Youʼ, he presents a courtly alternative to Marriott's angry ranting — they both have trouble with girls, but Ronnie prefers to voice his in a much less egotistic manner. The song reveals a solid Dylan influ­ence — its rhythmics, lyrical moves, and Ian McLagan's «Al Kooper style» organ all bring back to mind the days of Highway 61 Revisited — but Dylan would never end one of his verses with something like "you forget what we've found together, you forget what we've found is love", and even if he did, he would certainly never give the impression of tears in his eyes by the way he'd be singing them. Curiously, that organ part of McLagan's, starting out solemnly and slowly, even­tually picks up steam, going from J. S. Bach mode to Franz Liszt mode, if a classical analogy may be pardoned; Ronnie, however, never lifts his voice into anything even remotely resembling a scream — partly because he is technically unable to, and partly because he'd probably like the music to speak for his feelings, rather than risk making a pompous ass of himself. Repeat with ʽAll Our Yesterdaysʼ, where Dylan is replaced with an old-fashioned vaudeville arrangement, but the vulnerability stays the same, while the sneering, bullying Marriott cannot resist making fun of poor Ronnie by starting the song off with an exaggerated Cockney announcement: "...the darling of Wapping Wharf launderette, Ronald Leafy-a Lane!"

I have not mentioned the word «psychedelic» yet, and for good reason, because Small Faces never got truly hooked on to the psychedelic craze (even less so than The Who, who did record several Pink Floyd-influenced tracks for The Who Sell Out). However, the album would still be nowhere near as impressive had the open-your-mind wave completely bypassed these guys; in actuality, they saddled it in their own impressive manner, somewhat close to The Kinks — by merging elements of «Britishness», particularly the retro ones, with the magic of studio techno­logy. That way, a song like ʽGreen Circlesʼ marries the folk narrative approach ("and with the rain a stranger came...") with psychedelic attitudes, reflected mainly in the complex vocal har­mony patterns, the stereo panning fun, and the mantra gimmick ("green circles, green circles, green circles!..." until said circles really do begin to appear before your eyes) — actually, Syd Barrett and friends did this too (ʽThe Gnomeʼ, etc.), but Small Faces never go properly whacko. ʽUp The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshireʼ, a song written and sung by McLagan, tells you to "leave your body behind you with a different feeling", but somehow Ian's idea of a transcendental, poetic dream is to be slipping away "up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire", an idiomatic British expression with which parents used to shoo their kids away to bed, and which had already been previously immortalized in a Vera Lynn song. So it's another song about Going To Sleep, but with a more pronounced local flavor than, say, ʽI'm Only Sleepingʼ or Bill Wyman's ʽIn Another Landʼ — and also reading more like a dark lullaby than an account of one's personal experience ("when you're slipping into sleep, there's a world you fill find...", with the song's steady beat and McLagan's unfurling organ magically pulling you along some yellow brick road or other). Funny bit of trivia: on the US edition, the ʽto Bedfordshireʼ part was omitted from the song title — possibly by accident, but more likely because the publishers did not want to confuse American audiences with lengthy English toponyms, even though it made the title meaningless.

The idea of sleeping and dreaming is, in general, quite popular with the boys on the album: even the final track, despite its rather lively, even Caribbean-flavored, arrangement is called ʽEddie's Dreamingʼ (who's Eddie?) — implying that (a) life is a carnival and (b) life is only a dream, so nothing makes more sense than combining both in one short package. (In a way, this is what the Stones also did with their ʽOn With The Showʼ conclusion to Satanic Majesties, even if that song did not expressly mention the idea of dreaming — it was more of a common theme that linked together all the songs on the album). Somehow I think that this twist may not have been all that much to Steve's liking; but, as I already said, on this particular occasion his songs seem to mesh fairly well with Ronnie's and Ian's.

The US version of the album, retitled There Are But Four Small Faces, predictably cut out several songs in favor of the band's contemporary singles — ʽItchycoo Parkʼ, ʽHere Come The Niceʼ, and ʽTin Soldierʼ — thus seriously skewing the balance in favor of Marriott and the R&B groove, which, it may have been felt, would be taken more benevolently by American listeners. These songs are all classics, for sure (and one of them even provided the name for one of Britain's earliest progressive rock acts), but all of them follow more or less the same principle — the hook is primarily determined by the loudness level: quiet «preparatory» verses followed by explosive choruses — and, in my opinion, they do not reflect the true progression of the band nearly as well as the song selection and sequencing on the original UK edition of the album. I mean, ʽTin Sol­dierʼ is a kick-ass anthemic song and all that, but its constituents are fairly well understandable; ʽGreen Circlesʼ remains far more strange for my comprehension. Regardless, it is all too natural that my thumbs up would go out to either the UK or the US version in any case: almost every­thing that Small Faces did during this peak year of theirs sounds just as powerful or just as magi­cal today as it did fifty years ago.