Ian McLagan interviewed for Vital Source magazine, February 2006
F O R E W O R D
Talk about another "moment." It still is astounding to me that I got the chance to talk to Mac for as long as I did and how completely gracious and friendly he was in conversation.
I became familiar with the Small Faces' music my senior year of high school. I had the collection Absolutely the Best, but after buying a vinyl copy of Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, I knew I needed something a bit more than a paltry 18-track Greatest Hits package. The double-CD package The Darlings of Wapping Wharf Launderette has since gone out of print, but it's a 2 CD anthology that compiles everything they released on Immediate Records. As a result of buying that record at 18 years of age, I ate, drank, spoke, lived and breathed nothing but Small Faces for an entire year. Steve Marriott's voice, Ronnie Lane's songwriting, Kenney's drumming, and Mac's organ! For my money there never was, nor ever again will be another group as complete or cool as the Small Faces.
And the fact that the interview may never have taken place if Rhett Miller's management hadn't left me in the lurch leaves me even more befuddled. I was supposed to interview Rhett for the February issue, but one of his press agent's pulled him out of the interview 4 days before my deadline. Frazzled, I sent out a number of emails and phone calls for a last minute replacement, when Lynne Rossi, Mac's amazing secretary got back to me. Would I like to interview him Friday? Of course. Thing was, I was still so frazzled by the start of the week, that I didn't even process the fact that I'd be interviewing Ian McLagan, I was just grateful to have something.
Then it hit me: OH MY GOD, I'M GOING TO INTERVIEW ONE OF THE SMALL FACES!
Certainly one of the easiest people in the world to talk to, Mac's friendliness extended itself across the phone line to me and made me feel like I was talking to an old friend, not a personal hero. He's also incredibly open, and would jump from a story about Ronnie Lane to the possibility of finding homemade recordings that his grandmother may have made years and years ago in Ireland. He'd laugh about how Ronnie and he used to argue over who would have to put up with the hyperactive Steve Marriott, then put down the phone on his piano so I could hear how he played Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee" backwards to form "Cindy Incidentally." I'm surprised my cheeks didn't hurt the next day, having maintained an ear-to-ear smile for the entire hour-long duration of our conversation. Tales about Rod Stewart, Billy Bragg and Grant Showbiz, Mick Jagger, and how his wife, the biggest Paul McCartney fan in the world, wanted to have no part in seeing Macca's last show in Dallas... he was an open book, all too happy to let me ask about anything I pleased.
I can only thank both Mac for his graciousness and Lynne for setting the whole thing up. If you haven't, please get yourself some of the man's music - I'm sure you've heard something by him already. Also, read his autobiography, All the Rage, one of the funniest, sweetest and enjoyable rock and roll memoirs ever penned. Check out Lynne's amazing and informative website www.ianmclagan.com sometime, and also enjoy Mac's own spot on the web, www.macspages.com while you're at it.
Mac said he'd be in contact if and when he got to Milwaukee, and that we'd go out for drinks. I hope he knows I am, in fact, holding my breath...
As he said to me in signing off, "Bless you and all the best."
Wow.
Paul Snyder
January 2006
The published article can be seen here.
Familiar Old Face
Ian McLagan's mark is bigger than his name
By Paul Snyder
Don’t tell us you don’t know who Ian McLagan is.
Even if the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve certainly heard his handiwork somewhere down the line. As the resident keyboard man for the Small Faces in the 1960’s and the Faces in the 1970’s (Long before The Great American Songbook, Rod Stewart used to kind of rock, you know), McLagan was in the mix of some legendary rock and roll parties. From smashing up hotel rooms and keying Rolls Royces Keith Moon to taking axes to Steinways, he’s got more than a few stories to tell.
Of course, that was 30 to 40 years ago. In the time since, he’s fit in touring and recording with the Rolling Stones (that’s him providing the sultry keys on “Miss You”), touring with Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt, finding time to play along with Billy Bragg, writing his autobiography, All the Rage, recording a few albums of his own, and putting on a free gig every week in his home town Austin, Texas.
And why put the feet up now? McLagan’s readying two albums for release in 2006, he’s headed to the UK in April for some dates with Bragg, and he’s aiming for a little more northern exposure later in the year.
“We play Chicago and Cleveland a lot,” he muses. “Yeah, we need to get back to Milwaukee.”
When he does ride back into town, he’ll be coming in on a good wave. 2004’s critically acclaimed Faces box set Five Guys Walk Into a Bar is still selling in impressive numbers and McLagan’s nearing completion on his new Bump Band album, This is It. It’s all a labor of love, he insists, as he’s finally been afforded the ability to write, record and release albums as he pleases.
Deserved as it may be, that freedom was a long time coming for McLagan, who’s been at the short end of the financial stick for as long as he’s been in the game. Poor management and bad contracts meant that the Small Faces never saw a dime of their royalties, instead scraping by on a weekly wage and concert income. Continued financial troubles resulted in the sale of treasured items like gold records earned for Faces and Rolling Stones recordings.
Even when he flew to Paris to lend his hands to the Stones’ Some Girls sessions, Mick Jagger wasn’t exactly generous in payment for services rendered.
“He gave me the contents of his pockets, which was about 150 francs,” McLagan laughs. “It didn’t even cover my parking at the airport! But it was alright, you know. That was a fun weekend.”
And it’s that good-natured personality that’s afforded him some of the sweeter gigs of the last 40 years. While it’s intriguing to see the names that enlisted McLagan to record or tour with them, the names of those who’ve shown up to help on McLagan’s solo recordings read like a who’s who of rock and roll list. Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Bobby Keys, and Stanley Clarke are just some of the guys who’ve turned up on acetate with McLagan.
But McLagan puts a lot of it down to his very first lucky break: being asked to join the Small Faces in 1965. Besides the immediate brotherhood felt by everyone in the band, McLagan is still amazed by the prolificacy of the group. In three years, the band released five full length albums on two different labels alongside countless singles. The songwriting team of Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane, to this day, draws comparison to Lennon and McCartney.
Marriott passed away tragically in a house fire in 1991, while Lane succumbed to MS in 1997 after a long battle with the disease. McLagan has worked hard to keep their music in the spotlight, appearing at an all-star tribute to Marriott in 2001, and taking part in a new BBC documentary on Lane, which will get a stateside DVD release later this year.
“My wife and I watched it the other night and bawled, it’s so beautiful,” McLagan says. “It’s really high time Ronnie Lane got the credit and respect he deserves for his contribution to music.”
To that end, McLagan is also in the process of recording Spiritual Boy, a personal tribute to Lane’s music, which has already benefited from its own bit of heavenly guidance.
“It’s funny, just a couple of weeks ago, I was suffering from a migraine, and I was in terrible pain, so I went to lie down,” he says. “And as I was lying down, I heard ‘Itchycoo Park’ in my head – not as we did it in the Small Faces, but as Ronnie originally sung it to Steve when he first showed him the song.”
The song in question has never been a favorite of McLagan’s. Despite being the band’s only stateside hit and unduly pigeonholing them as novelty one-hit wonder act on these shores, the main point of contention for him lies within the song’s refrain. The novelty of singing “It’s all too beautiful” wore off for the keyboardist after he stopped doing acid. He even refused to play the song when touring Japan with Lane in 1990, causing a fight that lasted through the end of the jaunt.
“Ronnie had a very gentle delivery, and I just heard the song as more reserved and wistful,” he says. “Instead of going all out and bellowing “It’s all too beautiful!” I just kind of sighed it, and it really sounded quite lovely. I went right down the studio and cut it that day, migraine and all. And then I felt bad, because if we had done it like that in Japan, I wouldn’t have minded at all.”
McLagan also placed a photograph of himself with his grandmother and Lane in 1968 on top of the piano when recording a version of the Small Faces’ “Show Me the Way,” for the album.
“I was going over it again and again, and it was just missing something,” he said. “And finally I said, ‘I know what it’s missing.’ I put that picture on the piano, and got through the track straightaway.”
McLagan says his old compatriots maintain an omnipresence in his studio.
“I have pictures of Steve and Ronnie right here above my piano,” he says. “Anytime I’m struggling with a song, I’ll look up and go ‘Help me, Steve,’ or ‘Help me, Ronnie,’ and it gets me through it. I think about what they might think, or what they might have done with the song, and it always helps.”
McLagan pulled the title for the album from a favorite Lane song of his, “Spiritual Babe.” He says he regrets that it didn’t get the airing it deserved in the mid 1980s.
“Rod did a show in Wembley in ’85 or ’86,” he says. “And we got everybody from the Faces there to do a big reunion bit for the encore. Ronnie made it, which was very special, ‘cos he was pretty ill by that time. He was in a wheelchair, so he couldn’t play bass, but he could still sing.
“So we do a rehearsal of ‘Spiritual Babe,’ and it’s really lovely, but at the last second, Rod goes, ‘No, we’re not gonna do that.’ Because it was his show, he got to have the say so, I guess, and he just axed it. Whatever. Thanks a lot, Rod…”
But once the song gets the treatment McLagan sees fit, the tribute and his own new solo album will be ready to go, and he’ll be eager to hit the road. No small coincidence, then, that the spiritual road runs due north.
“It’s a lot of churches and a lot of beer in Wisconsin, isn’t it?” he asks. “One of our old bass players came from Milwaukee and he always used to go on about the amount of beer in that city. I don’t know if he went to much church.”
Not that the stigma should scare off McLagan. After all, the Faces were once labeled “the booziest band in the business,” and Stewart himself once cut a cover of “What Made Milwaukee Famous Has Made a Loser Out of Me.” McLagan, meanwhile, is more than happy to add a barroom anthem or two of his own to the repertoire (see the spirited “The Wrong Direction” off his 2004 release, Rise and Shine!).
“It’s funny, I’ve been known to like a drink or two myself, or so I’ve been told,” he says. “So when I’m playing ‘Wrong Direction,’ I always encourage people to have another and live it up.”
Yeah, he definitely needs to get back to Milwaukee.
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p a u l s n y d e r . n e t , 2006