Dec 14

Small Faces

SMALL FACES
 
 
Small Faces  were an English rock band from London.  The group was founded in 1965 by members Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Jimmy Winston, although by 1966 Winston was replaced by Ian McLagan as the band’s keyboardist.  The band is remembered as one of the most acclaimed and influential mod groups of the 1960’s.  With memorable hit songs such as “Itchycoo Park”, “Lazy Sunday”, “All or Nothing”, “Tin Soldier”, and their concept album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, they later evolved into one of the UK’s most successful psychedelic acts before disbanding in 1969.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Greg Shaw put his faith in what he called “power-pop”:  teenage pop music in the standard 3-minute format but backed up with a hard-edged punk rock aesthetic.  Pete Townshend coined the term power pop in a 1967 interview to describe the music that his band the Who and Small Faces played; many of the Beatles’ mid-period singles are also in that style, such as “Paperback Writer” and “Day Tripper”.  Among American bands, “Time Won’t Let Me” by the Outsiders and “Go All the Way” by the Raspberries are early power-pop hit songs. 
 
(April 2010)
 
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Other notable covers by the Stillroven are of more obscure songs from British bands, like “Cheating” (by the Animals), “Little Games” (by the Yardbirds) and “Tell Me Have You Ever Seen Me” (by Small Faces).   
 
(September 2010)
 
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Name shortening has been common among rock bands:  The Young Rascals became the Rascals, the Troglodytes lost a little something in the translation when they changed their name to the Troggs, Small Faces morphed into Faces, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark was abbreviated to OMD, and (believe it or not) the 1990’s Irish band the Cranberries started out with the name The Cranberry Saw Us.  Sometimes the official name never changes, but fans and DJ’s naturally begin to shorten the name, so the Rolling Stones are just as often the Stones, the Doobie Brothers are sometimes rendered the Doobies (as on two of their Greatest Hits albums, Best of the Doobies and Best of the Doobies Volume II), and bands like, say, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show are called just Dr. Hook.  Occasionally it can even go the other way:  A DJ on one of our local radio stations where I was growing up in Winston-Salem, Dick Bennick at WTOB-AM Radio was forever calling the Fab Four “the beetley, bootley Beatles”.  
 
(June 2012)
 
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To the surprise of the folks at Record Collector, numerous Klubs fans responded to the mention of the band; they were even contacted by one of the original bandmembers, Norris “Noz” Easterbrook.  Within months, Tenth Planet Records rushed a vinyl-only album called Midnight Love Cycle to market; the 1,000 discs in the pressing were nearly sold out when Record Collector justly named the record “Album of the Year” for 1999, ahead of releases that year of albums by much better known bands like Fleetwood Mac and Small Faces. 

 

(July 2013)

 
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For Allmusic, Bruce Eder has this overview of their later years:  “Unfortunately, as the records focused more and more on [Mal] Ryder, [the Primitives] became more of a kind of generic cover outfit for English-language songs of all genres.  According to annotator David Wells, their R&B orientation gave way to pieces such as ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ [by Traffic] and ‘Song of a Baker’ [by Small Faces], but also ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ and (astonishingly) ‘Over the Rainbow’.  Their edge was gone and, by the mid-’70s, so was the band.” 

 

(May 2015)

 

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Another fun effect is running the same or similar musical sections slightly out of synch; it is variously described as phasing and flanging.  The latter term was reportedly coined by John Lennon and is still in use today; it refers to sound effects caused by the manual or accidental slowing down of tape in a take-up reel, though the effect can be created electronically as well.  The Wikipedia article on flanging describes it this way:  “As an audio effect, a listener hears a ‘drainpipe’ or ‘swoosh’ or ‘jet plane’ sweeping effect as shifting sum-and-difference harmonics are created analogous to use of a variable notch filter.”  One of the earliest uses of phasing in rock music is the 1967 hit song by Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”. 

 

(July 2015)

 

Last edited: March 22, 2021