Features

Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones: Had Me a Real Good Time

Photo by Tom Wright

Where do you see the impact of the band in music today?

Jones: You see it in somebody like The Black Crowes. There are lots of bands like that but not as well-known as them.

Wood: And bands like Oasis in England—we were heavy influences on them. When Glen Matlock played with our new formation of The Faces, he was saying that the Pistols used to love The Faces as well. We all take a leaf out of each other’s books, whether we know it or not, but some people lean toward more of a heavy influence. You can tell it when you listen to some songs.

Tell me about putting the book together.

Jones: This ended up being quite an emotional journey—getting our old photographs out—because you normally wouldn’t go that deep into your collection. I’ll never forget the first mock-up that was sent to me—I cried three or four times going through it, reliving the memories. I realized, shit, we’ve gone through so much. When I spoke to Woody about it, he’d gone through the same experience.

Wood: I didn’t know a lot of photographs were taken. I thought all these hotel room pictures were just in a fog in my brain somewhere. And then you open it up and go, “Wow, I thought that was just in my head. I didn’t know anyone took a picture of it!” [There are] lots of black and whites where we’re all on the bed—lots of nasty accidents on the bed, in boring times in middle America. We were so lonely on the road, really. [We played] lots of football as well, in corridors and parking lots.

When we showed it to Rod in London, we were at dinner, and he more or less didn’t eat anything—he started to look at a few [pages] and then go deeper and deeper, and he finally said, “I’ve got to close the book, this is ridiculous, I’ll never eat.”

What did this project bring up for you emotionally?

Wood: There’s a satisfaction that those years are at least itemized and put down for history. Your little chunk of a crazy band that was only paying tribute to American music anyway, and putting our own slant on the blues, R&B [and] soul music.

Jones: My youngest kids have been asking me for years, “What was it like in The Faces?” They’ve seen videos, but now I’ve got the opportunity of saying. “Have a look at that and that’s exactly what it was like.” And from there on, I’ve been getting questions every day: “What’s this, where were you here, why are you falling over here, what’s going on there?”

How do you feel about The Faces and Small Faces being inducted into the Hall of Fame together?

Jones: Mac’s quite emotional about the fact [that] they’re two separate bands—and they are, completely. Small Faces never went to America, but The Faces did, and The Faces made a lot more people aware of the Small Faces. I’d like to think Small Faces would have ended up in the Hall of Fame eventually, but there is that kind of marriage.

Wood: Rod and I were the biggest fans of the Small Faces. So when Steve Marriott left, we were part of the morphing of that band, saying. “We’ve got to keep the spirit of this band going, the camaraderie of the Small Faces.” We carried a great message, we transformed it.

Jones: It was fate, really; it was meant to happen. They’re two separate bands but with that same thread running through of being creative and having a great time playing together. It’s nice for people to see the two bands as one in a sense, because there was that wonderful camaraderie and friendship between the two. The only drag is that Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott aren’t here to share it.

Wood: Once Ronnie Lane didn’t make it to a Top of the Pops TV thing and we had a cardboard cutout of him! When you look back, it was quite hilarious. We did another one where we rebelled against miming on TV—we always wanted to play live and they said, “No way, [you] can’t do that.” So I had a bit of string with old Coca-Cola cans tied to the guitar cord, silly things like that. You used to have to stand on a little tape dot, you weren’t allowed to move, and we would start playing football or whatever and the cameramen would go, “Oh, no, we’ll never get this” and “You’re banned from the BBC” or whatever.