A baptism in rock and roll

Or how The Faces inspired The Replacements

There wasn’t any holy water, but it was a baptism nonetheless. On the very first day of November, 1975, Paul Harold Westerberg, then a mere 60 days from his 16th birthday, found himself amid the deafening sounds of Rod Stewart and the Faces at the Minneapolis Auditorium (sometimes called the Labor Temple) in what turned out to be their final show.

You could say the torch was passed, though it’d take a few years for Westerberg and company to create their musical heirs, The Replacements. For Westerberg, it was a moment that hit him like no other.

“When they came on, we charged right up to the stage,” Westerberg told Bob Mehr in his wonderful book “Trouble Boys,” “The excitement and fun of the Faces…it was almost sexual. Virgins that we were, it was the closest thing to sex we’d experienced. In no time flat, I had a chick bouncing up and down on my shoulders.

“It was the most fun I’d had doing anything, being that close to a real rock-and-roll band that was so fucking deafeningly loud.”

The Faces’ final studio album, “Ooh La La” came out in late April of 1973 and went to No. 1 on the UK charts. But sadly, the band was about to fall apart.

The monumental success of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells A Story” and his irresistible hit single “Maggie May” understandably took him away from London’s Olympic Studios when the band started assembling the album. Bassist and founding member Ronnie Lane quit the band that summer, Ronnie Wood was snatched away by the Rolling Stones and after that final Minneapolis show, they were done.

Ooh La La by Faces, featuring Rod Stewart, role models for The Replacements?

Having seen The Faces at the Boston Garden several times, Westerberg’s description rings true, providing the band was relatively sober at the time. For one show in a steamy Garden in the middle of summer, the boys were not only in their cups but spilling over. After a few missed cues, ragged endings and on-stage gaffes, Stewart tried to rally with a few encores that were as spotty as the show had been. His heart was in the right place, though.

A recent move brought my vinyl copy of “Ooh La La” to the top of the pile and on a lovely March morning, I sat back with the old album for the first time in decades. I’d forgotten that Ronnie Wood actually sang the lead vocal on the album’s most enduring title song (you’ll hear it in commercials these days) and remembered how eager I was to get the album’s single “Cindy Incidentally” — some new Rod Stewart product! — back in 1973. Hearing it now, it’s not a bad song (just 2:35!) and it managed to reach No. 2 on the UK charts, thanks, you have to assume, to the nearly unprecedented rising of Stewart’s star. It was rockin’ Rod, by the way, who was the first artist to have the No. 1 album and No. 1 single in both the UK and US simultaneously with “Every Picture Tells A Story” and “Maggie May.” Not The Beatles!

Revisiting two other “Ooh La La” tracks brought a smile. Rod’s album opener, “Silicone Grown” — which contained two classic, if definitely politically incorrect lines — “I remember you said gotta keep abreast of time but obviously you don’t know where to draw the line” and “You’ve got more front than the Hague Museum,” a line which prompted your correspondent to look up The Hague Museum back then, just to see what Rod was talking about.

This is the Hague Museum. Evidently, Rod was prone to exaggeration.

The Side One closer “Borstal Boys” is another rocker, sort of Rod’s version of Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock,” about a British home for juvenile delinquents that’s just a classic Faces tune.

There are a few other tunes, a so-so instrumental “Fly In The Ointment,” a Ronnie Lane Civil War song (from a Brit!) called “Flags And Banners” and a couple Stewart-sung tunes that still sound fine - “If I’m On The Late Side” (which could have been written about Stewart’s presence during the recording of the album) and the somewhat unsensitively titled “Just Another Honky,” a Ronnie Lane breakup song —”Go be wild,” which Ronnie Wood might have taken as advice, joining Mssrs. Jagger, Richard, Watts and Wyman from this point forward.

Hearing the record once again after all this time, it wasn’t hard to see how the teenage Westerberg might have loved this album, maybe playing it over and over in his room, the spectacle — and volume — of seeing the actual band just a few feet away might have fueled his own dreams, once he got a chance to take his shot.

We don’t hear much about The Faces any more. Rod, Ronnie and drummer Kenney Jones have played a few shows including a seven-song set in a charity gig for Prostate Cancer UK last year and have recorded some new music (supposedly.)

Compared with enduring bands like The Who, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones whose albums still roar off the turntable, The Faces and their not-all-that-great four studio albums and sadly horrendous live record “Coast To Coast: Overture and Beginners,” — the Los Angeles smog rending Rod’s pipes nearly unlistenable — don’t measure up.

What they left behind in the recording studio and in a few scattered clips of live video bore little relation to what it was actually like to see and hear them on stage in peak form. I was there. I know what I saw and heard. It was fantastic.

Hearing “Ooh La La” this afternoon, did bring back a few pleasant memories of the boys. Like the song says, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.”