Oil Well Bootlegs - RSC CD: Rod Stewart & The Faces – Maggie Mae Oil Well

Rod Stewart & The Faces – Maggie Mae
Oil Well – RSC 011 CD

1 I'm Losing You 3:26
2 Bring It On Home To Me 5:02
3 Sweet Little Rock 'N' Roller 5:26
4 Fly In The Ointment 3:29
5 Every Picture Tells A Story 3:58
6 Stay With Me 4:40
7 Motherless Child 3:36
8 Gasoline Alley 4:07
9 Maggie Mae 5:28
10 Twistin' The Night Away 7:11

Note:
~~Live in Detroit, USA 1974"~~

Recorded live at Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino, California, 7 March 1975

Lineup:
Bass – Tetsu Yamauchi
Drums – Kenny Jones
Guitar – Ron Wood
Keyboards – Ian McLagan
Vocals – Rod Stewart

This album is a partial clone of: "Rhythm & Booze" - OH BOY 1-9068 without "You Wear It Well".
Please note that track 4 is Too Bad; Track 8 is Gasoline Alley/Stay with me (reprise). Limited to 200 copies only. On the original front cover Rod Stewart performing live during a concert. This bootleg has been released also with an alternate front cover.
Part of this concert has been released officially on: Five Guys Walk into a Bar... released on 20 July 2004 by Warner Bros. / Rhino Records. Due to its rarity and good quality, this disc is recommended.

The date listed on this show is from Detroit, 1974, but it is actually from San Bernadino, CA 3-7-1975 originally a KBHS show. Anyway; this has to be one of the finest The Faces' performance. The band is in tip top form tight and highly energized. Ronnie Wood’s guitar playing is the best I’ve ever heard him; making me appreciative of his talents.
The show begins with I Know I’m Losing You with Rod Stewart in fine form the band in perfect time behind him Ian McLagen spilling out sweet rolls from his keyboard and Woody’s laid back smooth rhythm guitar. This bootleg version has not got the drum solo by Kenny Jones. Following is Bring It On Home To Me a superb rendition of the old Sam Cooke track.

Next is my favorite of this show Sweet Little Rock’n’Roller, the old Chuck Berry track with a superb Ian McLagan piano boogie along with Woody’s excellent guitar playing with Kenny Jones and Tsetsu Yamauchi providing a hot rhythm section; showing how tight the band is on this night. Moving right along through Fly in the Ointment and Every Picture Tells A Story with splendid balance and the notes getting hotter and hotter. Stay With Me follows with Ian’s bogie piano and Ronnie’s guitar meshing with Rod in a splendid way. I can visualize the girls dancing rather intensely to this great track!

Motherless Child follows; the blind Willie Johnson track performed by Eric Clapton and others through the years. Ronnie Wood is absolutely on fire here; a wicked slide performance (in my opinion the best I’ve heard Woody play) having seen Woody play many times over the years this sticks as the smoothest I’ve ever heard him. This track reminds me of sitting in a juke joint in Mississippi hearing Son House play. Woody and Ian open Gasoline Alley with a wonderful version of Gasoline Alley, Rod in great form, soulful and the band swinging; then Ronnie goes back into his slide performance; smooth as a wet hummingbird; delicate, yet powerful and suddenly the band rips into Stay With Me Ian opening with some hot piano Tsetsu providing some deep bass runs with Ronnie’s rhythm and Kenny’s backbeat.

Maggie May follows with a boogie opening with Rod singing as if his life depended on it. Perfect rhythmic flow here, quite different from the studio version (Every Picture Tells A Story). This show ends with Rod asking the audience for applause for Foghat “A Magnificent Band” then says thank you, good night we’ll see ya and goes into Twistin’ The Night Away, another Sam Cooke tune with the band spot on, perfect flow with Ronnie on slide and Ian’s piano picking up the tempo faster and faster the band on fire to close this show! If you are a faces fan or just a music lover this one is a MUST have. Great sound along with a stellar performance for the ages!!
Click here to see some pictures from the show. Read below for more information on the concert.

Audio quality:

Quality content:

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Live in San Bernadino March 7, 1975
Take A Look At The Five Guys is a Faces release containing the March 7th, 1975 San Bernardino KBFH tape. There have been several releases of this tape in the past that are sourced from the radio broadcast, but this comes from the vault and is much more complete. Rhythm & Booze on Oh Boy lists this show as being from 1976 and is missing “Take A Look At The Guy,” “I’d Rather Go Blind,” “Angel,” and “I Can Feel The Fire.” A later release Real Good Time (Swingin’ Pig TSP 039) is missing “I’m Losing You” and incorrectly labeled Detroit, 1974.

The new tape includes most of the set including the “Motherless Children” reference in the “Stay With Me” medley which was cut from the original broadcast, probably for copyright reasons. The opening song, “It’s All Over Now,” is still missing from the tape and casts doubt whether or not it was even recorded.
Trial is the first label to release this tape with San Bernardino (Trial-209) on CDR, but Vintage Masters Premium is the first on silver. The recording is a very clear and professional recording with nice gain and a good balance between the music and the audience reaction. A characteristic common with many DIR tapes is the balance of the instruments lying heavily on the upper frequencies: guitar and vocals are much louder with the bass and drums pushed to the back.
The engineers with the company probably felt that was what listeners of the King Biscuit Flower Hour wanted to hear, but the drum sound is very thin on this tape even during the drum solo. Despite that, this is an improvement over the previous releases of this show since it comes straight from the master and is more complete.

The Faces’ farewell tour.San Bernardino comes from The Faces’ farewell tour. With Rod Stewart’s burgeoning solo career and with Ron Wood moving on to become a Rolling Stone, the enthusiasm for the band waned. This concert, recorded shortly before their demise, is a good example of what was right and what was wrong with the Faces. After bassist/singer Ronnie Lane's unceremonious exit from the touring version of the band, live sets played out rather like a Rod Stewart solo gig.

Those familiar with the near-flawless rock 'n' folk of Stewart's first few solo records will recognize some of his mega-hits and equally brilliant, lesser-known songs (as well as a questionable taste in cover material which would later mar his reputation); but sorely missed is Lane's country heart-ache and distinctly English humor. Woody and the boys hold it together just barely, providing the ramshackle performance and rollicking good time that the punters paid to see.

Ostensibly a tour for their last LP Oh La La, no material from the new album is played. In fact, very little Faces material makes its way into the set list. Instead the emphasis is upon Stewart’s and Wood’s solo material and numerous covers. The tour lasted for a month beginning on February 11th in Rochester, New York and ending several days after this show on March 13th at the PNC Coliseum in Vancouver, BC, Canada. They played man large venues and jammed with other musicians during the month. Wood joined Led Zeppelin on stage at the Nassau Coliseum on February 13th, and the band backed up Ike & Tina Turner in the studio on March 6th in Los Angeles, the night before this concert.

Setlist and recording

The recording begins with “Take A Look At The Guy” from Wood’s album I’ve Got My Own Album To Do from the preceding year and, with Wood himself taking the vocals, is an interesting choice for a set opener. The following number, “(I Know) I’m Losing You” is the Rod Stewart cover of the old Temptations song and features an excellent drum solo by Kenny Jones, which Stewart says, “Kenny Jones ladies and gentlemen, playing the trombone. It’s like a football match here tonight. I knew you wouldn’t let us down.” Particularly great is a slow and loose version of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” introduced with typical english humor (“No one sings it like Sam Cooke but we do it all right.”).

The band follow this with "Stay with Me," featuring a breakdown that threatens to literally breakdown. “Stay With Me,” from A Nod Is As Good As A Wink…To A Blind Horse, contains Wood playing the opening riff of Clapton’s “Motherless Children” before the band finish with “Gasoline Alley.” Afterwards Stewart says it has been three years since the band played there and introduces the new bassist Tetsu Yamauchi who is resposible for making the band play better, an obvious shot at Ronnie Lane who left the band. Their reputations as musicians and generally wild and crazy guys guaranteed ample opportunities following their break-up, and the members of the Faces would go on to support the best in the industry, most notably The Rolling Stones (Wood, McLagan) and The Who (Jones). But even when playing with giants, these lads were hard-pressed to match the well-crafted chaos they first made together.

“Sweet Little Rock N Roller” begins with a barking dog before the band launch into the song. The audience becomes wild at this point and Stewart tells everyone to move back before they play “Too Bad.” This song is a great honky tonk and blends perfectly into “Every Picture Tells A Story.” The following is introduced as “a nice song,” a Faces cover of Stewart’s cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Angel.” Working as a soaring anthem, the vocals are beautiful and are a good respite from the raucousness of the rest of the set as it is segued with the following “Stay With Me.”
There is a small cut in the tape and the sound quality changes noticably with the audience noises retreating to the back ground and the drums and bass being turned up higher in the mix. This change lasts for both the Ron Wood song “I Can Feel The Fire” and the closing medley of “You Wear It Well” and “Maggie May.” The original mix returns for the encore “Twisting The Night Away.” Take A Look At The Five Guys is packaged in a standard compact disc jewel case with basic, yet attractive, artwork common for releases on this label. Until the whole show is released this stands as the best version of the show available.
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