Remembering Ian McLagan, the Small Face With a Big Heart

The first time I spoke to Ian McLagan – the keyboard player for two of Britain’s greatest bands, the Small Faces and the Faces, who died of a sudden, massive stroke at 69 on December 3rd in Austin, Texas – was in June 1997. It was just after another passing: that of McLagan’s dear friend and bandmate in both groups, bassist-songwriter Ronnie Lane, who had lost a valiant struggle with multiple sclerosis at the age of 51.

“All through the disease, he never complained once,” McLagan said in an interview for my tribute to Lane in Rolling Stone. “When I’d see him, I’d say, ‘How ya doin’, Ron?’ And he’d shrug his shoulders and go, ‘I’m all right. How you doin’?'”

McLagan also said this of his fellow Face: “He left a lot of friends. That’s the amazing, lovely thing. We all start talking about Ronnie, and it always ends up with us laughing.”

Now it’s my turn to say the same thing about “Mac,” as McLagan was known to his own legion of friends, including the other Faces, Small and otherwise; the many artists he served in Britain and the U.S. as one of rock’s most gifted and sympathetic session musicians; and the loyal audiences in Austin, where McLagan settled in 1994 and kept everyone in stitches and smiles at clubs such as the Saxon Pub and the Lucky Lounge with cheeky banter, his old bands’ classic tunes and songs from his occasional but earthy and moving solo albums.

Glad and Sorry

I feel like I’m in that crowd somewhere. A few years ago, McLagan – whom I interviewed often, most extensively for my liner notes to the 2004 Faces box set, Five Guys Walk Into a Bar . . . – inscribed my copy of his 2006 release, Ian McLagan and the Bump Band Live (Maniac), like this: “All the best always, Mac.” He did much the same for the fans that always gathered around him after gigs like the ones I caught in Austin and New York, clutching vintage Small Faces and Faces vinyl, hoping for an autograph.

My last images of McLagan are a treasure now: just six months old, from a June 17th show at New York’s Iridium with the latest edition of his Bump Band, including longtime guitarist Scrappy Jud Newcomb. McLagan was promoting a fine, new album, United States (Yep Roc), a soulful reflection on love, need and committment drawn from another close loss – the death in 2006 of his wife Kim, the former Mrs. Keith Moon – and sung with compelling, weathered dignity. But McLagan also joked about the gear setup – which forced him to play piano and Hammond organ facing away from the audience – and told fondly comic stories about Lane and the late Small Faces singer Steve Marriott on the way to delightful readings of the former’s “Glad and Sorry,” a country-pathos jewel from the Faces’ 1973 LP, Ooh La La, and the Small Faces’ ’67 cracker “Get Yourself Together.”

Then McLagan spent more than an hour offstage with the faithful, shaking hands, posing for selfies and expressing warm thanks for the years of support. At five feet, five inches – well within regulation elfin height when McLagan joined the Small Faces in November, 1965 – he and his still-full snow-white hair barely came up to my shoulders. Yet he carried and shared, at all times, enormous heart. McLagan had been as close as you can get to the top of the pops, twice: rivalling the Beatles and the Who on the Small Faces’ magical run of U.K. hit singles in the late Sixties; scoring again with the Faces, especially in America with the 1972 Top 20 single, “Stay With Me.”    

But the Faces were also famous for arena shows that blurred the lines between stage, dressing room and hotel lounge, in a jubilant rain of booze, laughter and turbo-charged rock & roll fundamentals. I saw one of those affairs, in Philadelphia in 1972, and I can vouch for this: McLagan kept that spirit going long after the Faces’ circus ended. There was no VIP area in any room where I saw McLagan perform over the last two decades. The bar – along with his songs and the stories that came with them – was open to all.

All or Nothing

McLagan was born in Hounslow, in west London, on May 12th, 1945. An early band, the Muleskinners, was good enough to play behind visiting U.S. bluesmen such as Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf. But when McLagan replaced the Small Faces’ first keyboard player, Jimmy Winston, he brought a wider dynamic in style and influences: a deep love of and schooling in the Hammond jazz icon Jimmy Smith and Stax organ master Booker T. Jones; a modernist swing on piano, at once melodic and feisty, as if Chuck Berry’s sidekick Johnnie Johnson had grown up brash, mod and British.

McLagan made his first appearance on a Small Faces record in early ’66, on their third single and first U.K. hit, “Sha-La-La-La-Lee.” “To put it mildly, he was a breath of fresh air,” drummer Kenney Jones recalled in a phone call two days after McLagan’s death. “It was the first time we’d added a new dimension to our sound. We all had the same influences” – American blues, Motown and Stax records – “but Mac had his own style. He fit like a hand in a glove.”