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Voice
'Steve Marriott was the best vocalist that this country has ever produced.' -- David Bowie
'Steve Marriott played and sang on Their Satanic Majesties Request. On 'In Another Land' and I think on two other songs. Brian (Jones) couldn't do his part, so we had Steve in. He could sound like a pixie with the sweetest pipes. Could've lead little children over a cliff with that side of his voice, and then he could bray like a donkey, gale force, and the power of his voice would turn your skin to ice.' -- Mick Jagger
'Steve Marriott is one of those rare singers who, when you first hear him, instantly make you feel like a drought in your life has ended. He was his own meter, out there trying to go over the top with every number. Simply an amazing talent, tethered by nothing.' -- Bob Dylan
'You know Steve Marriott was the first choice to be Black Sabbath's vocalist. I tried everything I could think of to get him to agree, but he had other plans. He was Jimmy Page's first choice for Led Zeppelin too. He tried as hard as I did. I had a conversation with Page once about that, about what might have been. No skin off Ozzy or Robert Plant, both great in their ways, but Marriott was it. Greatest singer ever. Page and I agreed. We would have killed to have him.' -- Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath
'Steve Marriott was a very unique talent wasn’t he. I don’t know how I would describe it. He was one of the really great white soul singers, I know it’s all been said before but he really was. He’s just amazing really especially when you look at the size of him. As for why he wasn't as massive as he deserved, as massive and revered as Robert Plant or Rod Stewart or any of them, I think you make your own choices in life. I don’t think there’s any kind of sad story there because Steve Marriott didn’t want it. That’s how it seems to me anyway. Although I’m not convinced they were the happiest days of his career, its hard to say, I’m not inside the mans head. Humble Pie were massive in America but he seemed to turn his back on all that didn’t he.' -- Paul Weller
'Steve Marriott and I didn't get on. Had a couple of brawls with him. But I would have scraped the shit off his shoes to have his voice. To have his looks too.' -- Iggy Pop
'Steve Marriott was the greatest white soul singer to come out of the UK - and still is. No one has ever touched his unique lung bursting vocals. Set the high mark, he did. Unsurpassable. The rest of us can only try.' -- Jack White
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Face
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Combined
Small Faces 'Sha La La La Lee', 1966 (2:37)
Small Faces 'My Way of Giving', 1966 (1:59)
Small Faces 'Itchykoo Park', 1967 (2:21)
Small Faces 'Lazy Sunday Afternoon', 1967 (2:30)
Small Faces 'All or Nothing', 1968 (2:56)
Small Faces 'Tin Soldier', 1968 (3:18)
Small Faces 'Happiness Stan', 1968 (3:04)
Small Faces 'Rollin' Over', 1968 (2:18)
Humble Pie 'For Your Love', 1970 (8:29)
Humble Pie 'I Don't Need No Doctor', 1971 (4:20)
Humble Pie 'Black Coffee', 1973 (3:52)
Steve Marriott & Alexis Korner, 'Diamonds in the Rough', 1975 (3:02)
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7 comments:
I am of the eminently disagreeable but heartfelt opinion that the Small Faces knocked the shit out of every other British band of their specific eon. I reckon I could take ten of their songs to a Desert Island and be very happy there.
1. Spending summer holiday afternoons in a locked car with books and cassette tapes of the Small Faces and Immediate Records while my mum made a family income happen are my earliest memories of music.
2. "Autumn Stone" is one of the most loving songs anyone has ever or will ever write.
3. You have to love his penchant for guitars that are larger than he is.
Beautiful. I had a motherfucker of a day today and this really has put a spring in my footsore step. Nice one. :)
Dennis, as I'm sure you predicted, a Small Faces/Marriott post has brought me running to tie your shoe.
With apologies to Tosh and Mr. Glove, who have seen it all, heard it all, and will hopefully find any following inaccuracies or over-precious musings on my part excusable. The Small Faces do indeed rule:
Part 1 of the Marriot chronicles---
A friend said, not that long ago, "You know you're really really depressed when Marriott's voice can't make you feel better." For my tastes, the collaboration of Marriott and Lane is amongst the best ever. Style and cool distilled into a brief moment, from dance band to psychedelic cockney soul celebration, tender to terrifying. Endlessly fascinating in deconstruction, The Small Faces were purveyors of fine pop and deep soul.
I still have my 45 on Immediate of “Itchycoo Park”, a magic spinning pink thing. I remember being astounded when I played it on something other than my suitcase record player. I popped it on my dad’s stereo and low unto me a phased chorus panned across the living room. Back then I just wallowed in the wash of sound. Later I listened to the instruments buoyed below Marriott’s reminder that “It’s all too beautiful.” I didn’t “try the cheese there” until many years later.
As to the quote you've posted regarding the lack of recognition Marriott received in terms of "the pantheon"...well neither did Terry Reid. And what did these two have in common? They were both more than likely to implode into a painful self-destructive career ruining bender just as the light started to reappear. And this perception reigns despite the emotive strength of their vocal phrasing – and the added bonus that they were also both great guitar players. Many a mediocre “badly behaved” pop star (preferably prematurely dead so as not to show evidence of creative decline or reassessed hollowness) has been given accolades that more rightly belong to the likes of these two.
As to Jagger’s quote: Jagger wasn’t at the session for “In Another Land” (nor was Richards)…Wyman arrived at Olympic Studios to discover that the session had been cancelled. Glyn Johns, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, and Nicky Hopkins were at the studio despite Jagger’s memory. The Small Faces were also recording at Olympic that night (July 13, 1967) -- summer sessions that would yield “Itchycoo Park”, “Here Come The Nice”, and “Tin Soldier” -- so Marriott stepped in and played guitar and sang, Lane sang, Jones played Mellotron, Charlie (of course) did what Charlie does, as did Hopkins. At a later session Jagger and Richards added BV’s. So much for yet another, “Brian was too wasted”, Jagger/Richards post-op on who did what when. (Just listen to the boots of the Satanic Majesties sessions. Brian is wonderfully creative and ever-present).
Con’t in part 2…
part 2…Marriott chronicles:
I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Marriott had died. I remember watching his friend cry over a pint (or five) the next day. I remember feeling that my childhood dreams of style and cool were indeed being reordered into a world weary watered down soundtrack of middling-at-best talents running rampant across the radar of hiptitude...all this, as I cried into my respective receptacle of "brown", and realized that I couldn't look his mate and fellow Face in the eye. Maybe because all I saw at that moment was that spinning pink thing promising me an ideological revelation that never came…beyond the sounds. That came. The sounds. They were the revelation.
That was a dark Spring afternoon for me. I went home and studied the absolute "vision splendid" that is the studio version of "Tin Soldier". Played along with it day after day, marveling at it's immaculate construction. I channeled Lane's fingers as only a fan can do and smiled at Mac's aural declaration that he is the best B3 player to ever come from "over there". And thanked Marriott for the gift of it all.
I can't sing along to "Afterglow" without choking up. Of all the great Marriott moments, that one is the one that fits me most. It's my love for Jules and my friends encapsulated. There aren't many songwriters around that can do that to me, or should I say, singers whose phrasing reveals something deep and resonant to me in that one specific inimitable way. Like a mirror of some subconscious receptacle of the love and pain I carry with me daily. On “Afterglow”, Marriott’s humor gives way to such a testament of love that…well it makes me speechless.
I listen to The Small Faces with the regularity of an aging nostalgic grasping at something perfect that happened long ago. Thankfully, I haven't been depressed enough in recent times to experience what my friend was talking about. Marriott/Lane losing their hold on me? I can't even imagine it.
Despite Marriott's decline --I believe that the loss of Lane as a writing foil made for a rapid painful decent into wasted boogie...bad juju...or bad bugie, if you’ll pardon the pun -- The Small Faces albums, and perhaps parts of the first two Humble Pie albums, stay tucked by my stereo (the version of Buddy Holly’s “Heartbeat” on Safe As Yesterday Is, despite the dated lead guitar, is a wonderful arrangement and reminder of Marriott’s love of Holly…there are far better HP examples, but I do love that song).
And part 3
There is a picture of The Small Faces with Terry Reid. They are all immaculate in their Mod glory. Style dictating haircuts, clothes, and smirks. Dandies all. The two best voices of a certain ken standing side-by-side...both to be eventually tossed aside for decidedly lesser gods. Marriot and Terry sit comfortably on the top of my heap to this day. They trade places depending on my needs at the moment. Of course, Marriot wins hands down in the Mod fashion department.
The moral: Don’t smoke in your home. If you do, don’t drink to annihilated exhaustion. Stub that butt out as if your life depended on it. Or better yet, roll your own cigs (they don’t stay lit if you pass out…the irony of “Ogden’s Nutgone Flake”?). You just never know.
Rarely, it seems, do artists recapture former glory but they do sometimes reinvent themselves. Marriott may have had that happen if not for burning to death. I remain very skeptical of that possibility. That doesn’t matter; the real moral is that soul is rare. And he was the rarest of Mod souls. He was a face. I couldn’t help myself when writing this. I know that it is over long and selfish space-wise here in comment land. But I’m still resting the afterglow.
We are well...doing what we do...wishing we could do more. We send our love...your shoelace is now tied.
xxoo, M
PS. We send our congratulations to E. E. Cassidy. The postcard for “We Are The Mods” sits above my comp screen as I write this. Hopefully we’ll be able to see it soon. Erin, while we only met once, “You’re a Face, baby is that clear”!
pss...
I hate it when people misspell names. In the heat of spewing the above, I misspelled Stephen Peter Marriott's name multiple times. I will now retire to my blackboard to write out "Marriott" 1000 times. Then I will sit in the corner with my well-worn dunce cap and contemplate what Glove said about how bitchin' guitars looked against Marriott's 5'6" frame. And maybe add how cool basses look against Lane's as well.
M
Oh man, Helio! That's a bloody treasure, all that, precious in the good ways, thank you so much. This comments page is going into my several-pages-long list of 'things from D.C.'s that are bloody awesome'. I think I knew from somewhere that you and Mr Mac were tight, but that's all just gorgeous. And finally provides me with a decent excuse as to why 'Satanic Majesties' is and always will be my favourite Stones album... vindicated at last!
One thing I couldn't figure out how to write at the end of my adrenalin-exhausted day yesterday was that my earliest memory of playing guitar is sitting on the side of my bed at about nine years old on a summer afternoon with my dad's clapboard acoustic guitar playing to that tape. 'All Or Nothing', I think, we had the song-sheet music for it in a big binder that my uncle had left behind when he went to Germany.
(Maybe as much as a week later I discovered that I could tape a microphone inside the soundhole and plug it into a little battery-powered amp Dad had loaned me. And if I held this whole mess just like this the whole thing erupted in a chorus of groaning heaves and growls, just like that middle section of "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?". In those feedingback minutes, dear reader, a new world opened up like a cheap novel.)
I only discovered the Steve Marriott and the Small Faces about a year ago. And I have to wholeheartedly agree with Bob Dylan - I instantly felt like a drought in my life had ended. The Small Faces are Rock's missing link. Seek them out, and you will be guaranteed a happier life.
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