Faces Five Guys Walk Into A Bar CD

Includes previously unreleased tracks.
Faces: Ron Wood (vocals, guitar, slide guitar, pedal steel guitar, harmonica, bass guitar); Ronnie Lane (vocals, acoustic guitar, dobro, bass guitar, tambourine); Rod Stewart (vocals, electric guitar); Ian McLagan (Wurlitzer piano, harmonium, organ, keyboards); Kenney Jones (drums, percussion).
Additional personnel: Bobby Keys (saxophone); Harry Beckett (trumpet); Tetsu Yamauchi (trombone, bass guitar); The Memphis Horns (horns); Harry Fowler (steel drum); Neemoi Acquaye (percussion).
Liner Note Authors: David Fricke; Ian McLagan.
There has never been a better box set than the Faces' Five Guys Walk into a Bar.... There has never been a box that captures an artist so perfectly, nor has a box set taken greater advantage of unreleased and rare material, to the point where it seems as essential and vital as the released recordings. Simply put, there's never been a box set as necessary as this, since it tells the band's entire tale and explains exactly what the fuss is all about. Unfortunately, some explanations are in order, since the Faces never made it big, resigned to cult status in America and Britain alike. Nevertheless, if you love rock & roll with an all-consuming passion, you may consider the Faces the greatest rock & roll band ever. And you'd be right. Other bands were certainly bigger and plenty wielded a stronger influence, but the Faces were something unique, an endearingly ragged quintet that played raw, big-hearted rock & roll as hard as the Rolling Stones, but with a warm, friendly vibe that would have sounded utterly foreign coming from the Stones. At the turn of the '60s, that warmth was unusual in rock & roll, since most of the big bands were larger than life; even the Kinks, the quaintest and quietest of the titans of the late '60s, had a theatrical bent that lent them a mystique.
In contrast, the Faces were utterly without mystique. They were unpretentious to a fault, coming across like the lovable lads from the neighborhood who were always out for a good time, whether it was before, during, or after a gig. They were unassuming and mischievous, with their raggedness camouflaging a sweetness that flowed throughout their music; they were charming rogues, so endearing that even the infamously cranky, trendsetting British DJ John Peel had a soft spot a mile wide for them. That raggedness resulted in exhilarating music, but also made the Faces inconsistent on-stage and in the studio. At their peak, nobody could touch them, but even their greatest albums were sloppy, never maintaining their momentum. They would also throw away great songs on non-LP singles, and their live performances -- including BBC sessions for Peel -- often had a raucous energy not quite captured on their albums. All of these elements taken as a whole add up to a great band, but no single album, not even the first-rate 1999 compilation Good Boys When They're Asleep, captured each of these elements.
Five Guys Walk into a Bar... does. Produced and sequenced by their keyboardist, Ian McLagan, the set throws all conventional rules of box sets out the window. It's not assembled in a chronological order. A grand 43 of its 67 tracks are non-LP cuts and rarities, including a whopping 31 previously unreleased tracks. It has all the B-sides never released on CD. Several songs are repeated in alternate live or studio versions. Such a preponderance of rarities would usually mean that a box set is only for the devoted, but that's not the case here -- these rarities are the very reason why Five Guys Walk into a Bar... succeeds in a way none of their original albums do, since they fill in the gaps left behind on their four studio albums. This does mean that it features several Rod Stewart solo cuts that worked their way into the Faces' repertoire (partially because the band backed him on his solo albums, too), but that was an important part of their history (plus, the BBC version of "You're My Girl [I DonRolling Stone (p.124) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[T]hey made some of the friendliest-sounding rock & roll ever."
Spin (p.106) - "[The compilation] may be a truer picture than any single album."
Entertainment Weekly (p.77) - "One of their decade's warmest, scrappiest and most joyful acts, they were capable of both folkie intimacy and pranksterish raunch..." - Grade: A-
Q (p.137) - 5 stars out of 5 - "[They] suffused their rock with a wonderfully contagious roll....[With] an underlying grasp of the same influences that defined the early -'70s Stones..."
Uncut (p.106) - 3 stars out of 5 - "[T]he Faces were the perfect post-mod/blues-boom gang of good-time charlies, deeply steeped in American soul but also in English folk-rock."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.122) - 5 stars out of 5 - "[A] cover of The Beach Boys' 'Getting' Hungry,' from the group's final recording sessions, reveal a band still with much to offer..."