Review: Small Faces' 'The Decca Years 1966-1967'

Small Faces’ Decca catalogue has been reissued and reissued and reissued, but that situation seemed like it had come to an end in 2012 with the release of double-disc deluxe editions of the band’s two official Decca albums remastered on CD from the original master tapes for the first time. Not so. Three years later, Decca and Universal are bringing out Small Faces and From the Beginning and their numerous bonus tracks yet again as part of a five-disc box set called The Decca Years 1966-1967.

Just to save the faithful some time, I will be up front about the question on all of your modishly mop-topped minds: these masters of Small Faces and From the Beginning, as well as all their bonus tracks, sound identical to the 2012 ones to my ears. Yes, they still sound fabulous… if a bit loud, though Rob Caiger assures us in his liner notes that the loudness is all due to the band’s tendency to crank it up in the studio and not remastering engineer Nick Robbins’s heavy hand. However, if you’re happy with your 2012 CDs and aren’t overly desirous of cool packaging and a few recently unearthed radio sessions, then this might not be the box set for you. If you never dropped your pence on those previous deluxe editions, and you want to grab all of Small Faces electrifying Decca recordings in one sweet package, then The Decca Years 1966-1967 is the ideal way to do it.

Augmenting Small Faces and From the Beginning, which are both on their own discs, is a disc of all the bonus tracks from the 2012 deluxe discs (the only deletions are eight fake stereo tracks, the absence of which won’t exactly cause purists to weep), a Greatest Hits disc that collects essential tracks from the two albums with all the single A and B sides missing from them (this box’s tendency to repeat tracks is one notable flaw… the original versions of “Sha La La La Lee” and “What’Cha Gonna Do About It” each appear three times!), and a disc of BBC sessions. Perhaps it was the discovery of four tracks recorded for the “Joe Loss Pop Show” that were not included on 2000’s The BBC Sessions that justified this box set, but these are the roughest sounding recordings on the set (on the up side, they include the groovy instrumental “Comin’ Home Baby” unavailable in any version elsewhere on The Decca Years).

Unlike Rhino’s recent Faces box set, which sounds great but suffers from chintzy packaging, all attention to detail has been paid to Mac, Kenney, and Plonk’s early work. The Decca Years arrives in a high quality, though not-oversized, box with four over-sized, full-color postcards you’d be a dope to post. Each disc is housed in a mini-LP sleeve about the quality of the ones in the Faces box. There’s a great 74-page booklet full of color photos, essays, and profiles of each band member, their two Decca records, and their biggest hit songs for the label. So despite redundancy issues that may prevent you from wanting to spin the whole thing in one sitting, The Decca Years 1966-1967 is still a fab re-packaging of some of the best hard soul and rock & roll of the sixties… and if there’s one thing a bunch of mods should appreciate, it’s a slick package.

Review: 'The Who: Live at Shea Stadium 1982'

In 1982, The Who released their first “farewell” album, It’s Hard, and undertook their first “farewell” tour. Neither was the most beloved chapter in Who lore. Many fans, and certain band members, didn’t rate Kenney Jones an adequate replacement for the recently deceased Keith Moon. Pete seemed begrudging about the whole thing and was wrestling with his own issues with substance abuse and depression. The new material he offered to The Who wasn’t nearly as strong as the songs he kept for his own records, which meant set lists were peppered with less-than-classics.

Quite a few of these issues didn’t matter that much when The Who took their act to New York’s Shea Stadium on October 12 and 13. Perhaps it was playing at such a historic venue (on the 13^th, they whipped out two songs from The Beatles’ first album—that’s two more than they played from their own two first albums combined!). Perhaps having The Clash as opening act lit a fire under them. As evidenced from Eagle Vision’s new disc, The Who: Live at Shea Stadium 1982, The Who didn’t exactly put on the ultimate performance during their NYC stint, but they do burn through quite a lot of it, particularly when playing more recent material like “Sister Disco” and “The Quiet One”—both blinding showcases for John Entwistle—or treasured obscurities like “The Punk and the Godfather”, “Drowned”, and “Young Man Blues”. Otherwise, The Who mostly deliver the professionalism that makes the show a good listen, if not an exhilarating one. Mid set, that professionalism slips a tad with a version of “Tattoo” that suffers from some dodgy harmonizing and a general lack of enthusiasm over the number, but that kind of façade drop had always been an integral component of their shows—nobody ever wanted to The Who to be nice (plus, the song is their best as far as I’m concerned). A slack rendition of “Naked Eye” and a monotonous one of “Cry If You Want” are a little less easy to forgive.

An interesting facet of the movie is how it reduces great, big Shea Stadium to a more intimate venue by not dwelling on the elaborate stage set up, leaving most of the huge audience in shadow (we only really glimpse the first few rows), and muting their screams. It creates the illusion that The Who said “farewell” by playing a mid-sized club.

The Who: Live at Shea Stadium 1982 arrives on DVD and Standard Definition Blu-ray. That means it was shot on video (complete with some awful “slo-mo” video effects), so the picture cannot be in hi-def, but the music can at least be delivered without loss. As far as video goes, it doesn’t look bad. The audio is pretty good, though I wish there was more John in the mix. The show from the 13^th is included in its entirety, as are five bonus numbers from the 12^th, three of which are songs not performed the following night (“A Man Is a Man” and the essentials “My Generation” and “5:15”). Too bad the other two songs exclusive to that night (“Magic Bus” and “Athena”) aren’t here too, but overall, Live at Shea Stadium 1982 shines as positive a light on The Who’s rocky 1982 as one can expect.

Review: Deluxe Edition of Small Faces' 'Ogden's Nut Gone Flake'

Small Faces had really hit their stride by 1968. They'd moved from Decca to Andrew Oldham's more sympathetic indie Immediate. They'd finally cracked the U.S. top twenty with “Itchycoo Park”. Now they were poised to create their defining statement, which would distance them from their early bubblegummy hits and put them into serious competition with The Beatles, Stones, Who, and the rest. A conversation with Pete Townshend about his latest pet project inspired Small Faces to bin the covers of “Every Little Bit Hurts” and “Be My Baby” they'd recorded to pad out their next L.P. and spend some time crafting a narrative suite. Glued together with some inspired gibberish from double-speaker extraordinaire Stanley Unwin, the “Happiness Stan” suite would be Small Faces’ magnum opus and Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake their most convincing bid for major artistdom.

What set the album apart from the similar psychedelicized concept albums of the time are its unflagging humor, complete lack of pretentions, and fidelity to the hard R&B and R&R that was Small Faces’ specialty. Ogden’s was a smash sensation in the U.K. and a particularly well-loved album in a year crowded with such well-loved items as “The White Album”, Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland, Music from Big Pink, and Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Everyone was gaga over the novelty round cover done up to look like a tobacco tin too. Too bad that Small Faces’ most sweeping triumph also signaled their end.

Ever unsettled and hardly placated by Ogden’s’s success, Steve Marriott insisted on bringing Peter Frampton into the band to give it a fresh boost. When the other guys resisted, Steve and Pete went off to form Humble Pie. The remaining Small Faces hooked up with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood and ceased to be Small. With a recording career that lasted a scant four years and three official albums, Small Faces had ceased to be, leaving Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake as their defining statement.

Considering the album’s weighty rep, it’s appropriate that Charly Records has also given it the most elaborate treatment of any album in the recent Small Faces reissue campaign. Housed in a round box and expanded to three discs, Charly’s deluxe, limited edition Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake is a pretty impressive looking package. It would have been nice if the set was in an actual tin tin, but it's still a neat little container, if a little tight to uncover. Inside are a few variations on the original round artwork, photos, and band member profiles, which are collected in a lightweight foldout booklet and on individual, coaster-style discs. The hand numbering indicating your standing in the limited edition run of 5,000 is scrawled on the back of a reproduction of Mick Swan’s psychedelic artwork (I'm almost dead center at #2,455). Oh yeah, there are some CDs too.

As was the case with those previously released deluxe editions, the sound here is aces. The expansion, however, is a bit overinflated. We get the album presented in stereo and mono, each mix on its own disc and undiluted by bonus tracks. The bonuses are relegated to their own disc, which basically recreates the album’s original running order with alternate mixes that uncloak few revelations and some backing tracks. The most interesting things here are a mix of “Lazy Sunday” with more prominent acoustic guitar and electric piano that is probably the clearest stereo version I've heard, the backing track of a chunky alternate take of “Mad John”, and best of all, the backing track of “Happiness Stan”, which reveals a panorama of amazing textures, particularly the Prokofievian string pizzicatos and Kenney Jones’s titanic drumming. “Every Little Bit Hurts” (“Be My Baby” is apparently lost), the backing track of a funky raver called “Kamikhazi”, and what sounds like “Ogden's Nut Gone Flake” played backwards round out the disc.

As soon as this tracklisting hit the Internet, fans came out of their hidey-holes to start the inevitable griping orgy. If this is the last word in Small Faces remasters then where is “The Universal”? Where is the Ogden’s era b-side “Wham Bam Thank You Mam”? Where is “Donkey Rides a Penny a Glass”? Where are all the tracks (finished and unfinished) Small Faces cut for their aborted final album 1862? As the griping got heated, Tosh Flood (a project assistant on these reissues) took to the comments section of The Second Disc to ensure fans that all this and more would populate a four or five disc box set— without any overlap with these recent deluxe editions— sometime in the near future. So while Ogden's Nut Gone Flake brings an end to the Small Faces story, the Small Faces reissue-campaign story still has a few chapters to go.

Review: 'Small Faces' (Immediate) Deluxe Edition

When we last left Small Faces they were suffering ignominiously at the hands of a record label cobbling together an unrepresentative compilation and tossing it out just two weeks before the band's second proper album was due for release on their new label. Just as the Small Faces’ story shifted from Decca to Immediate back in 1967, it moves from UMe to Charly music today. The latter label is reissuing multi-disc deluxe editions of the Immediate albums Small Faces and Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. The change in labels (both of the original and reissue variety) is most appropriate as Small Faces had become a very different band during the switch. The band could still whip up a mighty soul wallop, and Steve Marriott could still unleash his Stax howl to shred the shingles from the roof, but an acid infused Small Faces now made music of great delicacy too. Their second eponymous album is a more diverse affair than the first one, mixing soul, heavy Rock, British folk, baroque tinkling, calypso, rowdy knees-ups, and swirling psychedelia in equal proportions.

Charly presents this intricate music in a classier package than the UMe deluxes, stowing it in a high-quality digibook instead of the flimsier digi-pak foldouts that housed Small Faces (Decca) and From the Beginning. While all the material on those previous deluxes really could have fit on single-disc editions, there’s enough stuff on Charly’s Small Faces (Immediate) to warrant a double. We get the album in both its mono and stereo incarnations, as well as some of the group’s finest singles and radical alternate-mixes as bonuses. “Green Circles” is presented in four totally distinct iterations that sport diverging experiments with phasing and equalization, as well as unusual vocal arrangements. An alternate version of “Things are Going to Get Better” features some cheeky whistling, and a mono alternate of “(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me” has super upfront lead vocals and a creepier blend on the bridge. You’ll have further fun spotting the differences between the standard mono and stereo mixes, particularly on the delightful hit “Itchycoo Park”. Fortunately, one avenue in which the Charly reissue copies the UMe ones is sound: the same remastering team worked on Small Faces (Immediate) and it sounds phenomenal. You’ll think Ronnie Lane is trapped in your speaker when he starts cooing “Something I Want to Tell You”.

Review: Deluxe Editions of ‘Small Faces’ and ‘From the Beginning’

Small Faces were the quintessential Mod band, one of England’s biggest hit makers of the ‘60s, and recent inductees into a certain turgid popularity club. Ample evidence that their wonderful recorded output should be ripe for double-disc deluxe editions, right? However, there are but four Small Faces albums, and they have been reissued and reissued and reissued since the dawn of the compact disc. But wait. Those myriad reissues have all shared one significant flaw: they’ve all been assembled from second-generation tapes. UMe’s new Small Faces deluxe campaign corrects this wrong, pulling their classic albums from the original masters. The sonic improvement will stop you in your tracks. I have Decca’s expanded edition of Small Faces from 2006, and I always thought it sounded pretty damn great. Playing it alongside UMe’s new edition reveals an anemic, overly trebly master. The UMe version sounds deep, dimensional, and very, very heavy.