Photo by Tom Wright

“With The Faces, you never know what’s going to happen.”

It’s a theme that comes up again and again in conversation with Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones, who made up the gloriously ramshackle, R&B-powered pub-rock band between 1969 and 1975 alongside Rod Stewart, Ian McLagan and Ronnie Lane.

Of the band’s four studio albums, only 1971’s A Nod Is as Good as a Wink…to a Blind Horse cracked the Top 20 in the U.S., and that album’s “Stay With Me” was their only charting single. Yet, the reputation that the The Faces made as a live act, and their hard-drinking, full-throttle approach to life both onstage and off, left a strong mark on the punk movement and on such latter-day rockers as The Black Crowes and Guns n’ Roses.

The occasion that has brought Jones and Wood together on this sunny afternoon in a lower Manhattan hotel is the band’s imminent induction into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which took place a few days later in Cleveland. Rumors of Faces reunions have surfaced repeatedly over the years, and after doing several tours with Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall taking vocal duties and Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols on bass, it seemed like the ceremony would be the opportunity for the surviving band members to finally make it back onto the same stage.

But indeed, the pair’s repeated warnings about the unpredictability of all things Faces-related proved true once again: Though they were palpably excited at the prospect of playing together for the first time since 1993, at the last minute, Stewart came down with the flu and joined Axl Rose as lead-singer-in-absentia at the event.

The Hall of Fame honors line up nicely with the publication of a massive new, limited-edition book of photographs, titled simply Faces, from the ultra-luxury British press Genesis Publications. The volume has hundreds of previously unseen images, capturing the band in full, raucous flight onstage, and in intimate tour moments both silly and contemplative. With tributes from musicians including Paul Westerberg, Slash and Paul Weller, the book reveals the long shadow that the group cast.

The project started a few years ago, when Genesis published a book of Wood’s artwork. According to Nicholas Roylance, who heads the company along with his sister, “a lot of our readers had requested a book on the Faces – we’ve had that feedback for a long time.”

The Faces were the second incarnation of the Small Faces. After Steve Marriott left the group to form Humble Pie, Stewart and Wood cut loose from the Jeff Beck Group and came onboard. Both groups were inducted into the Hall of Fame together, and in addition to all of the other activity, a set of deluxe and remastered editions of the Small Faces catalogue began its rollout in April.

Usually, the drummer is supposed to be the wild one, but on this afternoon, Jones – who later went on to join The Who after Keith Moon’s death in 1980 – was the calm half of the team. Wood, whose term in The Rolling Stones began during the final months of The Faces, laughs loudly and bounds about the hotel room, searching for coffee, soda and a missing slide for his guitar. ( “I need a ¾ inch copper pipe; otherwise, I can’t go on!” )

The pair reminisces easily about The Faces days and you have to believe that it was a genuine disappointment when the long-delayed reunion didn’t happen.

“When we all meet up, it’s like no time has gone by,” says Wood, “but it’s amazing to see how much time actually has flown by.”

So can you believe that, 40 years later, you’re still talking about The Faces?

Kenney Jones: We made an impression when we came to America in the first place, and I think it’s been a lasting impression.

Ronnie Wood: But it’s kind of a timeless music with The Faces, anyway. We’re all kind of like naughty schoolboys who can’t wait to get back together again. (He says to Jones) Did you see that email from Mac [McLagan] to Rod? “Let’s drop all the bollocks and pay tribute to Steve and Ronnie and just have a ball.”

Jones: But then again, anything can happen – which I’m hoping.

Wood: The element of risk is very funny with us – including the arrangement to a song. It could fall apart immediately, or it might happen, but that’s what we love. We wouldn’t be The Faces if we knew what was going to happen.

Photo by Tom Wright

Where do you see the impact of the band in music today?

Jones: You see it in somebody like The Black Crowes. There are lots of bands like that but not as well-known as them.

Wood: And bands like Oasis in England – we were heavy influences on them. When Glen Matlock played with our new formation of The Faces, he was saying that the Pistols used to love The Faces as well. We all take a leaf out of each other’s books, whether we know it or not, but some people lean toward more of a heavy influence. You can tell it when you listen to some songs.

Tell me about putting the book together.

Jones: This ended up being quite an emotional journey – getting our old photographs out – because you normally wouldn’t go that deep into your collection. I’ll never forget the first mock-up that was sent to me – I cried three or four times going through it, reliving the memories. I realized, shit, we’ve gone through so much. When I spoke to Woody about it, he’d gone through the same experience.

Wood: I didn’t know a lot of photographs were taken. I thought all these hotel room pictures were just in a fog in my brain somewhere. And then you open it up and go, “Wow, I thought that was just in my head. I didn’t know anyone took a picture of it!” [There are] lots of black and whites where we’re all on the bed – lots of nasty accidents on the bed, in boring times in middle America. We were so lonely on the road, really. [We played] lots of football as well, in corridors and parking lots.

When we showed it to Rod in London, we were at dinner, and he more or less didn’t eat anything – he started to look at a few [pages] and then go deeper and deeper, and he finally said, “I’ve got to close the book, this is ridiculous, I’ll never eat.”

What did this project bring up for you emotionally?

Wood: There’s a satisfaction that those years are at least itemized and put down for history. Your little chunk of a crazy band that was only paying tribute to American music anyway, and putting our own slant on the blues, R&B [and] soul music.

Jones: My youngest kids have been asking me for years, “What was it like in The Faces?” They’ve seen videos, but now I’ve got the opportunity of saying. “Have a look at that and that’s exactly what it was like.” And from there on, I’ve been getting questions every day: “What’s this, where were you here, why are you falling over here, what’s going on there?”

How do you feel about The Faces and Small Faces being inducted into the Hall of Fame together?

Jones: Mac’s quite emotional about the fact [that] they’re two separate bands – and they are, completely. Small Faces never went to America, but The Faces did, and The Faces made a lot more people aware of the Small Faces. I’d like to think Small Faces would have ended up in the Hall of Fame eventually, but there is that kind of marriage.

Wood: Rod and I were the biggest fans of the Small Faces. So when Steve Marriott left, we were part of the morphing of that band, saying. “We’ve got to keep the spirit of this band going, the camaraderie of the Small Faces.” We carried a great message, we transformed it.

Jones: It was fate, really; it was meant to happen. They’re two separate bands but with that same thread running through of being creative and having a great time playing together. It’s nice for people to see the two bands as one in a sense, because there was that wonderful camaraderie and friendship between the two. The only drag is that Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott aren’t here to share it.

Wood: Once Ronnie Lane didn’t make it to a Top of the Pops TV thing and we had a cardboard cutout of him! When you look back, it was quite hilarious. We did another one where we rebelled against miming on TV – we always wanted to play live and they said, “No way, [you] can’t do that.” So I had a bit of string with old Coca-Cola cans tied to the guitar cord, silly things like that. You used to have to stand on a little tape dot, you weren’t allowed to move, and we would start playing football or whatever and the cameramen would go, “Oh, no, we’ll never get this” and “You’re banned from the BBC” or whatever.

Photo by Tom Wright

Do you think that side of The Faces has caused people to minimize how good the band actually was? Even your biggest fans tend to talk about how much you drank before they talk about how you sounded.

Wood: Well, we went to rehearse first. We’d do one song, then [go] down to the pub. Got to get our priorities right.

Jones: I think we just liked having a great deal of fun together, and how better to enjoy each others’ company than with a beer or two – or a brandy or two in those days. But we were really good when we were sober.

Wood: We were a good band underneath – very soulful. And we used to take what we played very seriously. It never came across like that because we couldn’t keep a straight face – we were too busy having a ball and enjoying every moment of it. But no matter how drunk we were, we always pulled it together when it came time to play, and I think that’s what saved our lives. You’ve got to get it together when you play in front of an audience – you owe it to them. That’s a big gift that we had as musicians, to be able to pull it together – and pull it apart at the same time.

The two of you went on to join two of the biggest bands of all time. Was it a difficult transition going from the knockabout approach of The Faces to the huge machines of the Stones and The Who?

Jones: You know, we must have been good, or good enough, anyway – Woody joined the Stones, I joined the Who, Mac was playing with Bob Dylan, and Rod was Rod. I thought, [if] there is something in this after all that, we must have had something special going.

Wood: I think it was a challenge for Kenney like it was for me. The whole plethora of songs that we were presented with – The Who and Stones songbooks – even though I knew the songs in my head, I had to learn so many of them.

Jones: Someone said to me the other day that he remembered seeing me with The Who at Shea Stadium and I forgot all about that. I had no idea.

Wood: A gig is a gig.

Do you think The Faces ever made an album that really captured everything that the band was capable of?

Wood: No, we never did. Did we? There was always a loose link, a part of the album we sort of thought was filler.

Jones: Funny enough, a lot of people now have taken to the tracks that we didn’t think much of. They’re kind of favorites, and it surprises me.

Wood: There’s a whole fan club for “Flags and Banners,” and it’s like, “Really? You like that one?” It’s good that you cater for all tastes, without knowing it.

Jones: If you ask for my favorite Faces album, I’d say just take two or three tracks from each one and that would be the way to describe us.

Photo by Tom Wright

You’ve brought up Detroit several times as we’ve talked and it features prominently in the book. Why was that such a special market for you?

Wood: It was like coming home to us in Detroit. [Our fans there] all worked for the Ford Motor Company and they’d all come in leather jackets straight from work. They were all ready to rock and it was a bit working-class, the equivalent of the East End of London.

Jones: Don’t forget that we were really good friends with a lot of the American people we bumped into.

Wood: Like David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks (of the Temptations), we used to meet up with them. And Bobby Womack, who’s sadly ill at the moment.

Jones: Tina Turner used to come and play with us if she was around. All the different spontaneous moments with The Faces were so great.

Did you feel more of an affinity with that type of working-class American city than with the more glamorous media centers on the coasts?

Wood: We were always a bit outside the glamour. We were always a bit rebellious; [we] didn’t think we [were] worthy or whatever it was.

Jones: We weren’t commercial by any stretch of the imagination, and I think that’s what made us special to the people who liked us. We were just doing what we wanted to do and not what the record label wanted us to do.

Wood: We used to say, “We’re gonna do this,” and they would say, “Well, we don’t know if we can really get behind it, then.” And we’d say, “Well, sod you, we want to do it.” It was always a bit of a struggle because they didn’t really understand – they just wanted a pop hit, the usual.

Jones: And now, they want exactly what we were – all that old stuff that’s really special, that they wouldn’t promote at the time.

Talk of a Faces reunion comes up frequently, even before the Hall of Fame. Are you thinking at all about what might happen after this coming weekend?

Jones: I think if it’s going to come together, it will come together naturally. And that’s the way it should be left, really. When we come together, it’s like we’ve always been together. It’s a weird feeling. And that’s what I love about The Faces: that the friendship is always going to be there. You’ll either tour or you won’t, but it’s gonna be for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons.

Wood: The magic will be just getting together again, having an exchange between the guys musically and who knows what will happen? I think Rod is pleasantly surprised at the memories and the acclaim that the band is getting late in the day, but I don’t think he realized how loved the band was. None of us did, really. We always underestimated ourselves. We always thought we were just a band, doing what we do. We didn’t realize so many people loved it.