Ian McLagan Rocked Among Us
British Invasion keyboardist didn't use his laurels for a piano bench after moving here
British rock keyboardist extraordinaire Ian McLagan, who lived in Manor the last 20 years of his life, passed away nine years ago today, at age 69. Mac didn’t come to the Austin area to retire, but to work and create. He and his band of topflight Austin players held a residency at the Lucky Lounge for ten years, and when he died you had to kick yourself for not going every single Thursday. From Dec. 3, 2014:
When Kim McLagan died in a car accident in August 2006, it hit especially hard because I knew how devastated her husband Ian McLagan would be. You’ve never seen a veteran couple so in love. Kim was Ian’s angel and they made each other laugh.
I was at the Statesman when the stupifying news came, assigned to write an obit on the 57-year-old former British model, ex-wife of Keith Moon and doe-eyed princess of Swinging London. I’ve done hundreds of obits on deadline, but this time I couldn’t move. “How’s that obit coming along?” an editor came by after about half an hour. No place colder than a newsroom. He came by again an hour later and said, “I need it NOW!” How was I supposed to write when my friend’s life had just been torn apart? But I plowed through and got it done. Can’t tell you how many times that scenario repeated in my mind and I told the editor to fuck off and leave me alone.
Eight years later, Manor’s only member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Faces/Small Faces, passed away after suffering a stroke, and I had one part of me saying to get an obit up. I’d interviewed McLagan in depth about his career, and should let everyone know his keyboards were as important to Rod Stewart and Faces as Johnnie Johnson was to Chuck Berry. But I let myself reflect for awhile, going for a drive while Facebook and Twitter were blowing up. I was thinking about how Mac, this member of British rock royalty, was more a musician than a rock star. He was part of the community, not gated off from it.
He came here to thump that piano and sing like he and his mates were up to no good. He could break your heart when he sang about Kim (“Date With An Angel”), but he could also make you forget everything besides needing another beer. He had a tradition to uphold!
Mac hustled gigs to pay the bills- good gigs, mind you. And when he had enough songs he made great, rollicking albums like 2014’s United States (Yep Roc), which got great reviews and upped his roadwork. McLagan died the day before he and his band were to embark on a cross country tour with Nick Lowe.
The next summer was expected to hold the long-awaited reunion tour of Rod Stewart and Faces. It would not just be the biggest payday in Mac’s career, but a chance to show the world what true rock n’ roll looks and sounds like. It wouldn’t be the Faces without Ian McLagan, however, so the idea was dropped.
His 20 years in Austin were his most prolific as a songwriter, most rewarding as a bandleader. When he moved here in 1994 he hadn’t recorded a studio album under his name in 14 years, but then came an LP almost every two years: Best of British (2000), Rise and Shine (2004), his Ronnie Lane tribute Spiritual Boy (2006) and Never Say Never (2008). A 2006 Live album recorded at KUT was his tribute to the former Kim Kerrigan.
“I think I will miss playing with him for the rest of my life,” guitarist Scrappy Jud Newcomb told me in an appreciation that ran in Lone Star Music. Newcomb’s awe of McLagan evolved into deep respect over the years he was his guitarist. “I’ll always appreciate and be so thankful that he believed that I loved rock ’n’ roll the same way he did, and that was good enough.”
Bobby Keys, perhaps the greatest sax player of rock n’ roll, died the day before McLagan, one of its greatest piano players. Both had strong ties to Austin, with Keys touring with Joe Ely for years.
The music world has never seen anything like the British Invasion of the 1960’s, when the Beatles, soon followed by the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Hollies, Small Faces and many more mopheads with bad teeth, took the best of American music, from the blues to Buddy Holly, dressed it up on Carnaby Street and sent it back over the Pond as an exotic new strain of rock n’ roll. The response was sensational. Unlike the entourage-laden bands of today, who pretty much keep to their own circle, the British bands of the ’60s all hung out together. Like astronauts who’ve walked on the moon, they were a special fraternity. No one else could understand what they were experiencing, though everyone was trying real hard to find out.
McLagan’s Small Faces had a huge hit with “Itchykoo Park” in 1967, and regrouped two years later when the exit of singer/guitarist Steve Marriott made room for Rod Stewart and Ron Wood from the Jeff Beck Group. These Faces were Small no more.
After Ron Wood joined the Rolling Stones in ‘75, Rod Stewart went solo and the Faces broke up. Their final tour took them to Honolulu, where I worked for the promoter (who also owned Sunbums magazine) as a gofer. One of my jobs was to drive the step van to the airport and take all of the Faces’ luggage to the Kahala Hilton. The band- these gods of mine- walked past me in baggage claim, and I couldn’t believe how tiny they were.
There was trouble in Kahala a day or two after the concerts. The promoter got a call from the hotel that Rod had trashed his room, and Mac punched out Helen Reddy’s husband Jeff Wald. I had been pitching myself to magazines as a Hawaiian stringer, so I called Rolling Stone and was passed on to an editor of “Random Notes.” I told him what I had found out, that Reddy and Wald had booked the suite that Rod and Britt Ekland were in. They had decided to stay another day, but Wald demanded their eviction, NOW! So, Rod rearranged the furniture in a hasty manner. When Wald saw this, he tore off for the lobby looking for British rock stars. Shaking with rage, he grabbed McLagan, who punched him into the wall so hard a painting came down. I said I could write it all up, but they just took the info and wrote it themselves. I think I got $15 for the tip.
After Faces went to feces, McLagan stayed busy, touring and recording as a sideman for the Stones (that’s his electric piano on “Miss You”), Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Billy Bragg, Lucinda Williams and many more. He also had his own group, the Bump Band, named so for his 1980 LP on Mercury Bump in the Night, for club work in Los Angeles, where almost all the British rockers moved in the ‘80s.
While on tour with Rod Stewart in 1994, Ian and Kim signed the papers to buy a two-story wooden house on 15 acres six miles outside of Manor. This was right after the big earthquake in L.A. He loved that the town had a British name and that there was a great restaurant, Little Thailand, not too far away. But the main reason the McLagans chose to live near Austin was because Mac’s best friend from the Small Faces, Ronnie Lane, lived here. Lane had been diagnosed with MS in the late ‘70s, but had made remarkable progress since moving in 1985 to Austin. He was embraced as a musical hero, not just for the Faces, but his Slim Chance solo record and the Rough Mix collab with Pete Townshend.
But Lane couldn’t take the Texas summers and, newly married and in declining health, moved to Colorado just two months after the McLagans arrived. He died in 1997.
“Ronnie was the soul of the Faces,” McLagan said in ’99. “Rod’s songs are all about girls and parties, but the reason they worked is that Ronnie would follow up with a song that went deeper.”
McLagan wrote two songs about Lane — the pub song “Hello Old Friend” and the touching “Don’t Let Him Out of Your Sight” – and included them on his 2000 LP Best of British, which garnered universal great reviews. McLagan had found his singing voice.
The previous year, McLagan released his funny-as-hell autobiography All the Rage. When I went out to Manor to interview him, the photos from the book were scattered around his studio. One showed a 19-year-old Ian riding in the back seat of a car driven by Howlin’ Wolf, who used McLagan’s Muleskinners band as backing on a British tour. “Wolf was the coolest,” he said. “When we met him, he put his arms around all five of us, pulled us towards him and said, `My boys.’”
There were lots of photos of Mac hanging with the Stones, whom he toured with in ’78 and ’81. “So many great times,” he said as he thumbed through a stack of photos of him and Mick and Keith and Ronnie and Charlie. “When I saw the Stones at the Station Hotel in Richmond that first time (circa ’62), I knew that that was all I ever wanted to do. There was never a Plan B.”
I got to talk to Mac about the Wald incident and my brush with celebrity gossip, and he had to laugh. “I almost forgot about that.” It was all a crazy blur, those years on tour with the Faces, who “definitely had a reputation for partying,” McLagan said. We sat down with a pair of Guinesses in the Laughing Dog Pub inside McLagan’s house in ‘99, to talk about his memoir. “It was something the record label was all behind, this image of us as elegantly boozing rock ‘n’ rollers.” Every day the band would check into their hotel rooms and greeting them would be a full bottle of their liquor of choice (Jack Daniel’s for Mac). Often the band members would take their half-empty bottles onstage and swig throughout the show, accenting their charming recklessness. Even though Rod Stewart wore scarves and dated supermodels, the Faces maintained a working-class connection mainly because they refused to take any of this rock ‘n’ roll stuff seriously.
It was an attitude Mac brought to Austin, where he and his band played almost every Thursday at Lucky Lounge for 10 years. It was such a fun residency, with Mac telling stories of the Face days and his complicated relationship with Rod Stewart. It especially irked Mac that Stewart had a current hit with “Ooh La La,” written by Ronnie Lane and sung on the 1973 album of the same name by Wood. “Rod hated that song. He walked out of the studio that day,” leaving the band to record it without him.
Much of the tension in the Faces was because Stewart was signed as a solo artist with Mercury, where he had bigger hits (“Maggie May,” “You Wear It Well”) while the band recorded for Warner Brothers. With McLagan and other Faces playing unbilled on the “solo” albums Every Picture Tells a Story (1971) and Never a Dull Moment (1972), it gave the impression the Faces were Rod’s hired backup band, which the singer did not dissuade.
The McLagan that Austin got to know and love was confident of his place in rock history, as a fabulous keyboard player on so many important records. And as a member of one of the greatest-ever rock n’ roll bands. I didn’t see a better one from 1975 in Honolulu until the Stones played Zilker Park 31 years later. Handpicked to open the show was Ian McLagan and the Bump Band, huddled together at the front like another gig at the Lucky Lounge.
His beloved Kim had passed away two months earlier, so it was a bittersweet gig for McLagan. But for about half an hour he carried himself onstage less as a heart-broken rock legend than that white-haired bloke on piano out to bury your favorite young band.
Fucking beautiful, Michael. Thank you.
Heard him at the bugle boy in Lagrange a few years ago. Corcoran, you’re the real deal.