Tag: Small Faces

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366 Songs 202/203/204: Grow Your Own/Own Up Time/Almost Grown

It’s been a non-stop day; I went from feeling ahead of the crowd by lunch to feeling crushed by deadlines now, and I’m not entirely sure why. So, in order to get my energy and lust for life back, it’s time to listen to some Small Faces instrumentals. I don’t know why, but there’s something spectacularly energizing about these tracks for me, the relentless nature of them, the balancing of all the ingredients, and way they all desperately make me want to dance…

My favorite of the three posted here is easily this last one, “Almost Grown,” which has a perfect push-and-pull momentum going on that, at the very least, should have you bobbing your head as you listen along. Add to that, a particularly crunchy guitar and equally grumbly hammond organ, and you’ve got my love happily sewn up even before you get to Steve Marriott improvising towards the end “Oh, don’t talk that way…!”

Seriously. It doesn’t get much better than this, as far as I’m concerned; just listening to these three and I find myself ready and raring to go, no matter what lies ahead. Now that, dear readers, is the power of music.

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366 Songs 182: My Mind’s Eye

One of my favorite things about this song is that it was apparently released despite the Small Faces’ wishes; the version that everyone knows was a demo that management put out as a single because they wanted a follow-up to the band’s previous single sooner than the band could come up with. That might explain why it’s really only half a song, with the other half being what’s essentially a rip off of “Ding Dong Merrily On High” with “In my mind’s eye” replacing “Hosannah in excelsis” (This was the band’s 1966 Christmas single, amusingly enough; clearly, someone had a sense of humor) And yet… This is a great little psych pop song, even in unfinished two-minute form, as much because of the energy in the performance and the spectacular organ that the Faces had going on back then. It makes you wonder what other greatness we’ve missed from the band because it never went past the demo stage, doesn’t it?

Strange but true, I first heard the song as a (far inferior) cover from Britpop wannabes, Northern Uproar:

They totally butcher it with their sub-Oasis clodstepping, don’t they? So much so that, when I first heard the Small Faces version later that year, I didn’t even make the connection that they were in fact the same song. Just imagine how much musical greatness we have lost because Oasis were so popular back in the 1990s…