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McLagan’s routine usually consisted of pouring himself a pint or two of Guinness ("Ah, the black madness," he calls it) at home and settling in to sift through hours of rehearsal tapes, studio triumphs, and live performances. He tailored his approach to the way a great disc jockey might produce a radio show, sequencing the flow of the set for maximum impact. "This was my way of loving the Faces and presenting them. I wanted to knock myself out. ‘Flying’ [which opens disc one] was the first choice, and then ‘On the Beach’ was just so obvious, but it’s so illogical because the song just stops! Now when you have a song like that, the arrangement would have been trimmed here and there, but not then. It just falls apart for a minute and then starts again. So then I followed that with a rocker (‘Too Bad’), and I was gone. I was having the best fun."

To his grateful surprise, when questions arose about the source of a live performance or the date of a recording session, Faces fans from all over the world pitched in with suggestions and corrections. "They would e-mail me and tell me what the date of a BBC transmission was, and they really helped if I was to make a mistake."

Five Guys is dedicated to Ronnie Lane, and like Good Boys, it goes a long way toward rectifying what McLagan claims has always been the wrongful impression that the Faces amounted to Stewart’s backing band. (Stewart himself says he used to be embarrassed by advertisements plugging "Rod Stewart and the Faces.") It was a perception that led Lane — a gifted songwriter with a tender touch — to quit the group in frustration in 1973. (He was replaced by former Jeff Beck sideman Tetsu Yamauchi.) In fact, the songwriting was mostly collaborative and fairly evenly divided among Stewart, Lane, and Wood. (As opposed to what happened to him as a junior member of the Stones, Wood is credited on the lion’s share of jointly authored compositions here.) Still, it’s easy to understand how the charismatic Stewart, whose solo career was taking off with a string of seminal albums (Gasoline Alley, Every Picture Tells a Story, Never a Dull Moment), came to be seen as the focal point of the group. And given that he routinely enlisted various combinations of the Faces to back him on his solo material (Wood and McLagan both played on the studio version of his solo hit "Maggie May," and a raggedly wonderful version cut live with the Faces is presented here), the line between the Faces and Stewart’s solo career begins to blur.

Far easier to mark is the group’s dramatic transition from their original mid-’60s incarnation as mod-pop poster boys the Small Faces (with singer/guitarist Steve Marriott at the helm) to the barnstorming Faces, the name they adopted when Stewart and Wood — both recent alumni of the blues-rocking Jeff Beck Group — joined. McLagan found the new line-up, which many considered on to be the same blues-rock plane as the Stones, liberating. "When Rod started singing with us, he’d already sung with the Beck band and done a few other things. He was hungry then. When the Faces got together, we were released from being the Small Faces the pop band — released from the image and the expectation of turning out pop singles. That’s why, when we rehearsed in the very early days, we always played ‘I Feel So Good,’ because for Woody, Rod, and me, that was the first album we bought — Muddy Waters at Newport." A romping workout of the Big Bill Broonzy blues number appears on Five Guys; it was captured on McLagan’s tape recorder during an early rehearsal in the summer of 1969. The track offers a raw, revealing glimpse of a gutsy band finding their footing.

The Faces ended in acrimony two years after Lane’s departure, but after all these years, the hatchets have been buried, and at Stewart’s August 30 Hollywood Bowl concert, McLagan and Wood came on stage, Wood teaming with Stewart for five songs, including "Stay with Me," and McLagan joining in at the end on "Ooh La La." So maybe a reunion isn’t out of the question. "Rod tends to look back on those days and think we were all drunk," McLagan muses. "Well, actually none of us were that drunk. We were working very hard, and having listened to all of this, I know we were much better than we thought we were."