First Step (Faces album)

First Step is the debut studio album by the English rock band Faces, released on 27 March 1970 by Warner Bros. Records. The album was released only a few months after Faces had formed from the ashes of Small Faces (from which Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan hailed) and The Jeff Beck Group (from which Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood hailed). The album is credited to the Small Faces on all North American issues and reissues, while record labels for initial vinyl printings give the title as The First Step. The album cover shows Ronnie Wood holding a copy of Geoffrey Sisley's seminal guitar tutorial First Step: How to Play the Guitar Plectrum Style. While the album was recorded after the group's official formation and signing to Warner Bros. Records in the autumn of 1969, the band members had been rehearsing, performing and recording together in various combinations since May of that year. At 46:22, First Step is the band's lengthiest original release and many modern critics regard it as promising, but sprawling and unfocused – their least cohesive and most undisciplined offering. It is however perhaps the most democratic of the Faces releases, highlighting the band's talents as a unified whole and affording each member at least one composer credit, as opposed to the perceived dominance of Stewart and his songwriting partnership with Wood as their career progressed. On 28 August 2015, the album was reissued in a remastered and expanded form, including two previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded shortly after the album's release, "Behind The Sun" and "Mona: The Blues" (the latter was remade and refined by Lane and Wood in 1972 for their Mahoney's Last Stand film soundtrack).