Faces. Perfect name, dilating like Lit tle Orphan Annie's pupils into four cheery offwhite nubbins bouncing around in back of an amiably fey horse, who prances and preens and pulls up his baggy silk trousers like Charlie Chaplin, amazingly enough, just in time to run his bony fingers back through his hair and fling the sweat off with a bal lerina bow. Rod Stewart still sings with the same grainy grace and hard-knocks sensitivity, and the band is tighter than they used to be. Ron Wood is still chopping out those same chunks of Chuck Berry and Keith Richard with that cigar ette screwed in his mouth like a peg. Tetsu is looser than Free ever allowed, Ian MacLagan is comping and whomp ing with characteristic insouciance, and Kenny Jones has a new haircut that makes him look even more like a shop clerk trying to go hip.

These are the Faces, banging around on their umptieth American tour, doing basically the same set in the same way that they have been all these years, and if you think I like them you're right. I like them because they have the most per fect balance of sloppiness and discipline I have ever seen in a working band, and I like them because they're nice guys, and you don't have to personally know or be around them to know and appre ciate that fact. I like them because the first time I saw them they returned for their encore and said, "Listen, one thing you're going to have to get straight with us is that if you ask for an encore, you can't have one. You have to take three. So don't anybody try to leave." I like them because on their early 74 visit to my home town they were obviously exhausted, wasted from the road - at one point Rod bowed in one of his patented plies, and having come so close to the floor stayed in that elegant squat for just a moment too long, obviously resting -but put on a hell of a show anyway that had me dancing on my seat by the time they got to "Twisting the Night Away."