Ian McLagan was an avid follower of the Los Angeles radio station KCRW’s daily show Morning Becomes Eclectic. He would sit at the dining table/business HQ at his house in Pasadena, California, making his plan for the day, the phone at one ear, the radio at the other, and drawing, always drawing, the ex-Twickenham art school student advising me how best to drive across the bewildering network of LA freeways. “You want to take the 405, hang a right, then take the ten, after that, get on the one-ten … ” He made me beautiful hand-drawn maps with perfect arcing arrows.
Back then, his hair was that straight, upspiked black that he had perfected in the Faces’ days with Ronnie Wood. The style was achieved, he one day revealed, stepping out of his bathroom, by rubbing the scalp vigorously with a towel.
Mac was keyboard king. How that small lithe frame of his could command so much energetic power from a Hammond remains a mystery. So too was Mac’s stubborn refusal to cash in on his talent. He was offered massive deals, high grossing touring deals. “Send me the music, I’ll have a listen to it.” If he didn’t dig it, he wouldn’t play it. He was the most uncompromising musician I ever met. He just couldn’t sell out or play music he didn’t feel right with.
Mac’s wife, Kim, was the joy of his life. She had been married to Keith Moon, but even a near-angel such as Kim couldn’t live with the human steamroller that was Keith. She left, taking their young daughter, Mandy, and soon she was with Mac, who had himself had a family: a partner, Sandy Sarjeant, a dancer on Ready Steady Go, and a son, Lee. When Kim and Mac went ahead with their wedding plans, a month after Keith’s death in 1978, Kim wore a black pill-box satin hat and veil and stated to the tabloids that she loved Keith’s memory still, but her life partner was now Mac.
When the Faces’ successful line-up was no more, Mac and Kim, looking for fresh beginnings, went to LA, living briefly at a Malibu house which had belonged to Keith, with a distinguished next-door neighbour, the actor Steve McQueen. Even McQueen hadn’t been able to cope with Keith’s late-night pranks and carousing, and it wasn’t much quieter when Kim and Mac moved in. In the mornings, even if he had been up all night, Mac would run across the beach and hurl his wiry frame into the ocean.
The McLagans later moved up to Pasadena, and I was staying with them there when the riots of 1992 took hold. House burnings, store lootings, were edging up from South Central, to areas dangerously close to the house. Two years after the riots came the Northridge earthquake. Mac didn’t take kindly to having to shelter under the table. Finally these threats to everyday life prompted the couple to move to what Mac found was his spiritual home in Austin, Texas. “People who play good music, people who love music, they’re everywhere here.” He swapped the drawing pen for a laptop and while touring wrote a book, All the Rage (1998), that was clever, elegant and funny. John Peel, who had been the Faces’ biggest fan, wrote the introduction. Mac’s book toured at the same time I published my autobiography. We shared a reading at a London literary festival.
When I DJed in Austin, Kim picked me up afterwards and drove me out to their house along bare roads with nary a vehicle of any sort for miles. I spent an idyllic day with Kim and Mac. They’d built a bar, like a pub snug in a downstairs room, to remind them of the UK. From this new base, Mac took off on tour and played with his Bump band regularly in Austin, and Kim became a skincare therapist.
A year or so later, I came home from a late show on Radio 1 and opened an early edition of a morning paper, to find that Kim had been killed in a car accident. Mac carried on. Somehow. Perhaps that’s why he had toured almost maniacally ever since. Just days before he died, he had posted all his new tour details on Facebook. His hair had turned white, but he was still Mac the Mod, spikily stylish. What else was he to do but play his heart out?
