In praise of Humble Pie

Peter Frampton is quite a good guitarist. If you took off "Rolling Stone" and "Walk On Guilded Splinters", Performance would have been a fantastic live document. As it is it's too bloated, bad rock excess. Good heavy overlooked album track - "The Fixer" from Smokin'.

There's a 2-CD UK set called "The Immediate Years" that compiles them both.

Gee, I think the first one, at least (I think it is) is sooo nice.

man they rule

listening to the s/t now -- I just can not fucking believe how great Ridley/Shirley were. JPJ/Bonham are *probably* better ... but sometimes i'm not so sure

They refer to themselves as "The Pie" in the inside gatefold of Eat It.
blech

really? i suppose that's sorta lame, sure ... I've actually never heard Eat IT .. I got off the bus at Smokin. But what a great ride it was!!!

actually I don't why I said I don't like the first two up above --- I freakin LOVE the first two!!

"I'm Ready" off the s/t ... Ridley/Shirley are fuckin SICK. (this also could go on that noize board breakbeat thread)

Orange Amps in full effect

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Mu7sl5DnU

more niceness .. i would even go so far as to say x amount of niceness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pAzUG3UaWM

the humble pie version of "Desperation" is just epic -- shirley, frampton, and marriott trading vocals.

"30 Days In The Hole" and "I Don't Need No Doctor" both ruled the FM airwaves of my youth...

^^oh yeah. Rockin' The Fillmore = total recall of 8th grade :-/

I have a single-disc best-of by Humble Pie (this one) and honestly it doesn't do much for me at all. I like Foghat and Black Oak Arkansas and even Cactus and the Groundhogs better. What am I missing?

The Humble Pie of the first two records is a different beast than the post-Frampton boogie juggernaut. The boogie is cool, but the early stuff is full blown folk-rock with hints of psych, blues, and epic hard rock. I wouldn't put early Humble Pie in the same category as Foghat and Cactus. It has more to do with Faces, Stones, Little Feat's debut, etc.

Frist two records:

Town and Country

As Safe as Yesterday Is

Or, if you buy vinyl, there is a fairly cheap twofer compiling both discs. This came out in the early '70s, after the band blew up as a boogie act.

Humble Pie, one of my favorites, were spotty all through their career although a major live draw. Their first few albums after the switch from Immediate tended to sell well. Marriott took the band over the cliff in his yen to be a soul man complete with black lady backup singers. It blew up in the act's face around the time of the double album Eat It. Fans started giving up on 'em and never came back.

Don't believe half the praise here for the Immediate records, which came out before Pie were a success. They just aren't that good.

The band improved dramatically when they cut the softer stuff. Best album is Rock On. They did their best two hard tunes, "Stone Cold Fever" and "Four Day Creep" -- both of which are must haves -- over the space of it and the live set. "Rock On" lives up to its title.

There is a 2-CD box called Hot & Nasty, superior as a retrospective than the onesie you have. If you can secure a copy, trade in the onesie. It has a few tunes from the Immediate discs and does do a good job of picking the best. It includes "Thunderbox" from the album of the same name as well as "99 Pounds," a tune to which the former is very much superior. Includes more from Smokin', their best-selling studio LP. Also includes "Red Light Mama, Red Hot" and "One-Eye Trouser Snake Rumba" from eponymous record, first after leaving Immediate. Both rock. Trivia note: Rocket from the Tombs took "One-Eyed Trouser Snake" as the bedrock for one of their own tunes.

Includes one of the Beatles covers, "Rain" from Street Rats, the last LP, although not "Paperback Writer," which I would have picked over "Road Hog," which is what the onesie delivers. You get that anyway along with the title cut while one pays a little more for the Hot & Nasty box, you get everything the shorter "greatest hits" (something they never really had) packages deliver.

The band improved dramatically when they cut the softer stuff.

Depends on what you like.

When you get down to it, for those who enjoy long hard rock jams with no discernible song structure except at the very beginning and end, "Rolling Stone" and "Gilded Splinters" have their moments, the former being my preference. Frampton puts a lot of his modal soloing into Rockin' the Fillmore -- the LP that broke them in the States -- and it's their hardest record. Sequenced on vinyl, you could play the first and fourth sides and have a satisfying session of bombast and crunching axework.

i like it all. early, middle, and late. but i'm easy to please. i think the first album is lovely.

Jerry Shirley has a book out:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Seat-House-Drumming-Marriott/dp/1888408138/

He was on WFMU last night, good interview

Looks cool. Seems to be a pretty thoughtful and reflective guy, based on his quotes in The Mansion On The Hill. Also, a fan-fucking-tastic drummer.

Humble Pie had a really killer rhythm section, Greg Ridley was a really great bassist.

On Earth 2, there is probably a version of Humble Pie that Frampton stays a member, sings some songs and they become an absolute huge group until they fly apart in the late 70s. I'd like to have heard those records.

Of course on Earth 3, there is probably a version of Led Zeppelin fronted by Steve Marriott.

there's a 4 CD - Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore The Complete Recordings

this goes so hard, i think i feel abt this the way everyone's been feeling about the Dead Cornell set recently

I got partway through CD1,and gave up and went for my copy of Wire's "Pink Flag", hray!

Wire is a great band
I don't see know why you'd listen to Humble Pie if you were in the mood for Wire

It was more like having a massive portion of I dunno, steam pud, would mean you need a good beer.

See, "Wham Bam" was one of my favourite Small Faces tracks, to me it sor-of said they could have continued and still have been great/relevant to the times, etc.

It wasn't until somewhat later that I found out that Kenny Jones, for one, didn't like it at all.

ok u harshed my mellow carry on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJr80trTFPo

Scorching Pie & Blackberries at 28:32 ("I Don't Need No Doctor") & 49:56 ("30 Days In The Hole")

Marriott was one charismatic M.F.

As I understand Keith really wanted to play with Steve Marriott and they jammed with him before the Stones took on Ron Wood. There was no way Mick would have signed off on it as there is no way Marriott would have been able to just be a guitar player in the band.

The "I Don't Need..." from that show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJPVLywFd9I

This is awesome... I don't think I've ever actually seen video of The Pie in action.

I luv <3 when he dances w/the backup singers (starting around 2:40)

he was nuts live. i was just listening to Thunderbox today! i love how he could turn any song into a humble pie song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay_YBli0YEM

https://www.loudersound.com/news/humble-pie-midnight-special-1973

Didn't know that performance was filmed in a *Department Store*

Performance: Rockin' The Menswear

30 Days in the Mall

ThunderBigBox

i don't need no dockers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPELbIVZKs4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvO8h1kZLQs

An All-Star lineup coming together to stop A.I. Steve Marriott was not on my 2024 Bingo Card.

https://variety.com/2024/music/news/steve-marriott-children-fight-stop-ai-generated-songs-small-faces-humble-pie-1235996140/

A long list of artists including Robert Plant, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Peter Frampton, Bryan Adams and more have joined the late British singer Steve Marriott’s children and bandmates in opposing the release of “new” recordings featuring AI-generated versions of his vocals.

...

The AI-generated recordings, which are said to be incomplete, were authorized by Marriott’s third wife, Toni Marriott, whom he married less than two years before his death.

...

Shirley tells Variety that late last year, he received an email from Los Angeles-based independent label Cleopatra Records, which had issued some of those Humble Pie releases, mostly to his satisfaction, about renewing their agreement. “Buried in the renewal contract,” he says, was a new paragraph addressing AI.

At first, “I had no idea what it was, to be honest with you,” he says. “But eventually I realized what it meant, [France] confirmed it, and I said, ‘I want nothing to do with it.’”

In an effort to prove that the AI-generated recordings would be unsatisfactory, Shirley proposed that Cleopatra attempt an AI version of “Georgia on My Mind,” the R&B classic made famous by Ray Charles, as an example. He would then compare the result with a rough recording of the song in his possession that Marriott had recorded during the 1960s that was unreleased (so the AI couldn’t be trained with it).

The AI recording was “horrible,” Shirley says. “It sounded like someone trying to sound like someone trying to sound like Steve Marriott.” The company sent him another attempt, which “sounded like a not-bad soul singer,” he says, “but it didn’t sound like Steve. And the backing track was just laughable.”

Damn… that’s crazy

Is anyone not surprised it was Cleopatra records as the label?