Your Big Sister’s (Record) Rack: “Smokin’,” Humble Pie

OK, enough of the video and back to some old records – this is the stuff that your big sister or big brother had, the stuff that might have been kinda famous back in the day.  Today we remember Humble Pie’s Smokin’, from 1972.

Humble Pie was, of course, the British rock band that started in 1969 with lead singer Steve Marriott (formerly of the Small Faces), bass player Greg Ridley (Spooky Tooth), 17-year-old drummer Jerry Shirley and a pretty-boy guitarist and singer named Peter Frampton.  Frampton made four studio albums (and another live album) with Humble Pie before departing for a solo career in 1971.

Lost Classics! “Rock On,” Humble Pie

  

Humble Pie was a British boogie-rock band that reached monstrous success in the early 1970s.   The band was formed in 1968 by former Small Faces guitarist/singer Steve Marriott, and Peter Frampton, a guitar player from the Herd, a moderately successful U.K. pop band.  Because they signed a recording deal with Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, it was thought that Humble Pie would be a sort of Stones-ish blues rock band – but it took a while for them to get there.

The band’s first two albums (As Safe As Yesterday Is and Town and Country) sounded more like the Band, with its acoustic underpinnings.  It wasn’t until the fourth album, Rock On (1971), that Humble Pie hit its stride.  The band recorded many of the songs on tour before they went into the studio and Rock On is a balance, a tug-of-war maybe, of Frampton’s more sedate, acoustic pop sensibility vs. Marriott’s boogie-till-you-puke approach.