Steve’s the singer, Pete’s the lead guitarist, Greg’s the bass player and Jerry’s the drummer – how’s that?’ If you pay attention to your strengths, we might have something. “By our third record ,” Frampton explains, “our first album for A&M in 1970, Glyn Johns said: ‘I think you ought to look at your direction. And although they would play an ‘unplugged’ opening set – way ahead of its time – it was clear they would have to cut the fiddly bits and concentrate on the down-the-line blues rock that ended the show. “Put the band out there, have them play for months, years, whatever, until they’re tighter than a duck’s ass, then capture that on vinyl and away you go.”īut the talent-packed Pie initially proved too eclectic for American rock audiences to digest. “They’d done it before with Joe Cocker,” Shirley says. Although those first two albums had been recorded by a band with no live experience together, Humble Pie were soon to get to know every inch of America’s freeways and turnpikes, thanks to their management. So off-the-cuff was Natural Born Bugie that it didn’t even get on to the band’s second album, Town And Country, which arrived in the record stores in December 1969, just six months after Pie’s debut, As Safe As Yesterday Is. Which is what he and the whole band were trying to appeal to – people who were into music.” “Steve had a bad feeling about singles,” Shirley says, “because he associated them with screaming little divs, as opposed to serious music fans. Singles didn’t figure in the equation initially, but Natural Born Bugie nevertheless went to No.1 in several European countries (No.4 in the UK).

“When you consider we were only in the studio between the months of April and July intermittently, a week here, a week there, it was a tremendous amount of input for a relatively short space of time,” Jerry Shirley says. That band, Humble Pie, ended up on Immediate Records, where the combination of a creative band with songs coming out of their ears and a record company desperate for cash resulted in two albums that have since been released a dozen times. Then the phone rang, and it was Steve: ‘Look, man, I just left The Small Faces. After hearing the first side of Led Zeppelin my jaw was on the floor. “I flew back with Glyn and went to his house straight from the airport, as he wanted me to listen to a new band he’d just recorded. So we went to Paris and I joined The Small Faces for a week. “The way he put it was: ‘Johnny would like either Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page, but they’re busy. He’s always been a big fan and wants to do a couple of Ronnie Lane/Steve Marriott songs’. Rather than Marriott muscling in on Frampton’s band, it was the latter who wanted to be one of The Small Faces.įrampton: “ Glyn Johns called me up and said: ‘The Small Faces are going to go to France to do this record with Johnny Halliday. The story of the band’s formation has been mis-told a thousand times. It wasn’t that good for Humble Pie’s long-term direction, because we did everything – acoustic, country, you name it we did it, all the way up to full-on rock’n’roll. And I think both Steve and I realised that we could do anything we wanted, now we were starting all over again. We were just having a lot of fun playing. It worked against us, because it took three or four years before we actually made the record everybody expected of us.”įrampton revelled in the freedom:“The first day we got together, in Jerry Shirley’s mother’s living room, I think, we were doing songs off Music From Big Pink. “And that was partly why the band’s name was chosen. “We wanted to build it slowly,” drummer Jerry Shirley recalls. Marriott and Frampton had stopped enjoying the teen adulation of their previous groups The Small Faces and The Herd respectively, and wanted above all to be considered serious musicians. Add a trio of the finest backing singers- Venetta Fields, Clydie King and Sherlie Matthews- and you've got a party.Thunderbox (Clemson/Marriott) Copyright 1974 Almo Music Corp/Rule One Music (ASCAP)If you enjoyed this show, please check out these episodes: This show is part of the Pantheon network of music-related podcasts, check out all the other great shows! And please subscribe to this show - that way, you’ll never miss an episode, they’ll be delivered right to you.From the off, though, Humble Pie were to be a reluctant supergroup. Humble Pie was a guitar riff machine, and Steve Marriott was 5' 5 of vocal dynamite. Some songs are timeless expressions of love. Some songs explore the deepest depths of your soul. Some songs call for you to speak out & demand action.

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