Humble Pie’s Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore, one of the most revered live albums from the 1970s, has been expanded into a four-disc set, covering the four sets the band played May 28 and 29, 1971 at the Fillmore East in New York City. The sets include many of the same songs, but as four complete performances, you’ll hear slight variations and an out-of-this-world mix by engineer Ashley Shepherd to make you feel like you’re there. Listening through Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore – The Complete Recordings, you’ll really wish you were.
When Humble Pie — vocalist and guitarist Steve Marriott, vocalist and guitarist Peter Frampton, vocalist and bassist Greg Ridley and drummer Jerry Shirley — first came together, they played a lot of acoustic songs and were being groomed as a super pop band. Marriot’s time with Small Faces, Frampton’s with the Herd and Ridley late of Spooky Tooth all gave the band tons of street credit; their evolving musicianship surely inspired them to be more than just a Top 10 sensation in the UK. It was when they went to America that they were encouraged to beef up their sound. With four studio albums in the can, Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore was the perfect vehicle to launch the band stateside at a time when the hard rock world, spearheaded by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad and Deep Purple, was creating this great monolith of thunderous rock ‘n roll.
Hearing The Complete Recordings is the whole picture of a band operating at their all-time peak. You’ll know the ones they picked for Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore when you hear the licks phrased just so, or one of Marriott’s casual quips ala “It’s really been a gas!” Apparently, they played “Stone Cold Fever” only once, at the end of the third set in place of “I Don’t Need No Doctor.” How wild to think that if that’s the only set you caught, you missed out on the one song released as a single (considerably edited down), which helped boast Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore to gold record status, Humble Pie’s first in America.
Multiple versions of “Four Day Creep,” “I’m Ready,” the epic “I Walk On Gilded Splinters,” “Hallelujah (I Love Her So)” and “Rollin’ Stone,” which was played twice, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for collectors, completists, freaks, hardcore fans and whatnot, this is the Holy Grail. Marriott’s soulful yelp is an instrument unto itself, which he changes up subtly, for example, from one version of “I’m Ready” to the next. Frampton, of course, was on his way to becoming a guitar God, while Ridley and Shirley formed a tight-knit rhythm that gives the music wheels to blast through “gilded splinters” and broken glass.
By the time the double Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore LP was released and zooming up the charts, Frampton had gone solo and Humble Pie were working on a follow-up studio album. Smokin’ made the Top 10 and the single, “30 Days in the Hole,” became one of Humble Pie’s most beloved songs. Various lineups would come and go into the early 80s, but with Marriott’s tragic death in 1991, followed by Ridley’s passing in 2003, all hope of a full reunion with the original unit have been dashed. Thankfully, Frampton and Shirley, who co-produced Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore – The Complete Recordings, with its four CDs of the remastered, remixed, unedited four sets and detailed liner notes by Tim Cohan, recognize the historical significance and unbridled muscle the original Humble Pie had in 1971. It’s high time they shared the whole thing, at its most pristine, with the rest of the world.
~ Shawn Perry
