Shindig! #170 – Humble Pie
By the end of 1968, 18-year-old Peter Frampton had quit hit-making outfit The Herd, fed-up with the teen idol tag being foisted upon him. Steve Marriott was also fed-up with what he saw as Small Faces’ creative stagnation. This shared frustration led to Frampton and Marriott forming HUMBLE PIE, but there was clearly no rancour on the first two Pie albums, As Safe As Yesterday Is and Town And Country.
To commemorate this, PETER GALLAGHER talks to Pie percussionist Jerry Shirley about the band’s action-packed formative year
Band formed, the next step was a name. Each band member brought two possibilities to the table and the pros and cons of each discussed. Marriott’s suggestion of Humble Pie won the day, not least because it served as a riposte to the “supergroup” whispers circulating in the music press. Management and a record label were items two and three on the tick list, with Chris Blackwell (Island) and Kit Lambert (Track) being considered before the Pie ultimately signed with Andrew Loog Oldham and Immediate, the current home of Small Faces.
After much feet-dragging by Immediate, As Safe As Yesterday Is was released in August ’69. The last album featuring Steve Marriott had been the intricately packaged Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and the record label prevaricated over devising a competing concept. This ongoing delay caused Marriott to momentarily misplace his rag, and he stormed into Immediate shouting they could put it out in a brown paper bag for all he cared. So that’s what they did, with David Bailey’s specially commissioned band photographs reduced to stamp size. Non-album single ‘Natural Born Bugie’ was released at the same time and reached #4 in the UK. Both album and single have a distinct American sound, as if Frampton and Marriott were deliberately trying to leave the “Englishness” of Small Faces and The Herd behind.
“There might have been a conscious attempt to move away from the poppy side of Pete and Steve’s past”, concedes Shirley, “but it was more a case of moving towards what we were now listening to, which was primarily The Band, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills & Nash, all those West Coast bands. We were just engrossed in American music at the time, which is why we ended up covering ‘Desperation’ by Steppenwolf. It was the opening track, and in retrospect a cover version might appear an unusual choice to introduce a new band, but it was the first song we learned together and the first thing we recorded, so it seemed natural to place it first on the album.”
Town And Country arrived in November, a mere three months after As Safe As Yesterday Is, a remarkably swift turnaround even in those heady pump-out-the-product days. “We had As Safe As Yesterday Is rehearsed immaculately before we even went into Olympic Studios, so when we went in, we were knocking off the backing tacks first take, second take, because we knew them so well. I think we had the whole album done in three or four weeks, so we kept going.
“Also, Steve would do a guide vocal on most songs we recorded, and they were always so good. I’m not saying we kept them all on every song, but we kept a lot of them. So, those two albums were really one long set of sessions, the only difference being the first album was pre-rehearsed whereas the second album we did in the studio. By then we knew each other so well we could make it up as we went along, song by song. By the time the first album came out I’m pretty sure that Town And Country was already done.”
One of defining features of the Immediate Pie albums is that they’re hard to define. ‘Bang?’ is a southern-rocker before the term was invented, ‘Alabama ’69’ a rootsy gospel song, ‘A Nifty Little Number Like You’ is proto-heavy metal, ‘The Light Of Love’ an Eastern-tinged pastoral, and so on. Despite this, those two albums each had their own distinct identity. Was this by accident or design?
“When we formed our credo was not to be tied down to any one form, and, right or wrong, we stuck to it. So there was a bit of design in there but much of the tonal difference was organic, based again on the music influencing us at the time. So some of the songs brought to the table for Town And Country were maybe lighter. Some were a bit countrified, or a bit rootsy, a bit more pastoral. And there’s the cover of ‘Heartbeat’, which is a little poppy. We wanted to give it a kicking backtrack, lend it a bit of heft, but remain faithful to the three-part harmony of the original because it was our tribute to Buddy Holly. We weren’t consciously trying to be anything in particular; we were just bringing whatever songs we had to the table.”
Town And Country contained the first solo writing credits for both Jerry Shirley and Greg Ridley, with ‘Cold Lady’ and ‘The Light Of Love’ respectively; a daunting prospect, surely, considering the proven track record of their bandmates?
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