’Ow d’you fancy starting a group up?”Ī few minutes later Marriott is stuffing shillings into the slot and belling Peter Frampton, who he tracks down to producer Glyn Johns’ London flat. I’ve just done a show with the Small Faces at Alexandra Palace and I’ve had enough. This bloke co-wrote them a single called (Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me, got him a deal with Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records, fast-tracked him to play drums for the latter’s Orchestra. But he’s happy to answer a call from a man he is in awe of, who’s known him since he was 15 and played with Apostolic Intervention. Jerry’s played a gig that night with Tim Renwick and their group Little Women (aka Wages Of Sin), and is about to turn in. Drummer Shirley, still only 17, answers the phone at his parents’ house in Nazeing, Essex. Very heavy, very Humble.įlashback to the fag-end of New Year’s Eve 1968 and the early hours of the New Year. These, though, were the good times, when every teenage music fan worth his salt walked around with a copy of the band’s fourth album, Rock On, released in spring 1971, tucked under the arm of their greatcoat. A few months later Frampton will quit after mixing their live album with Eddie Kramer, and five years on Steve Marriott, the ultimate mod, will be found living in poverty in Santa Cruz, collecting empty 7-Up and Coca-Cola bottles and using the deposits to buy cigarettes, before not enjoying an aborted reunion with the Small Faces, and suffering a non-fatal heart attack.
But at Hyde Park we simply enjoyed being in the greatest band we’d ever been in.” The heroics came later, after I left and made Frampton Comes Alive!. I didn’t feel like I was a guitar hero, it was just something I did. We enjoyed that commanding feeling, the intensity of the big occasion. We’d already packed out Madison Square Garden where the noise was unbelievable. “We made it more than difficult for Grand Funk to follow us. He grabbed the audience with all the old corny methods, his dancing, his voice. We’d been tear-gassed in Milan a few nights before. Big crowds didn’t bother us they made us play better. Steve managed to project without any effects. According to Shirley, “We were on our game. Less than three years into their career Humble Pie have got their live show sussed. After they’ve played a large proportion of the crowd drift away, just as they will a week later when the experience is duplicated in Shea Stadium. Grand Funk’s manager Terry Knight introduces them to the biggest roar of the afternoon and they easily upstage their US rivals. With four studio albums under their belt and a live double album recorded at the Fillmore East in NewYork yet to come, Humble Pie are on top form and on home ground.
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