Humble Pie
Life & Times of Steve Marriott + 1973 Complete Winterland Show BluRay/DVD/CD set
Review by Gary Hill
I think that perhaps this should have actually been released under Steve Marriot's name. Don't get me wrong, a big chunk of his life was Humble Pie, but that wasn't his whole life, and this covers his time with The Small Faces and more. The story woven in this documentary is really the story of Steve Marriot more than it is of Humble Pie, even though they were always interwoven.
This is not a brand new documentary. Nor is the audio disc new. This documentary was previously released under a different title without the CD. This is the first release on Blu-Ray, though. Looking to just the documentary, I find it to be pretty exceptional. A lot of times documentaries will show only short clips of the music, but this one includes whole songs. The story is told through a series of interviews with family members, musicians and more. Some of the musicians are former band-mates, while others are musicians who were somehow influenced by Marriott. Of special interest to me are the bits with Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos from Cheap Trick, as those guys are from my hometown, and I have met them numerous times (and interviewed Carlos for my book "Poetry of the Air")
As to the CD, this might well be the first official release of this disc. It had been released as a bootleg years ago. It's not audio from the documentary, but rather the complete Winterland show from 1973. It's a nice complement to the documentary and does a good job of adding value to the set.
This review is available in book (paperback and hardcover) in Music Street Journal: 2019 Volume 6. More information and purchase links can be found at: garyhillauthor.com/Music-Street-Journal-2019.
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