What a fiasco. Humble Pie’s 1975 LP Street Rats was like the crash of the Hindenburg, sans the cool explosion. And what a way for a band, perhaps not a great band, but a band that produced quite a few excellent songs and were one of the more formidable live acts of their early seventies, to go out.
As for legendary Humble Pie and (former) Small Faces vocalist and guitarist Steve Marriott, the LP stands as a career nadir. And the amazing thing is, despite the fact that the band itself abhorred it—more about the reasons why to follow—it could have been much, much worse. There are songs on it worth hearing—the problem is they’re surrounded by songs that have been shown to induce clinical disgust, and a cautious person will want to think long and hard about putting the LP on their turntable. The damn thing could be contagious.
Plenty of bands get fucked by their record labels. It’s standard trade practice. And on 1975’s Street Rats, A&M Records gave it to Humble Pie and gave it to them good and hard. And kudos to the folks at A&M, because they managed to do it at a great distance and without the band even knowing about it until it was too late.
Not that Marriott—an incendiary guitarist and gritty, big-lunged vocalist whose combined talents made him one of the most jaw-dropping (if unfairly neglected nowadays) performers of his era—did himself no favors. His brilliance is largely conspicuous by its absence on Street Rats—only two of the songs are solo Marriott compositions, and neither song stands amongst his better efforts. And he doesn’t even lend his mighty pipes to four of the LP’s eleven songs.
The back story is one of rapacious record label perfidy. A&M wanted new product but Humble Pie didn’t want to give it to them, so in early 1975 an impatient A&M confiscated material from Marriott’s Clear Sounds Studio, much of which was intended for Marriott’s in-the-works debut solo album and a collaborative album with Humble Pie bassist Greg Ridley.
Having filched the goods, A&M then brought in Andrew Loog Oldham to do the mixing, and boy did he mix ‘em. He mixed them until they screamed, and when the band heard them they screamed too, loud and long and hard. A braver band may have stolen the masters back and confined them to a bonfire. Humble Pie ate humble pie. And to add insult to injury, even the LP title wasn’t theirs.
Things weren’t improved by the fact that the material passed on to Oldham was largely—and in several cases lethally—sub par. Street Rats includes five Beatles covers, two of which (and this is one of the album’s few saving graces) they do interesting things with, as well as covers of songs by Chuck Berry and Clarence Reid. With the exception of the two solo Marriott compositions the remaining originals were written by consortium, and none of the consortium’s members were distinguished songwriters. The results were less album than minefield, with few safe places for listeners to put weight on their ears lest they be blown to smithereens by bad music.
The Marriott composition “Street Rat” is a thick slice of hard dry metal I’m sure Brownsville Station would have loved to have gotten their nicotine-stained fingers on, but it lacks Marriott’s usual soul. What’s more he doesn’t sound like Steve Marriott, and a Steve Marriott who doesn’t sound like Steve Marriott is a real waste of a Steve Marriott. Furthermore his guitar seems to be trying to play George Harrison’s riff on “Paperback Writer” from memory, but is too wasted to remember how it goes.
But “Street Rat” may as well be “Paperback Writer” compared to the Pie’s incomparably awful cover of Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music.” It’s literally the worst version of the song I’ve ever heard, hobbling and lurching across the vinyl as it does like a zombie with a wooden leg. But what really renders it unlistenable are the tuneless vocals of Greg Ridley. Ridley was no singer, and it amazes me that Marriott—a genius of a vocalist—didn’t recognize the fact. Guess he was trying do a friend a large, but friends don’t let friends do awful things like murder Chuck Berry songs in cold blood.
Marriott’s bluesy and heavy-on-the-soul adaptation of the Lennon-McCartney composition “We Can Work It Out” bears no resemblance to the original, but it works. Anyone who’s heard songs like “Black Coffee” and “Beckton Dumps” knows that Marriott was a damn fine white soul singer, and he’s in great form here. Toss in some organ to add gospel fervor, along with some guitar licks to add punctuation, and what you have is a song that suffered unfairly from the fact that it was in very bad company.
But not all bad company–Humble Pie similarly renders the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” unrecognizable by transforming it into a slow country number, with guitarist Clem Clempson’s tasty slide guitar and the piano adding color. Like “We Can Work It Out” it’s a noble experiment and works—so well in fact that it somehow manages to survive Ridley’s vocals, perhaps because he eschews singing for impassioned talking.
Mighty mouth Steve throws his big soul chops into the Clempson-Marriott boogie “Scored Out,” alternating singing with talking, and when he kicks in on guitar on the slow take-out, it’s awwright. No major achievement, this one, but it’s no embarrassment, and in this swinish company you can only call it a small victory.
On the Marriott-penned “Road Hog” he talks his way through a loose-as-a-goose boogie, which comes as something of a surprise. With a title like that you’d expect heavy metal thunder—instead Marriott ruminates about the hard times, when there are only two eggs in his sandwich. Unfortunately the song sounds half-unformed, a first draft as it were, barely a step above a captured snapshot of a spontaneous studio jam.
The cover of The Beatles’ “Rain” is a muddy, bloody mess. From its very odd opening (“Is this a cover of ‘The Weight’?”) to the chaotically under-thought arrangement (it swells here, deflates there, and why is anyone’s guess) and the overpowering female backing vocalists all is a muddle. It doesn’t help that Marriott shares vocal duties with Ridley, or that the song just creaks and rattles on and on, a piece of shoddy worksmanship that you just want over and done with.
“There ‘Tis” is another soul number that Marriott talks his way through, but it’s as charmless as it is unformed. Like “Road Hog” it sounds like a random moment of studio tomfuckery captured on tape and best left in the vaults—Mel Collins’ saxophone is particularly annoying, and if it was meant to add some jump and boogie Collins didn’t deserve to get paid. The cover of Clarence Reid’s “Let Me Be Your Lovemaker” is an interminable heavy metal crusher of no discernable merit that is helped not a whit by Ridley’s personality-free vocals. Marriott plays some mind-boggling guitar, but nothing could save this one, although handing the microphone to Marriott would have lowered the pain quotient.
The piano- and drum-heavy “Countryman Stomp” could use more stomp, but its seesaw groove has something to be said for it. But like too many of its companions it sounds like a one-take wonder that Oldham was allowed to perform Nazi medical experiments on. Once again Ridley handles lead vocal chores, and once again he makes it clear he’s no lead singer. His vocals are a heavy boot on this one, and the boot can’t master the art of stamping in tune. Closer “Queens and Nuns” is a lighthearted slow boogie that Marriott once again talks his way through—it reminds me a bit of Ronnie Lane panicked chatter on the Faces’ “You’re So Rude,” but it lacks Ronnie’s droll sense of humor.
Marriott was well on the downward slide come Street Rats, and his star would continue to fall. That solo album he was working on didn’t fare well, a reunion with the Small Faces was a disaster, and at various and sundry points the money ran out reducing him (on one occasion) to stealing vegetables from a field near his home and (on another) to collecting empty glass bottles to redeem for small change. And this was the guy Keith Richards wanted to replace Mick Taylor with, although sadly nothing came of it.
Drink and drugs took their toll, a Humble Pie reunion failed to change much, and on and on it went, with Marriott continuing to show flashes of brilliance during his innumerable live engagements but unable to put together a band that would put him back on the charts. And so things went in their staggering, desultory way until he died in a fire at his cottage in the Essex village of Arkesden in 1991.
It was a tragic end to the career of a genius who never achieved the renown he deserved—or his full potential. How much potential? It bears remembering that it took two other greats, Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, to fill his shoes when the Small Faces morphed into the Faces. As for Street Rats, it stands as a sad testament to a man and a band that produced both great music and great memories. Even rats, although perhaps not those of the A&M variety, deserved better than this.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
