30 Days in the Hole

Zoo Freaks, the Crew just dropped the needle on Humble Pie and “30 Days in the Hole,” off the 1972 album Smokin’, and if you have ever heard Steve Marriott tear into that chorus you already know why the room leans forward. That voice does not ask permission. It comes out of the East End of London, runs through a soul singer’s chest, and lands like a bike kicking over in a gravel lot. The song is a swaggering little jailhouse yarn, and the story behind it is as crooked and funny as the groove itself.

Marriott wrote it. He got the spark after Humble Pie played Kentucky and somebody laid out the local math: get caught holding and you were looking at thirty days in the hole. A friend of the band had already done time for a joint, so the warning was not a rumor passed around a dressing room. Marriott later said the title itself floated up from a prison picture he caught on television, a Humphrey Bogart flick where a convict gets sent down for thirty days in the hole. Folks still argue whether he meant Angels With Dirty Faces or whether the line he half-remembered actually belonged to Paul Newman in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Either way, he lifted the phrase, stuck it on a boogie, and made it his.

The lyric is a roll call. Red Lebanese. Black Napalese. Durban poison. Cocaine. A greasy king-size. And Newcastle Brown, which can sure smack you down. Some listeners hear the brown ale out of the northeast of England. Others hear the slang for heroin, the stuff that had stopped being a joke by the early seventies. Jerry Shirley, the drummer who was there, remembers Marriott trying lines on the band out on the road, then losing the scraps in a pocket. When they got to Olympic Studios in London to cut Smokin’, Shirley jogged his memory. There was a little amp in the room with a tremolo that shook just right, and the music fell together on the spot. Shirley has called the tune a song about debauchery, drink, and the rest of the road kit. It plays like a party. Underneath, Marriott was also saying the law was swinging a hammer at something half the culture was already doing.

It was not a single back home in Britain. A&M put it out in the States about a year after the album, backed in some pressings with Sweet Peace and Time, and it never charted. Album radio did the rest. Classic rock stations kept it in the crate, and it became the Humble Pie song a lot of people know even when they cannot name the record. Dave Clempson, who had come over from Colosseum after Peter Frampton walked, has said it is one of the tracks he would most like to be remembered for. Years later, asked about putting the band back together without Marriott, Clempson called the idea a waste of time. The song wears Steve’s fingerprints that hard.

Smokin’ was the fifth studio album and the one that turned them into American headliners. Frampton was gone, off toward his own long road, and Clempson’s guitar gave the band a heavier, funkier bite. Marriott sang, played guitar, harmonica, and electric piano. Greg Ridley held the bass and the harmony. Shirley drove the drums. The record sits next to Hot ’n’ Nasty and the rest of that Olympic session like a denim jacket that still smells like a club. Shirley has told the story of the Shea Stadium gig that came just before, opening for Grand Funk in the rain, Marriott grabbing the mic and telling the crowd they did not care about the weather, they were going to rock. That is the same spirit sitting inside “30 Days in the Hole.” Good-time music about a month in a cell. Only Marriott could sell both ends of that bargain in one breath.

If you want the trail back to how this crew even got started, you have to rewind to New Year’s Eve 1968 at London’s Alexandra Palace. Marriott was still the singer in the Small Faces, the band that had defined the mod moment in England, and he had grown sick of being the teen pin-up who had to sing Lazy Sunday like it was the whole story. Mid-show he walked. He yelled that he quit and left the rest of them to finish. He was twenty-two. The first call he made was to Peter Frampton, nineteen, late of the Herd, a guitar player Marriott had already taken under his wing because both of them were tired of the heartthrob tag and wanted to be taken seriously as musicians. Frampton has told it more than one way over the years, but the phone call lands the same: Marriott had left the Small Faces, Greg Ridley from Spooky Tooth was willing, and did Pete want in. He did.

The fourth piece was Jerry Shirley, seventeen, out of a little Immediate Records band called the Apostolic Intervention. They rehearsed in Shirley’s parents’ front room, knocked around hard blues, soul covers, and the boogie that would become the trademark. The British press slapped the supergroup label on them before they had played a note in public. They hated it. Names went into a hat. Humble Pie was Marriott’s pick, a joke aimed straight at the hype, and it beat Frampton’s suggestion of Evil Cardboard, which was supposed to be the end of a joint. They signed to Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label. The debut, As Safe As Yesterday Is, arrived in 1969 with the single Natural Born Bugie, a number four hit at home. Town and Country followed the same year, then the move to A&M and the records that built the live reputation, climaxing in Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore. By the time Smokin’ hit the shelves, the pretty-boy chapter was closed and the denim chapter was wide open.

Marriott never really shook the excess that fed the song. He died in a house fire in 1991, and the band’s story after that has been Shirley’s to carry, with the name in his hands and the blessing of the old camp. The records did not vanish. Robert Plant has said he wanted to be Steve Marriott. That is the company this voice keeps. When the Crew spins “30 Days in the Hole” on THE ZOO, it is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a road song, a bust song, and a reminder that the best rock and roll often starts with somebody walking off a stage because the hit single felt like a cage.

The band’s own trail is kept at the Humble Pie official website, where the Smokin’ years still sit at the center of the story. The page they run on Facebook is Humble Pie Music. Freaks who want the longer hangout can find the group co-run with Jerry Shirley, tied to his book about the drum stool, over at Humble Pie Official: Hot ’n’ Nasty. Pull up a stool. The record is still hot.