Lost in those dead-on jokes from This Is Spinal Tap is the fact that hard rock bands from that era often justified the excesses of their music. A band such as Humble Pie, who turned their amps to the prophetical ‘11’ did so not because they were clueless rubes following the self-indulgent trends of the era, but
because they had a group in Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, Greg Ridley and Jerry Shirley that could use that volume to make their points in the aural equivalent of Technicolor. We’d be a lesser world if that era of musician played within the lines of acceptable protocol. The original Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore was a transcendent batch of electric performances that was still an album side or two short of Canned Heat at their jammiest, even though it
featured a 27-and-a-half minute version of “I Walk on Gilded Splinters.” Time lengths alone never tell the whole story. The fact is, this multi-CD collection doesn’t cull highlights from the four shows played at the Fillmore East over the Friday and Saturday nights of May 28 and 29, 1971, like the original release, but presents unedited tapes in glorious stereo for fans to determine which versions should’ve been the definitive.