SMOKIN' was Humble Pie's first post-Peter Frampton album. Co-founder and blues shouter par excellence Steve Marriott was thoroughly in charge here, and the result was the band's best-selling album. The idiom is basic, straight-ahead Stones/Faces style blues-rock, with occasional forays into Led Zeppelin-style riffage.
Highlights include dramatically slowed down versions of Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody," Junior Walker's "Roadrunner," and the wah-wah laden slow blues "The Fixer." "You're So Good for Me," which begins as a delicate acoustic number, ultimately mutates into a full-bore gospel rave-up, and is precisely the sort of thing that the Black Crowes seem to have studied assiduously.