Frampton Comes Alive! - Peter Frampton

I am very late to the party with Frampton Comes Alive! Not that it's an excuse but I was just thirteen when this came out, and it really wasn't an album any of my friends had at the time, so I never had a chance to hear it. It also didn't help that for whatever reason the big hits seemed schmaltzy. Peter Frampton looked like a rock star who didn't really seem to play rock but played smokin' guitar. At the time I liked Kiss, Alice Cooper and BTO and this wasn't on my radar.

Of course the album was huge, and Peter did play that really cool Les Paul. If two pick ups were good, three would put you over the top. But still, aside from the radio hits I didn't know anything about the guy or the album. Of course by the time I had enough money to buy things I never really felt this was anything I'd ever want or even listen to.

Then a couple of years ago I was in a music store and got to talking with the guy behind the counter about players we liked. This young guy, much younger than me, asks "You heard the Humble Pie at the Fillmore stuff?" I replied no, I hadn't really listened to Humble Pie, other than it was a name I'd heard before. This guy kept at it, "You should hear the stuff Peter Frampton does. It'll melt your face." Okay, maybe he didn't say melt your face, but that's what he meant.

So I find the Fillmore concert and after putting my face back on, I had a new found appreciation and respect for Mister Frampton. Then one day in the car "Do You Feel Like We Do?" comes on the radio, and it wasn't schmaltzy at all, for close to fifteen minutes I'm listening with new ears, and now I get it.

Not long after I'm a the record store going through my favourite dollar bins, and there it is. Frampton Comes Alive! "Please be in decent shape." I mutter to myself. I give it a good clean, and aside from missing sleeves the rest was in decent shape and played great all the way through both records.

I played it again.

Sometimes it takes me a while to figure things out. I suppose better late than never.

Comments

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog