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 pickups 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 newfound 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 at 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 the 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

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 band, 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 , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it 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, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I 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. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog