Frampton Comes Alive!

by

Peter Frampton

Edit

Ahhhhhh...1976...America was celebrating its 200th birthday, Farah Fawcett hairdos were all the rage, everyone wore either pooka shells or a mood ring (or both) and this album was EVERYWHERE.

I was eleven years old.

I remember sitting in the garage of my aunt's house listening to this album with my significantly older cousins. We'd have the garage door shut and Mike would light incense so that his mom, my aunt wouldn't smell the.....uhm, the biscuits that we were baking, in the garage...well, maybe it wasn't biscuits, but something was getting baked.

I just remember shutting my eyes while the music was going and feelung like everything was just this weird and wonderful dream. The music just kept on going and going even though I knew that my cousin periodically pulled himself up from the avocado colored beanbag he was sitting on to change the record. This music just seemed to register into my pre-teen brain. It even made me want to take guitar lessons even though my dad insisted that I should learn a more "practical" instrument first and then move on to the guitar.

Since when is the accordian practical?

But I never learned to play either of those instruments. Kind of sad, really. But cue up Show Me the way and I play a real mean Fender "air-caster". This album is just loaded with gems and even though later on, I was informed that a lot of stuff was done in a recording studio with stadium effects put in later, it still didn't sour my memories any.

I had this on vinyl and my friend at the time begged me to let him borrow it, after much pleading and promising, I succumbed to his whining. He promptly left it on the seat of his truck on a 105 degree Southern California Summer day. Oh, the carnage. He didn't even offer to replace it. He just told me it was an unfortunate accident. No, his mom not keeping her legs closed 20 years ago was an unfortunate accident. I did find another copy in a used record store, but it's still not MY copy. My copy had vibrations of my love, my joy, my gladness seeping through the album cover onto the album itself. The album that I was now holding had vibrations of someone desperate for a little cash money to buy their next beer so in their desperation they pawned this record for a buck...maybe even less. There's no love coming from this. Only desperation.

So I bought a CD version. Still not the same. At least it's mine, though. My little nephews get a kick out of this music. My youngest likes to pretend he's playing drums and my oldest is a chip off the old block playing his Fender air guitar just like his uncle. It makes me proud that I was able to provide them with some groovy music for some groovy memories later on.

Not too long ago I asked my cousin whatever happened to his vinyl version of this recording. Tears welled up in his eyes as he recounted a very sad tale of him being so desperate one night for cash. He said he sold it to a used record store for a buck so he could get a beer.

Buy this album. Make it yours and never sell the things that move your soul.

Peace & Blessings

Every Frampton fan obviously knows these tunes, my comments here relate to the CD reissue of this classic album.

What you see is what you get, nothing more. No additional bonus tracks, photos, etc. With a running time of 77 minutes, this could have fit on a single CD. Instead, you pay top dollar for a two CD set with half empty CDs. Amazon's whopping discount doesn't help either. After 25 years, Frampton's fans deserve better than this. Surely A&M has made enough off of this monster selling album by now.

If you don't mind overpaying for catalog material and have plucked down for other ripoffs like the Beatles Red and Blue album CD reissues, by all means go and buy this one too. If you have a computer and a good vinyl copy, you're better off saving $ and copying the album off onto a single CD-R, like I did.

By the way, will "Wind Of Change", "Frampton's Camel", and his oother solo albums ever be reissued? If so, I hope they get better treatment than this album did.