Frampton Comes Alive!

Peter Frampton

1976/1987: A&M 75021 6505 2


CD1

  1. Introduction
  2. Something’s Happening
  3. Doobie Wah
  4. Show Me the Way
  5. It’s a Plain Shame
  6. All I Want to Be (Is By Your Side)
  7. Wind of Change
  8. Baby, I Love Your Way
  9. I Wanna Go to the Sun

CD2

  1. Penny for Your Thoughts
  2. (I’ll Give You) Money
  3. Shine On
  4. Jumping Jack Flash
  5. Lines on My Face
  6. Do You Feel Like We Do

I couldn’t give any manner of informed “review” of this album, being merely a person who likes music and to celebrate it; also, the album came out when I was 10 years old and therefore was somewhat stamped into my musical psyche at least peripherally thanks to its hits (and they were monster hits for radio play back then). Instead I can only note that this is a pretty good taste of a not-very-hard-rock rock concert of the 1970s—not of the experience of being at the concert, unless you have a joint handy and are already fairly well disengaged from the pace of daily life—a concert that has room for something as relatively quiet as the sweet little guitar instrumental “Penny for Your Thoughts” (although even that is punctuated by yelps and whoops from the stoked crowd). My own perspective puts this in a special listening room with Kiss’s Alive!, itself a quite thrilling trip into a harder-rocking concert of the day. Frampton’s music is more musical than Kiss’s, less formulaic, but his group (and consequently the audio experience) is much looser and more unfocused by comparison.

“Do You Feel Like We Do” IS what this album is all about, now, the concert in miniature even: a slightly groovy rock number that the crowd gets into right away, it gets down to business doing the whole rock-song thing for awhile and has a beaut of a simple chorus for all to groove on, but then the instrumental jams and solos begin…and at their core is Frampton’s “talk box” guitar/voice manipulation (where electric guitar solo and scat merge spellbindingly in the hands/mouth of the artist). That isn’t the track’s zenith, merely its mesmerizing and slow rocket-flight…you can practically FEEL the audience’s enchantment with that solo, but Frampton and the band still bring the track up a bit higher on its climb and arc into the climax superbly.

I suppose I should mention that I do NOT play this one idly (especially the closing track) or as filler while I’m doing anything else: especially on headphones, it provides such a magical transportation to its actual moment that that moment still commands my attention. And while Frampton’s voice is nothing special in itself, it still delivers the necessary goods here and is therefore integral.

HOME   •   MUSIC

Comments © 2010 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.