Frampton Comes Alive! hit #1 for first of 10 weeks

Frampton Comes Alive! Peter Frampton

Recorded: live: March 24, 1975 to November 22, 1975 Released: January 6, 1976 Charted: January 31, 1976 Peak: 110 US, 6 UK, 117 CN, 8 AU, 11 DF Sales (in millions): 8.0 US, 0.1 UK, 17.0 world (includes US and UK) Genre: classic rock

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts. Something’s Happening Doobie Wah Show Me the Way (2/21/76, 6 US, 10 UK) It’s a Plain Shame All I Want to Be Is by Your Side Wind of Change Baby, I Love Your Way (6/26/76, 12 US, 28 AC, 43 UK) I Wanna Go to the Sun Penny for Your Thoughts I’ll Give You Money Shine On Jumpin’ Jack Flash Lines on My Face Do You Feel Like We Do (9/18/76, 10 US, 39 UK) Total Running Time: 78:06

Rating: 4.295 out of 5.00 (average of 19 ratings) Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: “If you were challenged to name five rock albums that epitomized the ‘70s, Frampton Comes Alive! should probably top the list.” AZ After stints with Herd and Humble Pie, Frampton had ventured out on his own. He made “four solo albums with little commercial success.” WK It wasn’t until a collection of some of those tracks were recorded live “and released as Frampton Comes Alive! that he became a household name.” AZ In fact, there’s a joke in the movie Wayne’s World 2 that if you lived in the suburbs at the time, you were automatically issue the album. WK It was recorded during the summer and fall of 1975, primarily at San Francisco’s Winterland venue and New York’s Long Island Arena. Recordings from four different shows went into the making of the album. WK Consequently, “one must take this all with a grain of salt as a concert document.” AMG Not only did work have to be done to splice the songs together into seemingly one show, but “there was considerable studio doctoring of the raw live tapes, a phenomenon that set the stage for such unofficial hybrid works as Bruce Springsteen’s Live/1975-85 and countless others.” AMG When initially released, the album “was an anomaly, a multi-million-selling (mid-priced) double LP by an artist who had previously never burned up the charts with his long-players in any spectacular way. The biggest-selling live album of all time” AMG offered “buoyant pop, sentimental ballads, arena rock – this album has it all.” AZ It’s easy to see why the album did so well. Frampton “packed one hell of a punch on-stage – where he was obviously the most comfortable – and, in fact, the live versions of Show Me the Way, Do You Feel Like I Do, Something’s Happening, Shine On, and other album rock staples are much more inspired, confident, and hard-hitting than the studio versions.” AMG The 1999 reissue offered “a considerable improvement over the original double CD or double LP in terms of sound – the highs are significantly more lustrous, the guitars crunch and soar, and the bottom end really thunders, and so you get a genuine sense of the power of Frampton’s live set, at least the heavier parts of his set, rather than the compressed and flat sonic profile of the old double-disc version.” AMG “Frampton and the band sound significantly closer as well, even on the softer songs such as Wind of Change, and the disc is impressive listening even a quarter century later.” AMG

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Peter Frampton AMG Bruce Eder, All Music Guide AZ Lorry Fleming, Amazon.com WK Wikipedia First posted 1/6/2012; last updated 11/30/2022.