By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY
In January 1976, a not-especially-well-known British rocker named Peter Frampton released a live double-album, often the custom in those jam-oriented days of pop music.
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY
We love your way: Peter Frampton is marking the 35th anniversary of Frampton Comes Alive! with a tour that re-creates the album's set list. /cutline>
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY
We love your way: Peter Frampton is marking the 35th anniversary of Frampton Comes Alive! with a tour that re-creates the album's set list. /cutline>
The album was Frampton Comes Alive! and it killed. More than 6 million copies sold that year, and 16 million to date. It ruled the airwaves with hits like Baby, I Love Your Way and made Frampton an overnight sensation.
"My friend (filmmaker) Cameron Crowe perhaps said it best," Frampton, 61, recalls with a laugh. "He said, 'The look on your face (on the album cover) is that of a man who's just been shot into outer space.'"
Though Frampton has long since come back into earthly orbit, he's returning to the stratosphere with a summer tour (next U.S. stop: Danbury, Conn., Friday) that finds him playing the entire Comes Alive! opus, 14 songs that formed the soundtrack to many a Boomer's life.
The album's ubiquity was captured in Wayne's World 2, when Mike Myers' Wayne jokes that "if you lived in the suburbs, you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."
"It's the definitive musical document of the '70s," says Rolling Stone contributor Alan Light. "It had the long hair and the long songs."
The fragmented nature of today's music and media means that shared cultural moments provided by albums such as Comes Alive!? and six years later, Michael Jackson's Thriller? cannot be repeated, Light says.
"It's hard to imagine any release today having a cultural-event status like this," he says. "Then again, the very definition of a phenomenon is something you don't see coming."
To commemorate the album's 35th anniversary, a deluxe edition with extras such as an autographed scrapbook and a vintage-style T-shirt is available at peterframpton .com. An iTunes version includes an exclusive cover of Do You Feel Like We Do by guitar ace Warren Haynes.
Though Frampton has played snippets in past concerts, he's never revisited the entire set list.
"Look, I've moved on, and even won a Grammy" for 2006 instrumental album Fingerprints, says Frampton. "But I figured it would be nice to do the whole thing."
Frampton found success as a teenager in his native England, first with The Herd and then with Humble Pie. But nothing before or after came close to the explosion that was Comes Alive!.
"I wished for that success, and then it hit when I was just 26, and it was nuts, with huge highs and lows," he says. The biggest low: being pressured into rushing out a follow-up, 1977's I'm in You.
"I bowed to voices that were focused on greed," he says. "Peter Frampton the musician became buried by Peter Frampton the pop star."
The ensuing years ebbed and flowed. He nearly died in a car wreck shortly after Comes Alive!, released albums that didn't sell well, married three times and had four children.
With the passage of time, Frampton says he's able to look back on Comes Alive! and smile, knowing that he managed to bottle lightning.
"We had an inkling when we went to hear some of the tapes for the first time," he says. Keyboardist "Bob Mayo and I just looked at each other with Cheshire cat grins.
"There was an energy and power coming out of those speakers. And absolutely, playing those songs now puts me right back there."
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