"Frampton Comes Alive" - Keep or Return?

I have yet to wrap my head around the phenomenon of this album. So dude follows four solo albums that didn't get much traction with a double live at a reduced price and that's the one that turns into one of the biggest albums of all time? It's weird. Like the audience freaking out to the opening notes of 'Do You Feel Like We Do' as if the song was already some massive hit. I don't understand! Explain it to me!

After the lack of success of his "Camel," Frampton performed under his own name and began touring the United States extensively for the next two years, supporting acts such as The J. Geils Band and ZZ Top, as well as performing his own shows at smaller venues. As a result, he developed a strong live following while his albums sold moderately and his singles failed to chart. "Do You Feel Like We Do" became the closing number of his set and one of the highlights of his show.

it was a joke that 14 million people were in on

feel like he was another one of these 70s equivalents to DMB or something, quietly becoming really huge among teens/college kids based on live shows. like that snippet says i guess. it IS a weird phenomenon, esp combined with like, the cheesy title and the fairly unlabored-over cover, which all feels like a throwaway release to have something to sell at shows, and yet they're releasing a double live album for a not-super-huge name.

also one of those albums where every single vinyl copy i have ever seen has a faded, worn out looking sleeve, as if ring wear was a special process applied at the factory.

"Exqueese me? Have I seen this one before? "Frampton Comes Alive"? Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of "Tide""

The double album was released in the US with a special reduced list price of $7.98, only $1.00 more than the standard $6.98 of most single-disc albums in 1976.

I have yet to wrap my head around the phenomenon of this album. So dude follows four solo albums that didn't get much traction with a double live at a reduced price and that's the one that turns into one of the biggest albums of all time? It's weird. Like the audience freaking out to the opening notes of 'Do You Feel Like We Do' as if the song was already some massive hit. I don't understand! Explain it to me!

― Jerome Percival Jesus (Old Lunch),

Ultimately, sales phenomena are unexplainable. How did Hootie become so massive in 1995?

Whatever the Friends friends are into, I'm into too

xpost too much whiskey prior to show time

I have yet to wrap my head around the phenomenon of this album.

I was there, I bought it (I was 15, I think), and I can't explain it (beyond the cult for live-doubles at the time). Payola was still a big thing at the time, I think--maybe that factored in.

Plus the Lester Bangs Rule: tasty licks and all that Traffic twaddle.

At FCA's level of sales, payola ceases to matter at some point (see: Rumours, Saturday Night Fever, Thriller).

with no easy way to sample music back then and word of mouth and print recommendations being more of a thing, once something got into the zeitgeist, zoooooom. add a cult following that enjoyed his live shows and wants to recapture the magic of said live show, I guess that explains it.

also dude was in Humble Pie, maybe that helped get him some attention

his s/t solo album also went Gold, so he wasn't exactly popular but he wasn't invisible prior to the live album, either

I think it got certified after FCA iirc

payola doesn’t explain why the rest of the western world would follow suit

one factor I’ve not seen mentioned on this thread that Frampton was considered a hottie for the ages and He Was In You

I did consider the Humble Pie factor but I didn't get the sense that they were particularly huge themselves.

Responses have been very illuminating, and I thank u all.

Bowie discusses his history with Frampton here, specifically the tradition in which Frampton plays:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhaRvqI0nHk

(he also, typically, makes Never Let Me Down sound juicier than it is, should you listen to the rest).

Christgau's review might shed some light: "All right, Peter, you've made your point--tour enough and smile enough and the tunes sink in. I'll rate your fucking album--it's been in the top five all year."

So maybe he's a version of the Grateful Dead, with an audience built up through non-stop touring. Again, I'm just guessing. If I could remember why I bought it, that would probably help.

also he used talkbox and people thought when he made the guitar say "I want to thank you" that it said "I want to spank you"

Some good background here:

An Exclusive Oral History of 'Frampton Comes Alive!'

I've never actually listened to this record

It's not bad, though I don't listen all the way through that much. I was puzzling over the phenomenon a couple of days ago too.

I'm in You was after this, right?

and his exposed chest

Haven't read the oral history yet, and it probably covers this, but manager Dee Anthony's strategy was to keep bands on the road constantly, while still putting out studio records, and then cashing in with a live double. It worked decently for Humble Pie (Performance: Rockin' The Fillmore), worked even better for Joe Cocker (Mad Dogs & Englishmen is his highest-charting album in the US), and worked unbelievably well for Frampton. Dee Anthony was also a thief with ties to organized crime who left the members of Humble Pie near-broke. When Steve Marriott went to Anthony demanding his money, Anthony brought Marriott to a meeting with John Gotti and other mobsters and told Marriott to drop it.

the success of this album completely wrecked him though, as he rushed into his next album and even though it went platinum, it was considered this huge disappointment.

This is kinda neat -- one of the shows on FCA is from a small town in way upstate NY (about 30 miles from the Canadian border):

https://www.vpr.org/post/40-years-after-frampton-comes-alive-recalling-concert-recorded-plattsburgh#stream/0

Yeah, that was another fucked up thing about Dee Anthony: the idea of giving an artist a break for rest was anathema to him. Frampton barely completed I'm In You, did the Sgt. Pepper movie around the same time (I think?), and was done, career-wise.

xp

Tangentially related, but...Frampton Plays Monk!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZyB7C6AB8Q

I dig Frampton’s Camel from ‘73. That record made the rounds in my dad’s circle at the time... Haven’t actually heard alive

I think it was the height of FM hard rock radio, so big it spawned a sitcom. Add in some payola and Tiger Beat magazine and Frampton got huge.

1976 was when quite a few bands busted out that were a few records into their career.

Kiss 'Kiss Alive' (came out Sep 75)
Aerosmith -got huge & Dream On came back on charts to top 10 in '76
Bob Seger - Live Bullet/Night Moves
Rush '2112'

FM radio was at height of payola, but the format was open enough that you had DJs that would get into a record and they would catch on.

'Do You Feel Like I Do' was like some other epic tunes that the DJ could go the john or smoke a cigarette or do a bump while it was playing it was such a long cut.

KISS benefited from payola for sure.

I think it was the height of FM hard rock radio, so big it spawned a sitcom.

^^Room 222, iirc.

Timing I'm about to read far too much into, but: Frampton's record came out in early '76, Boston's a few months later. Meanwhile, disco and punk (less so) are starting to make news. Maybe Frampton and--Chuck Eddy would hate this formulation--Boston were a safe haven of sorts from those two things on the horizon. (Now I'll shoot that down myself: at 15, I didn't know the first thing about punk, and I did not, at all, hate disco.)

No I agree, similarly Boston were an apotheosis of a certain strain of 70s rock goodtimes, like there was just nowhere for the form to go from there, very much the end of a “thing”...

Dazed and Confused being set in 1976, with the soundtrack that it has, also surely reflects this at some level.

curious how much of the old Classic Rock Canon is post-76 actually. styx, rush, foreigner, tom petty for sure, and the handful of new wave acts like the Police that got partially assimilated at some point. but i think *most* of the other big acts for the format had done *most* of their most essential work *for* the format by '76 or '77 at the latest. or put another way it seems like relatively fewer AOR releases from after that point got locked into the canon, or the format was less willing to follow new stylistic directions for some of these acts, etc.

.38 Special?

i always forget them... never been grabbed by any of their songs. maybe a perfect fit for the "the gas was out of the tank for that type of rock" narrative actually.

"Caught Up in You" is one of the glories of the Western world!

Billy Squier, John Mellencamp (especially) -- huge on album rock radio

Caught Up in You is classic

zzzzzzzz

(directed at .38 Zzzzspecial, not y'all)

or this pearl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBPuzjZ8Dc0

(directed at .38 Zzzzspecial, not y'all)

>:-(

Dire Straits' first album was '78

I mean, the first couple years when Billboard started keeping track of the stuff are pretty good.

JAZZ

I had not twigged to this 70s double live thing before. Gives the title of the Butthole Surfers 'Double Live' official bootleg some context which I would not have considered before.

https://img.discogs.com/adV9AwhXGFUzd-JTdY65PObXP1k=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/R-10911005-1515020145-1293.jpeg.jpg

It’s known as The Foghat Principle (at 1:24):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDgpQBaziy0

Solid rule.

The Little Feat live from Ultrasonic Studios is all-time.

they actually did two shows there, in '73 and '74. also worth a listen: Bonnie Raitt with Lowell George & John Hammond Ultrasonic Studios, Hempstead, NY October17,1972

I had not twigged to this 70s double live thing before. Gives the title of the Butthole Surfers 'Double Live' official bootleg some context which I would not have considered before.

― ringworm, Saturday, June 19, 2021 5:38 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I thought that was like an understood given. maybe less visible if you're coming from much later or something.
But yeah did seem to be something that was a near standard thing for early 70s hard rock bands and presumably others.

I thought the mid 70s might be the milieu it was characteristic of too. Interesting if the fading arc was interrupted by a chance reignition in a double lp that could have been a single becoming popular outside of other trends.

Yes, the double live album is such a 70s cliche, usually released when bands had run out of new material or needed a break from the one album a year treadmill.

Hard to imagine that without FCA, Jimmy Buffett might never have released "You had to be there."

At one point I thought about putting together a book proposal for something like The 101 Greatest Seventies Live Albums (with extra space devoted to triples like Yessongs and the ELP one and Santana's Lotus).

I have never heard Frampton Comes Alive!, ftr.

Neither have I, but I'm not American!

you haven't lived until Frampton has

35 years ago, for a defunct Canadian magazine, a friend and I did a piece on stage patter that was dominated by '70s double-lives. Kiss Alive!, of course, was the Citizen Kane of stage patter, though someone else might argue for Take No Prisoners. (Can't remember if there's much patter on Frampton Comes Alive. I don't think we quoted anything--probably good-guy innocuous, if there is.) It'd take some box moving to retrieve the piece, but from memory, one of my favourite bits was from a Thor live album (a single, I think):

"Anyone out there read Kerrang!? (no response)...Kerrang!? (no response)...Anyway..."

hahahah

The Little Feat live from Ultrasonic Studios is all-time.

they actually did two shows there, in '73 and '74. also worth a listen: Bonnie Raitt with Lowell George & John Hammond Ultrasonic Studios, Hempstead, NY October17,1972

― Thus Sang Freud, Saturday, June 19, 2021 6:38 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't realize this. The one I know is from 1973 and opens with the dedication of Apolitical Blues to Chairman Mo Astin. I always loved that joke.

I will have to find the 1974 show.

I misspoke; I dug through my Twitter archives and it turns out I listened to Frampton Comes Alive! in 2019. But I have absolutely no memory of that, so I'm listening to it again this morning.

The only track that stood out to me on this record was a bonus, "Nowhere's Too Far For My Baby".

UFO's Strangers in the Night and Neil Young's Live Rust, both 1979, seem like the last iconic rock double live albums of that era. Something like The Name of This Band is Talking Heads is already a different world.

Oh wow, I was going to mention "Strangers in the Night" earlier!

It's one of those live records that's more acclaimed than any of the band's studio albums.

These were also really popular live records too.

DP's - Live in Japan
Thin Lizzy - Live and Dangerous
Judas Priest - Unleashed in the East (their first Platinum record but not a double)

The one surprisingly not mentioned yet and filed in getting big in Japan and then released to US/UK...

Cheap Trick - Live at Budokan

It is one like Frampton's where the live versions are the more known version of song rather than the studio take. It was the album the broke them in the US. Not a double LP though...

I don't really know the lp but do know Frampto0n from the Herd and Humble Pie.
Face of 68 too.
I probably heard it in the wake of Dinosaur Jr covering Show Me The Way though.
& I think I have a few live sets by him and various backing bands on various hard drives. Frampton's camel among them. Probably mostly early 70s though. But nothing I know well enough to sing a song from its title. Apart from Show Me teh Way I think.