At the time of its release,
Frampton Comes Alive!
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, it made
Peter Frampton
a household word and generated a monster hit single in
"Show Me the Way."
And the reason why is easy to hear: the
Herd
/
Humble Pie
graduate 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. [The 1999 reissue in
A&M
's "Remastered Classics" (31454-0930-2) series is 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.
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. Of course, one must take this all with a grain of salt as a concert document -- as was later revealed, 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.] ~ Bruce Eder