"Frampton Comes Alive" - Keep or Return?

- Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers)

From what I remember of the vinyl version it was has more tracks than the origianl CD issue. On the 25th anniversary edition the missing tracks are replaced and more included, but I haven't heard the 25th anniversary edition.

STILL A QUESTION FOR THE AGES.

You see, the box is in the line between the guitar and the amp, and he puts the hosepipe in his mouth, the sound of the guitar comes out of the hose, bounces around inside his mouth, and comes out into the mic in front of his face which goes to the PA.

Danelectro recently put out a talkbox that has a mini-microphone in the tube, so you don't need a mic & PA, just a guitar, 2 cables and an amp.

One of my favorite talkbox memories was the Ween show in cleveland 99, when Deaner was talkboxing the phrase "Kill Whitey", and then I guess he got too close to the mic that the vinyl tube was attatched to/sticking off of, and then he choked, recoiled, and came back to the other mic and said "Fuck man, I almost threw up there". I love Ween.

24 minutes of "Walk on Gilded Splinters"?! Sweet mother of mercy...

Had no idea this was recorded inside theaters and arenas. Ruins my whole vision of it at as an outdoor summer jam, beach balls bouncing in the moonlight.

Listened to this interview with Alec Baldwin recently - good one:

http://www.wnyc.org/story/222659-peter-frampton/

great album

He wasn't a great singer, was he? It actually seems like a p exceptional case that an album by a good guitarist/meh singer could have been as popular as this.

yeah but he had the talk box

You kind of had to be there, and even then it was kind of hard to fathom his massive popularity at the time. I *was* there, and the J. Geils band blew him off the stage. Very much like this account!

https://www.magicalmomentphotos.com/j-geils-band-geils-band-foghat-upstage-frampton/

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.

XP So was the first Van Halen.

SiriusXM's Classic Rewind station is all canonical post-'76 Classic Rock.

Self-XP And the first Cars!

38 special aside, post 76 classic rock loses the facial hair and maybe any kind of semblance of marijuana?

Rundgren’s bang on a drum a late addition?
Also F Mac and ZZ Top?

bang on the drum is classic nothing

zz’s first greatest hits album came out in 77

Fleetwood Mac are kinda not of this realm

(1980 but) Loverboy!

I get the feeling that in the 70s, concert-going was more of a casual act that didn't require a big investment in particular artists. Tickets were cheaper, even taking inflation into account, so if Frampton was a name that people recalled vaguely, and he played often and widely enough, kids would go and see him even without a hit record or radio play. From the crowd noise on the record (which could be faked, as Kiss did), enough people were seeing the shows BEFORE the live album came out.

Bad Company are the bridge between early- and late-era Classic Rock.

$4.00 — the top ticket price for Frampton’s Plattsburgh, NY show — in 1975 would be around $20 today. But also in 1975 you could only see artists live or on a brief late night TV appearance, and that was it (and if you missed Midnight Special, you missed it; no widespread VCR usage yet). So if someone like Frampton came to town, tickets were cheap enough that yeah, you’d go see him even if you only knew a couple of his songs from the radio. And I’m sure one reason playing college campuses in places like Plattsburgh, NY was lucrative was because what else are kids gonna do that night? There might be one movie theater in town, so you could spend $1 to see some disaster movie, or spend $2 - $4 to see Frampton.

xp

i saw this tour! so maybe i'm a good test case? here's why i went: my local radio station, WLIR, broadcast concerts every tuesday evening from their studio, with a small invited audience. i tuned in when they had frampton on and recorded it on my little portable. for whatever reason, i fell in love with that tape. friendly persona, jammin' tunes, sweet guitar work, who knows. so when i saw the listing for his show at the calderone concert hall (july 11, 1975, you can look it up), i enticed a friend to go with me and i guess i enticed my dad to drive us there. (thanks, dad.) it was a really good show from what i recall. i never would have predicted the success of the subsequent live album, but then again, why not? i don't think any of the material was taken from the show i saw, though they did use songs from another long island show on the same tour (commack arena).

the WLIR broadcast is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZmlXaV1jAI

fantastic firsthand info!!

"Friendly persona"--I think that's the single biggest factor of all. There were other people that had that, of course, but for whatever reason, with Frampton it combined with other factors and created a perfect storm.

This is a great thread/subthread -- I had also always wondered why there was this one live song from this one live album that was played on classic radio all the fucking time when that artist didn't seem to have any studio singles that were ever played on the radio. Also I hated it very very much as a kid, and also Boston. Now I'm kind of indifferent to Frampton but still hate Boston. I like some of the material on Humble Pie Live at the Fillmore.

Yeah, this thread is a real testament to the power and the majesty of the ILX/ILM braintrust.

"Friendly persona"--I think that's the single biggest factor of all. There were other people that had that, of course, but for whatever reason, with Frampton it combined with other factors and created a perfect storm.

― clemenza

Yeah, this helped. That oral history linked above mentions what a charmer Frampton was -- he had no enemies.

there was even something friendly about his guitar solos -- lots of major scales showing up. is pentatonic the right word? if so it has a much different feel in his work than, say, the allman brothers or whatever. i'm sure he picked up a lot of his tricks from jazz soloists, but it impressed my teenaged self. even that he could sing the notes he was playing. he seemed to have an active mind.

Bowie, as noted above, was very much enamored of his style of playing: 'an English R&B thing.'

man alive, i'm curious which of the songs you have in mind! i think of it has having three - "baby i love your way," "do you feel like we do," and "show me the way." I always preferred the latter two for all the talkbox antics and energy level; DYFLWD is one of the rare lonnnng radio cuts that i'll never switch the channel on. also the one where the live sound and crowd stuff adds the most sense of space and atmosphere. like i guess it could be a daytime festival type performance, but it really SOUNDS like nighttime, maybe even a little chill in the air.

Thus Sang Freud, thanks for posting that link -- this is a fun show! I'm getting a clearer idea of what he brought to Humble Pie as a songwriter, too -- lots of moments here remind me of things on As Safe As Yesterday Is and (especially) Town and Country.

Regarding his soloing, I hear a neo-modal approach, and a...cleanliness of thought, if that makes any sense. He never sounds distracted, he's not playing anything just to show off his facility, and there aren't any moments of "I'm just gonna sit on this one riff until I figure out what to play next."

i've been enjoying listening back to it too. wlir is known for having broken the new wave format -- there was even a recent documentary -- but they were great before that too. those ultrasonic studio concerts are worth tracking down. some have been officially released -- big star, maybe the lou reed, maybe the dr. john and little feat. but there are a whole bunch of them out there -- incredible string band, holy modal rounders, gentle giant, fleetwood mac, jo jo gunne, tower of power, bonnie raitt, taj mahal...all very intimate.

man alive, i'm curious which of the songs you have in mind! i think of it has having three - "baby i love your way," "do you feel like we do," and "show me the way." I always preferred the latter two for all the talkbox antics and energy level; DYFLWD is one of the rare lonnnng radio cuts that i'll never switch the channel on. also the one where the live sound and crowd stuff adds the most sense of space and atmosphere. like i guess it could be a daytime festival type performance, but it really SOUNDS like nighttime, maybe even a little chill in the air.

― Bobo Honk, real name, no gimmicks (Doctor Casino), Friday, June 18, 2021 8:09 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sorry I was thinking of Do You Feel Like We Do, although certainly I did hear the other two on the radio as well. I guess DYFLWD just stuck out to me as being especially live sounding with that talkbox jam in the middle (which I detested but now find harmless).

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

It didn't though.

Seems like it did (outside the UK), based on this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frampton_Comes_Alive!#Chart_positions

Got to No. 1 in Australia and Canada - and Portugal, for some reason - but never got higher than No. 6 in the UK.

I know Canada is a much smaller market but it sold 50,000 in Canada as opposed to 8 million in the US.

It was top 10 across much of Europe but if #1 is the standard, just three countries, I guess.xp

It was a record that sold well but there's little doubt that was overwhlemingly a US phenomenon.

Huh, yeah, checked the Music Canada database: it only ever went gold in Canada. The first Boston album was 5x platinum by 1979. This is reflected in their comparative presence on the radio tbf.

"Frampton Comes Alive" was octuple platinum in the US!

When you reach that stage you might think about inviting a new category of disc - Dilithium maybe.

Crime of the Century was 8x platinum in Canada by 1979.

Another thing:

Bob Mayo – rhythm guitar, piano, Fender Rhodes electric piano, Hammond organ, vocals
Stanley Sheldon – bass guitar, vocals
John Siomos – drums

... never heard of any of these guys.

10x platinum = diamond btw

“On the bass…Bob Mayo…he wrote this”

Focusing my fading memory a bit, I think I was led to Frampton Comes Alive from Kiss Alive to a degree; I probably just thought "live albums, good."

bob mayo, on the keyboards, bob mayo

Bob Mayo emulsified into trace amounts of oil and egg on stage
It happens all the time , it’s just not widely reported

Bob Mayo's been a player on Hall & Oates recordings; he's not unfamiliar.

i've been enjoying listening back to it too. wlir is known for having broken the new wave format -- there was even a recent documentary -- but they were great before that too. those ultrasonic studio concerts are worth tracking down. some have been officially released -- big star, maybe the lou reed, maybe the dr. john and little feat. but there are a whole bunch of them out there -- incredible string band, holy modal rounders, gentle giant, fleetwood mac, jo jo gunne, tower of power, bonnie raitt, taj mahal...all very intimate.

― Thus Sang Freud, Friday, June 18, 2021 11:33 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

^

looking him up, bob mayo was briefly in rat race choir, a big presence on the east coast club circuit back in the day along with twisted sister etc. he died in '04 of a heart attack while touring with frampton.

Frampton comes unalive

Frampton also was able to appeal to both the teenyboppers and the He Can Really Play Guitar audience.

Not sure about play guitar angle .. he’s no steve lukathar or Lee rit

looking him up, bob mayo was briefly in rat race choir

Fun fact: Rat Race Choir was the backing band for John Entwistle on some of his ‘80s US tours, and Frampton played on Entwistle’s Whistle Rymes album in 1972. It’s all a rich tapestry.

i also saw john entwistle's ox at the calderone concert hall, fwiw. 3/16/75. a few months before frampton. i remember it was very loud, and sort of a short set.

Was Entwistle headlining that show? Most of his 1975 US tour dates, which he lost tens of thousands of dollars on, were opening for Humble Pie or the J. Geils Band.

(His ‘80s-‘00s US tours drained him financially. He didn’t care; he just wanted to play, and he knew that the next Who tour would bail him out.)

yes, he was headlining. i don't remember if there was an opening act. the whole thing sort of felt like an afterthought. if i remember right, they closed off the balcony, and even the orchestra seats were sparsely filled. of course that meant that my group was able to move up close. it was fun, and rocking, but...short.

there are ads for it here: http://www.thewho.info/proads16.htm

maybe his band had to clear out early because it looks like the barker-gurvitz army was playing a 10:30 show that same night. https://www.ebay.com/itm/313488548041?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&campid=5338722076&toolid=10001

baker

i wish Sandy were on this thread, feel like she could help parse out some more of the finer-grained sociology of Frampton listenership.

I did the incognito thing and found Cameron Crowe's RS piece from April '76:

“Sweet guy”...“nice kid”...nobody has anything bad to say about Peter Frampton. He is extremely easy to like. An already endearing personality combined with the automatic courtesy that comes with all the second-billed years on the road have made him expertly charming. In conversation he remains light and breezy, but his personal life comes out in the albums. “I write about what happens to me,” he says. “It’s all there. I couldn’t do it any other way.” Wind of Change, for example, was a pleasant slice of life from the time of his first marriage. Frampton’s Camel was a depressing look at the marital breakup. Somethin’s Happening marked the arrival of his current girlfriend, Penny, and Frampton was a joyous testimony to their success together.

Before the now platinum Frampton Comes Alive!, none of his albums had gone beyond the 200,000 sales mark. Why the sudden fever? Peter isn’t about to question his explosion to the top: “Dylan, Chicago, Paul Simon...and me?” Rather, he shrugs in wonder. “I’ve figured it out,” he laughs. “There’s no way anybody could like that album and hate my guitar playing. That takes care of a lot of my insecurities. I’ve always wanted to be the best guitarist in the world, ever since I was eight years old. Ever since I saw Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and...anybody else with a Stratocaster. But between you and me, I’ll settle for just being listened to.”

And this:

Frampton Comes Alive! was originally meant to be another single album. “I was told to keep it to a one-record package,” Frampton recalls, “’cause the day of the double live album is gone. I agreed, you know. So I mixed and cut together the whole thing, with ‘Lines on my Face’ and ‘Do You Feel’ on one side and ‘All I Want to Be,’ ‘Something’s Happening,’ ‘It’s a Plain Shame’ and ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ on the other. That’s all.

Gone? Seems to me it was just beginning--I suspect you could list 100 double-lives from the second half of the decade. Although maybe it was dying and then record companies took a look at Frampton's album.

This says far more about me than Frampton Comes Alive: I did not, when I bought it at 15, think I'd be sitting in front of little screen at the age of 59--much less on a Friday night--trying to figure out why it was so popular.

clemenza, I think you have the opening and closing scenes of an autobiography there.

We're Up All Night Trying To Figure Out If Frampton Comes Alive Was Destined To Be Popular, Or Did He Just Get Lucky?

Remembrance of Things Frampton

Gone? Seems to me it was just beginning--I suspect you could list 100 double-lives from the second half of the decade. Although maybe it was dying and then record companies took a look at Frampton's album.

I think they may have been on the way out, but then the triple-whammy of Frampton, Alive!, and Live Bullet (all career makers too), brought 'em back.

Yeah, as soon as I typed that, I realized Frampton himself was the answer. Did the first wave of double-lives start with Live Dead?

The internet is not answering that question for me...had to have been the first.

Yeah, Live/Dead in '69, then the Woodstock soundtracks in '70 & '71, Mad Dogs & Englishmen in '70, Allmans at the Fillmore in '71...

Live/Dead probably was first — all live non-jazz/non-classical albums at that point were single LPs — Live At The Apollo, The Live Kinks, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, B.B. King’s Live At The Regal — mostly because those artists rarely played (or were allowed/had the opportunity to play) a live set longer than 40 minutes or so. The Dead obviously played far longer sets than many acts.

And even after Live/Dead, many of the iconic late ‘60s/early ‘70s live albums — Live At Leeds, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, Band Of Gypsys — were all singles from bands whose sets were often longer than double-LP length.

Just remembered too that Absolutely Live by The Doors from '70 was a double. Like alot of the early Rock double lives, it had a number of exclusive/expanded tracks.

4 Way Street must have been one of the first.

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

live adventures of bloomfield/kooper was jan 69 so pre-live/dead (tho does have some tangential dead connections)

also yes to the little feat tip!

Wow, you're right--many months ahead of Live/Dead. Yet the Wikipedia entry doesn't even mention it as the first. Either an oversight, or there's something else earlier.

Guess this doesn’t really count?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famous_1938_Carnegie_Hall_Jazz_Concert

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.