I was in junior high school when Peter Frampton’s epic album came out, and although I wasn’t really a big fan then, I liked it well enough and I still remember hearing songs from it all the time during that era. In the school cafeteria there was a jukebox where I’d hang out with friends in the morning before classes started and I must have heard “Do You Feel Like We Do” dozens of times. I don’t know why I always showed up so early to school but there I would be hanging out with my misfit friends listening to Peter Frampton or the Steve Miller Band—just about every single morning it seemed! (I’ve often wondered if any of my friends back then were also crossdressers but that’s for another blog post.)

Anyway, I was surprised to read recently that it’s been fifty years since Frampton Comes Alive! came out. I found this article (with its overly dramatic title) pretty interesting about the story behind the album, how impossible it was for him trying to match its monster success, and the millions of dollars that he lost from bad business decisions—a common rock-star story.

But even as a kid I remember wondering why was it that the live concert recordings of his songs were the ones that became huge hits and not the original studio recordings from just a few years earlier? It didn’t make sense to me, but hey, years later I can appreciate just how rockin’ that live album was. And the talk box technique that he used (I always thought it was a vocoder, but no) really belongs to Peter Frampton—who can do that without immediately thinking of him? Good stuff!