#89 - 1976/12: Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive!
The sleeve: Nice '70s font, and as live show photos go, not too bad either. The pink hair is very now.
Had I heard this before: well, no.
Sure, I've complained about those 1970s live double albums enough now, but honestly. When I called the Rush album 'terrible in every way' I mainly meant that it was the opposite of what you might call my thing. This, though, THIS, is really terrible in every way and there is no way the critics of yore aren't trolling us with its inclusion. Here is a man who, I'm sure, is a talented guitarist and a generally nice individual. He's also a no more than competent singer, though, and he's seriously lacking in the writing-good-songs department. From the evidence here, he's written two or three and a whole lot of unremarkable ones. And then of course they're played live here, so they start to all sound the same (because the same band with the same setup and Frampton having to shout-sing over them without any scope for dynamics) and they get elongated solos, and they have crowd noises. By the third track, "Lines on my Face" (but who cares about the titles, they really are all the same song), which gets a 7-minute treatment, his voice has absolutely worn me out. I can't take any more of it, nor of the plodding meat-and-potatoes rock it's couched in. But guess what? There's 16 more songs to go over almost three quarters of an hour. Interminable suffering ensues.
Now, partly this is my fault, as I'm listening to the 35th-anniversary edition, which adds five songs to the original 14 (and the irksome "Lines..." is on side 4 originally, not 'disc 1'). But I'm afraid re-editing the edition down to its original tracklist order for the 2nd listen does little to make this more bearable.
It's a chicken and egg thing, I'm sure, but it also strikes me that the better songs ("Show Me The Way", "Baby, I Love Your Way") are relatively tidy at just over 4:30 minutes, while the weaker ones are either drawn out to 7+ minutes via lengthy additional solos or were of epic length to begin with (I'll mention "Lines" again, but also "I Wanna Go To The Sun", a song so lacking in character or spirit I'm forgetting it while it's playing - sadly, the irritability it provoked does not disappear with it).
By side 3 (or 'disc 2'), … oh well whatever, you know where this is going. I'll just say that there's a 14-minute track at the very end - charmless from start to finish - and before that, the worst possible cover of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" you can imagine this side of Nouvelle Vague or Postmodern Jukebox versions. May all copies of this monstrosity spontaneously catch fire.
[F]
Next up: More classic rock, but surely the only way is up?
















