Search - Peter Frampton :: Anthology-History of Peter Frampton

By the time Peter Frampton assisted in lifting the record industry to a new era of mega-sales with 1976's Frampton Comes Alive! he'd been a professional recording artist for nearly a decade. A teen "Face of '68" with the Herd, he quickly stepped up to arena-rock status with Steve Marriott in the quintessential boogie band, Humble Pie. (In a nice touch, Frampton later played that band's road manager in filmmaker Cameron Crowe's '70s period piece Almost Famous.) Soon, though, the guitarist went his own way with a melodic, Americanized pop-rock sound. At first a minor favorite of the era's FM DJs, Frampton's catalog proved the stuff of platinum dreams when culled for highlights on Alive!. Catchy if occasionally gimmicky (the "talking guitar" routine on "Do You Feel Like We Do," which paradoxically or not became his most credibility-laden tune when stretched to 14 minutes on the live LP), his music ended up one of the decade's defining artifacts. This history-minded disc offers Herd, Pie, and solo tracks, the latter mostly in studio versions. The breathtakingly weak ballad "I'm in You," the best he could offer as a follow-up to his massive score, landed him in Manilow territory and helped relegate him to also-ran status by decade's end. --Rickey Wright