On March 24, 1975 Peter Frampton and his current band recorded a live show for San Francisco radio station KSAN from the Record Plant in Sausalito. He had toured relentlessly ever since leaving Humble Pie in 1971 and had become a cult and critical favorite with four solo albums to his credit. By this point it wasn’t a matter of if he would hit the big time, but when. 1976 would see the release of Frampton Comes Alive, also recorded in San Francisco at a Winterland concert later on in 1975, and it would become the best selling live album in history. The guitar wizard from Bromley was an overnight sensation after almost a decade of striving to reach the top.
It had all began in the mid-Sixties with a pop group The Herd that saw quite a bit of success in England. He left the group after being saddled with the pinup image of the teen magazines. The often clashing ideas of personal artistic credibility versus commercial achievement became a constant for Frampton. He joined with Steve Marriot to form the R & B, folk rock, and jazz amalgam Humble Pie. His folk rock styling rubbed up against Marriot’s gritty blues forms for a dynamic mixture of sound. After recording 5 records in 3 years and right on the cusp of multi-platinum American sells, Frampton split from the band. The blues boogie was winning out over his more AOR lite taste.
So Frampton started over again, but this time the music was his alone. The original era of iron-on tee shirts, trucker caps, and bell bottoms was ripe for California seeded lite rock played by an Englishman. KSAN was one of his biggest promoters so it made perfect sense to do the live show for them in March of 1975. The set list reads as a test run for the Frampton Comes Alive album as all but one song, “Day’s Dawning”, made the cut for the Winterland show.
This CD is aimed at the devoted Frampton fan. It is a limited non-numbered edition of 15,000 only available directly from www.hip-oselect.com. The sound is excellent and will give the listener a more nuanced version of songs soon to be forever frozen in the time capsule of 1976. If you’re looking for Seventies music that rocks with a lowercase r you can’t go wrong here as the songs included are virtual guide to the harder edged end of the Adult Contemporary radio spectrum.
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