On my 14th birthday I received Frampton Comes Alive. I sat with my friends behind 7-11, drinking beer hidden in Slurpee cups and smoking cigarettes. I had the album with me, in all it's vinyl glory, and my eyes glazed over in that 14 year-old girl way whenever I looked at the picture of Frampton on the cover. That hair! Those eyes! Swoon!
I never confessed that I didn't really like Frampton's music. I liked his hair. Ok, I went crazy over three songs on the album but the rest was crap. But I was cool for having it, and we went back to my house and listened to the stupid wah-wah pedal thing and when you are 14 and you just smoked some pot and the record player is emitting sounds of "do you feel like we do" played through some voice synthesizer, all you think about is some Charlie Brown special where the teachers are doing that wah-wah-wah voice and maybe playing some air guitar to Show Me The Way.
Holy shit! I was smoking pot at 14? You mean I only have about two years before my daughter comes home reeking of resin and bong water?
Anyhow. As much as Frampton's hair and synthersizer amused me, I had other musical avenues to explore. 1976 was the year the Ramones debuted. Kiss's Destroyer came out that year. Blue Oyster Cult's Agents of Fortune. Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak. And even though I had all that metal running through my brain, there was no way to avoid the musical vomit that came out of the tinny AM receiver that summer.
How many times could you hear Rick Dees singing Disco Duck before you wanted to go deaf? The song that defined my summer of 1976 in the worst way possible was Starland Vocal Band's Afternoon Delight. Sure, I was too naive to know the song was about catching a little noontime nookie but it annoyed the piss out of me anyhow. On one end of the radio dial you had Gordon Lightfoot mourning his Edmund Fitzgerald and on the other end was a constant barrage of More, More, More and Fly, Robin, Fly. I would always hope that somewhere in between I would catch Play That Funky Music, White Boy and I would close my bedroom door and do some spastic dance while pretending to be ultra cool.
I wore my Disco Sucks button with pride. And I spent hours in my air-conditioned bedroom dreaming up ways to change the music industry. I wrote my own lyrics, 4-chord save-the-world type lyrics that would show those white suit wearing disco freaks that there was more to life than dancing.
Article comments
1 - Charlie
I graduated high school in '76, still such a straight-laced nerdy boy that no one as cool as you would have willingly spoken to me. Luckily, much of that was self-correcting after a year of college.
My God, the music! The Frampton album was even mentioned in the "Wayne's World" movie: "If you were a teenager in the 70's, it was practically mailed to you!"
There's a lovely young lady who cashiers at the supermarket up the road. Her name is "Rhiannon."
I asked her about it...she said I was hardly the first. "My parents were big, big Stevie Nicks fans..."
Jed, fetch me my corn-squeezins. My rheumatiz is actin' up agin....
BTW, your blog is truly enjoyable.
2 - Eric Olsen
I'm Class of '75, we are neighbors. For good or ill, not surewhich I was closer to Michele in my experiences shunning "what everyone else" listened to, for what most of my friends listened to, exchanging one set of socially defined aesthetics for another. Eventually you find your own way.
3 - annie
I'm Rhiannon!!
4 - Dawn
I wish I'd known that 1976 was going to the best year of my life. I'd have enjoyed it more.
5 - Christopher Rose
So, is your daughter smoking pot now?
6 - Paul Battis
In a way they did mail everyone a copy of "Frampton Comes Alive"; it was called the Columbia Record Club and for one penny you got 13 choices. A double LP like FCA was two choices. And you are right-on about there only being 3 good cuts off the album and we all know which ones they were. 1976 was also the year that American Cars started to get really crappy and stay crappy til about three years ago. It was Leif Garret and Randy Mantooth and lots of bad popular music. I had no idea about all the great stuff: punk rock and funk that was going on until it was already well underway. I saw Patti Smith last year do a 30th anniversery of "Horses" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was and still am blown away that she recored that in 1975. But I did enjoy KC and the Sunshine band and the Spinners. OH and Peter Framton.
7 - Bill Collier
It's the 100000th year anniversary (2^5) of the Bicenntenial summer and I found your blog while trying to track down other peoples memories of that summer. "Afternoon Delight", I feared it back then just like I feared the BeeGees and KC and the Sunshine Band, but now that all that sillyness has played out I look back on it with a little bit of nostalgia. For me, it's "Frampton Comes Alive" and an older album, "Ten Years After, Live" that stand out as the sound track for Summer 1976. The memory that stands out more than any other is a super hot, super crowded 4th of July on the Mall in DC.
8 - patty burke
i'm 56, married but never really been happy except the summer of 1976,turned 21,my girlfriend an i ran off to california, we were from nebraska went to be with a home town boy that had joined the marines.best time of my life, I'll always love you Danny.
9 - Irene Athena
Some of the 70's stuff is timeless. Today my son and I celebrated the last day of school together with what else?