Peter Frampton Performs Frampton Comes Alive!

Before there were iPods and iPads and even MTV, there was an album that sold more copies than any live album before. It was Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive and Frampton returns to Nashville Saturday to play the Ryman Auditorium. The concert is the last stop of his North American tour which began in June and has seen him perform 67 times before the Ryman finale.


The Frampton Comes Alive! tour is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his monster- selling 1976 double live album. It was that album that turned the former Humble Pie guitarist into a teen idol and put him on the cover of Rolling Stone. The current tour has seen the accomplished British singer-songwriter-guitarist, now 61, playing a three hour show. The first half of the concert is a song- for- song performance of the entire 14-song Frampton Comes Alive disc. Highlights to expect include "Lines on my Face", "Show Me the Way" (with the classic talkbox making its first appearance of the night), "Nowhere's Too Far", "I'll Give You ( Money)" and the set standout, "Do You Feel Like I Do?" with the talkbox part sure to get the entire audience on its feet.


After a brief intermission, Frampton and his band will return to play some Humble Pie selections and some covers. Expect to hear Frampton's version of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and an exquisite encore of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" to close the show. Frampton is also playing some cuts from his recent two albums, 2010's Thank You Mr. Churchill and 2006's Grammy winner, Fingerprints. Fans after the show will be able to buy the evening's performance as it is being recorded for post- show sale by Abbey Road Live.


Frampton Comes Alive! A note-for-note reincarnation of the record is what’s on the agenda — that’s right, all 14 minutes and 15 seconds of “Do You Feel Like We Do?” could transpire in real time before your very eyes in a matter of hours, if you so desire. Now, since there’s no way you’d have made it 95 words into this blurb as a Frampton hater; and since there’s no such thing as a Frampton fan who’s never heard Frampton Comes Alive! — “If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it,” according to one fictional resident of Aurora, Il., — then it’s hard to find a more convincing argument to entice your Framptonian patronage than a simple headline. But here’s one anyway: Tonight’s show is a benefit for the preservation of Nashville’s Radnor Lake — on the floor of which, urban legend has it, sits a mis-shipped 78 crates of Frampton Comes Alive! LPs.