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Peter Frampton hit it out of the park with 1976’s 'Frampton Comes Alive!', a pivotal record that forever transformed the music business–for better or worse.
Already a rising star from his days with the Herd, Humble Pie, and Frampton’s Camel, Peter Frampton hit it out of the park with 1976’s Frampton Comes Alive!, a pivotal record that forever transformed the music business–for better or worse. Better because it’s a historic two-record set filled with fantastic guitar playing and infectious songs that rightfully catapulted Peter Frampton to superstardom, but worse because FCA!’s phenomenal success marked the point when most record companies began marketing their music out of the accounting office instead of the A&R department.
But don’t blame Frampton. All he did was make a great record that still holds up to this day. And the masses obviously agree: Frampton drew huge audiences for his 2011 and 2012 35th anniversary FCA! 35 tour, during which he recreated the 1976 album in its entirety.
For those tours, Frampton was joyfully reunited with his beloved three-pickup Gibson Les Paul Custom, which had been missing since a 1980 South American plane crash. To recreate the sounds of the era, he relied on Marshalls and a mix of vintage and modern effects, including an MXR Phase 90, a TC Electronic M3000 delay (Frampton used a Binson echo unit and a Leslie speaker on the original recording), and, of course, a Framptone Talk Box. Originally pioneered by steel guitarist Alvino Rey, the talk box, or voice bag (Kustom put out “The Bag” in the early ’70s) is an effect that reroutes a guitar’s output signal through a driver or small speaker and funnels it through a tube into the user’s mouth, where it is subsequently miked up. (Fact: Joe Walsh