Peter Frampton Comes Alive!

Last night I went with Beloved to see Peter Frampton playing his "Peter Frampton Comes Alive!" I wasn't really looking forward to it (the tickets were a birthday gift for Beloved), but by the end of it, I really appreciated Frampton—he's a guitar god!! Oh, and he played the planecrash guitar, which was really cool.

It was a really good show. They played the whole album (which I really don't care for—more on that in a minute), took a short break, and then for their encore (which was almost as long as the first part), they played new stuff, including "Black Sun" (which I very much liked) and some instrumentals.

I am not really an electric guitar girl. I like it, I appreciate it, but I always thought it goes just so far. I've seen the error of my ways. For most of his new stuff, there were FOUR electric guitars going, and the drums. And it didn't seem as though anything was missing—very full, very cool sound.

Overall, this is what I would say about Frampton: he's thin on vocals/songs. This is not a diss on his voice, which sounds exactly the same (eerily so). But his strength is CLEARLY music. It's a bit of a shame that he didn't meet with a really great lyricist, because I bet that would have been a band of the century.

Side notes:

·        The fans were all Beloved's age or older (he is a few years older than me, and he was a "young" fan [14] at Frampton's height). Parked around the concert venue, there were all SUVs, mini-vans, and, as I put it, "old white-people cars." 

·        Everyone was so happy—we chatted with the people all around us about how big Frampton was for a period, how every girl had his poster on the wall…like Justin Beiber, someone said...and everyone paused for a moment.

·        During the song, "Show Me the Way" (I want you/to show me the way…I want you/day after day) a woman a few rows in front of us got up and went.to.town dancing. I realized in that moment what it must be like to sit behind me at a Bruce Springsteen concert.

·        There was a couple at the end of the row we were sitting in, and every time someone in our row had to go out or in, which was not often, the woman had a minor fit. I didn't get it—everyone was THRILLED to be there and it was such a happy atmosphere. And you can see where your bloody seating is when you buy the tickets. Crabby people like that piss me off.

Peter Frampton used to look like this, back in the day:

Now he looks like this:

Still handsome; just different without the hair. He has the same arms and legs he had back in the day—very skinny. But when he turned to the side, he had a nice ol' pot belly. I saw just about every woman in the audience turn to her partner and whisper, and I saw every man slightly incline his head. I just knew the women were saying something about Frampton's pot belly, and the men were thinking, "I finally got something on Frampton."

Background (why I didn't like Peter Frampton)

In my house, we had one big record player that was a piece of furniture. That was for my dad's records—no rock records allowed. And we had a portable record player that my older sisters used. They played Peter Frampton all the damn time. I got sick of him. This is also how I got sick of the Beatles and, later, Michael Jackson. But it's also how I fell in love with Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, and BRUCE.

Anyway, I grew up and eventually met Beloved. When we started shacking up, one day I heard some music coming out of our "office" room that was vaguely familiar and vaguely irritating to me. I could see he was rocking out to it, so I didn't say anything. I was going about my tidying business, ignoring the music, when I suddenly heard the words, "woke up this mornin', with a wine glass in my hand/whose wine?/what wine?/where the hell did I dine?"

I interrupted Beloved and asked that he confirm "the stupidest song lyrics of all time." He was aghast and asked me if I knew who Peter Frampton was. "Oh, God!," I said, "that's who that is. I hate that guy," which led to a long lecture about how Peter Frampton was the biggest thing ever and that he was in the top ten all-time greatest guitar players in the world. I just laughed.

Several months later, Beloved and I were training for a century bike ride. For our 75-mile training ride, it was hot, it was hilly as hell, and we were on hour five, I think. Chugging up yet another hill under the hot sun, we were miserable. I suddenly heard Beloved's voice, "woke up this mornin', with a wine glass in my hand…" and I laughed so hard. He kept singing, and as we crested the hill, he raised a fist and sang, "Do youoooo, YOU…feel like I do?!"

So when I saw that Frampton was going on tour, I had to buy tickets for Beloved's birthday. And it was sooooo worth it. Not only did I enjoy the concert, but Beloved's face was alight with joy and delight. He was so excited!

Usually, I only see him like that when he's looking at me.

Clarence Clemons, Big Man

This is a really nice article on Clarence Clemons: "Before Bruce, Clemons Was a Big Man on Campus."

On a related note, there was a n article about the inspiration for Bruce's song, "Glory Days": http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/sports/baseball/bruce-springsteens-inspiration-for-glory-days.html?scp=3&sq=springsteen&st=cse. It's a mildly-interesting story, but it's a bit hashed up--it just needs a good editor, I think.

Ring of Fire

It is difficult to find a better song than "Ring of Fire." Most people identify Johnny Cash with the song, but it was his wife, June, who wrote the song. I like that. Johnny is always seen as "the complicated one" (the man in black) and June as some sort of saving angel. But June had a lot of her own demons. She deserves to be appreciated as her full self, so saith the Ped!

Ramrod: Thanks, Big Man

I am a big Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band fan. I became a fan after relentlessly mocking my older sister Margie for liking him. "Mumble mumble mumble," I would tunelessly sing along to one of her Sprinsteen records, "nobody knows what I'm saying, and nobody cares, and it's definitely depressing." One day, she reached out with her perfectly manicured talons and forced me to read the lyrics as the record played. I did. And was utterly won over.

Clarence Clemmons, the sax player for the E Street Band, died this past weekend. It makes me so sad.

So, a little remembrance:

Right after college, I moved back into my folks' home. I came into the workforce at the height of a recession, and it was hard finding work. When I did find work (in Chicago), it paid poorly. In between paying off my student loans, paying off my outstanding balance at my college, paying my parents rent, and paying for my egregiously high monthly train pass from the Western suburbs into Chicago, I practically had only pennies to set aside to save for the security deposit on an apartment my older sister Chris and I were going to share in Chicago. Also, I had to wake up really early in the mornings to hitch a ride with Chris to the train station. The train got in at 6:45 a.m., I believe. I reported for work two blocks away at 8:30 a.m. I would sit in the great hall of Untion Station, reading. I would smoke two cigarrettes, then go to work. I felt like a formless lemming coming up out of Untion Station and walking the bridge over the cold Chicago River to my office. At lunchtime, I would go across the street from my office to the 48th floor of the Sears Tower. There, I would buy a Diet Coke and a Symphony chocolate bar, read, and smoke two more cigarrettes before returning to my office and closing out the day. Then I would head back to Union Station for the train back home. I would take an earlier train than Chris, so I would wait at my suburban train station for her to get to the station as well. By the time I got back to my parents' house, I had 45 minutes before I needed to go to bed for 8 hours of sleep (which, of course, I never did/got).

It wasn't a joyless existence--I got to catch up with my younger sister Carol every night (she was still in high school). I got to hang out with Chris on the train. And I read a lot. During this time, I read lots of classics--The Picture of Dorian Gray, The House of Seven Gables, all of Jane Austen--books that were already at home so I didn't have to buy them. But it was definitely a period where I felt aimless and insignificant.

I have a big family, so there was always lots of people at my folks' house. It was nice in a way to fall back into the old routines, but I missed the privacy I could get in my dorm room. One Friday night, I was in a really bad mood. When I got home, by some miracle, no one was there. I was able to find Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's record, "The River," amongst my boxes brought from college. I went behind the sofa in the living room, opened up the lid to my dad's record player, turned the volume up to 10, pressed the lever to release the spring mechanism for the arm, intercepted the needle with my index finger as it was about to land on the first song, and placed it instead on "Ramrod."

From Bruce's opening counts, "uhhh-ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR" and the guitar plucks, you know you're in for a jamboree. It is a rollicking good song: it's funny and irreverent and you cannot keep still listening to it. And--as in so many songs--Clarence wails out a sax solo that turns the song up even further.

And I danced.

Oh, say little darlin' with the blue jeans on--

I danced from behind the sofa and into the living room.

Wanna ramrod with ya honey 'til half-past dawn--

That wasn't big enough to contain me, so I danced out to the dining room.

Put yer hair down mama and pick up this beat--

All around the dining room tables and all the chairs.

Well I said come on come on come on pretty sugar--

Then, back to the living room.

Come on come on let's shake it tonight--

I danced like I was mad.

Come on little darlin' won't you say you will--

I danced and I danced.

Meet me tonight on the top of that hill!--

I was out of breath, so I threw myself on the sofa.

Well late at night when I'm dead on the line--

But my legs wouldn't stay still, so I got back up to dance.

I think of yer purty face when I lay there awhile--

And I danced some more.

Well come on now sugar see them city lights?--

As Clarence opened up on his solo, I went even crazier.

Well she's a roadrunner engine in the '32 Ford--

Arms and legs akimbo, I spun around and around.

Give me the word now sugar and we'll go ramroddin' forevermore--

All right!

I played that song over and over--a million times. Eventually, I heard the back door unlock--someone was arriving home. I ran to the record player, whipped the record off, turned the volume down, and ran upstairs for the bedroom I shared with Chris and Carol. Maybe I didn't want to break the happy spell. Maybe I didn't want to share.

But I felt a whole lot better.

Thanks, Big Man. Rest in peace.

Foo Fighters: Update

Okay, so I've been listening to these guys (courtesy of Beloved) for a longer time now. I am sorry to report that since I've been able to now figure out most of their lyrics, they really stray into Spinal Tap territory.

There are still some good songs...but not as many as I thought before. They are good musicians, though.

Great Article on Keith Moon and Music

There's a great article on Keith Moon ("The Fun Stuff," by James Wood, in the New Yorker) and his approach to drumming. I'm not a big Who fan and it's so hard to write (and read) about music—but I was really engrossed in this article.