It was 47 years ago this week (April 10th through 16th, 1976) that Peter Frampton's fifth album, the blockbuster, Frampton Comes Alive! hit Number One on the Billboard album charts for 10 nonconsecutive weeks. The album featured the hit singles “Show Me The Way” (#6), “Baby I Love Your Way” (#12), and “Do You Feel Like We Do” (#10) — all of which, amazingly, remain in constant rotation on classic rock radio. In January 2001, for its 25th anniversary, Frampton reissued a remixed and expanded version of Frampton Comes Alive! — including four tracks that were not included on the original double album — “Nowhere's Too Far (For My Baby),” “Just The Time Of Year,” “White Sugar,” and a radio performance of “Day's Dawning.”
Although Frampton Comes Alive — which has sold over eight million copies to date — took Frampton and the rock world by storm, since leaving Humble Pie in 1971, he'd slowly been making substantial strides in his solo career, inch-by-inch: “My studio albums had a cult following (laughs), a small cult (laughs) to start with and building up to the Frampton record; the one in '75, which included 'Baby I Love Your Way' and 'Show Me The Way.' And that one did sell a lot more — more than the other three put together — Wind Of Change, Frampton's Camel, and Something's Happening. I was starting to do reasonably well, but still haven't really broken through in the way that, y'know, the next record we hoped would be gold.”
Frampton told us that back during the original Frampton Comes Alive era, his legendary black Gibson Les Paul was a warhorse onstage and unlike today — when due to various tunings, he can go through half a dozen guitars during a single show — the guitar had to handle everything Frampton threw at it: “We didn't have more than one guitar in those days, y'know. If you wanted another guitar, you sold the one you had to get another one (laughs). So it was only. . . I think I had a white backup Les Paul — that was about it. And nobody really had backups of things — that was it. I think if there was different tuning for 'Nowhere's Too Far (For My Baby)' I would do it before the number onstage by myself. I don't tune myself anymore; I have someone I pay to do that (laughs) — fancy schmancy, yeah!”