For the last few years during football season, my youngest son and I often drive about an hour to my brother's home to watch the 49ers play (living outside Detroit you don't get to see many of their games unless, like my brother, you buy the NFL package each season). When we initially began making the trek, I was listening to this week's artist's greatest hits, and over time, my son became as big a fan of this week's tune as his Dad...and it's become a tradition that whenever we drive to my brother's for a Niners game, we listen to this tune first before listening to the rest of Frampton's greatest hits....
Over the course of the last 56 years, Peter Frampton has most certainly seen the ups and downs of being a rock and roll star in all its actuality. He had his first band by the age of 12 (he went to the same school as David Bowie and the two had their bands appear on the same bill at their school, as well as playing music together during lunch), had a taste of success (three top twenty hits) at age 16 with the Herd in his native U.K., and then joined supergroup Humble Pie before going solo. Frampton had little commercial success with his first four albums before a live album turned him into a superstar. His follow-up LP went platinum but was considered a disappointment, he starred in the film version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (nearly universally despised) and suffered major injuries in a car wreck which helped lead to a drug addiction problem. Frampton eventually cleaned up and while he never again achieved the height of success he had in the late seventies (though he did win a Grammy), he's been making music for over fifty years now and you can't beat that. For his career Frampton has released 18 studio albums (with one reaching #2), four live albums (with one mega smash), and 24 singles (three of which hit the top ten).
"Do You Feel Like We Do" was the third single released from his career making hit, Frampton Comes Alive!. The single reached #10 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Hot 100, while the LP would hit #1 on the Billboard 200 for a total of ten weeks and eventually sold over 11 million copies.
Fun Fact: When the single was released back when I was still but a wee lad, there's a point in the song where Frampton uses a voice box for an extended riff and many of us young folks thought he had a line where he says/sings "I want to fuck you" which naturally upped its coolness quotient among a bunch of impressionable high schoolers. With the passage of years and many a web site devoted to music lyrics, we've all come to sadly realize that Frampton actually says "I want to thank you...."
"Do You Feel Like We Do" is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's fourteen minutes long (the single version was seven minutes for radio), it's a live cut, and about 75% of it is just jamming. But if you're looking for an exquisite taste of seventies arena rock, man this is it. The song is anthemic, the chorus is a call to arms, and the guitar playing (Frampton is often underrated as a guitarist) is to die for. I've been listening to it for 46 years now and it still makes me whip out the air guitar and jam away. For a child of the seventies, it doesn't get much better.
Lyric Sheet: "Champagne for breakfast and a Sherman in my hand/Peach top, peach tails, never fails/Must have been a dream I don't believe where I've been/Come on, let's do it again..."
Enjoy:
Republican = Traitor
Peace,
emaycee
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