I saw Frampton in Dallas at the Electric Ballroom in July of '75, he basically did the same set that was on Frampton Comes Alive and I remember being a bit dubious at the whole talk-box Do You Feel Like We Do thing. I liked it but hated it at the same time. I liked Billy Gibbons, Jeff Beck, Larry Coryell, Johnny Winter, John McLaughlin, Clapton, Zappa... they would never stoop so low... well Jeff did the talk box thing entirely different and then ditched it quickly--like the distraction it was. By the time Frampton came out with the I'm In You shit, I was a hater. I love Zappa's I'm In You parody.
Joe Walsh had used the talk box before that, but more as part of the overall performance. And Nazareth on "Hair of the Dog", which may have been subsequent to
Comes Alive! I also remember hearing it used by some Canadian band, I think, a song about a guitar or something. Frampton was one of the first I heard to use it pretty much purely as a gimmick, and yes, it could get old quickly.
I actually liked Frampton's studio LP that came out just before
Comes Alive! - I can't remember the name of it right now - but he was always just
this far from sounding coy and cloying. After the live LP, I didn't have much use for him. But, I was recently listening to Humble Pie's Fillmore East LP for the first time in many years, and he sounded (and played) damn good on that, he was probably still in his teens at the time.
Damn I wish I would have seen that show, I never got to see Bob Marley and I'll always regret the opportunities I let slip by.
I sometimes think it was the best concert I ever attended. The Music Hall was intimate anyway, there were around 3,000 people in the audience, tops. We were on Row L (I still have the stub), 11 rows back from the stage, in the center. Marley and his band were at their peak, and still trying hard to get a solid foothold in the U.S. (they were already huge around most of the rest of the world.)
I had first got into them around '73 or '74, Clapton had released his version of "I Shot The Sheriff" and I was curious. so I checked it out; but most people I knew, savvy music fans, too, had no idea. I had bought the
Live! LP when it came out around 1975 or so, and it eventually became a party favorite amongst the people I hung out with back then. Then
Rastaman Vibration came out the next year, and more people became familiar with reggae, which at that time (and maybe still now), reggae = Bob Marley, pretty much.
Kaya was the follow up, and I liked that LP quite a lot; some didn't. Anyway, I think everyone else in the audience had listened to
Live! as much or more than even we had (as far as I could tell, the audience was about 50/50 black & white, the only thing close to that I'd seen was the
Mothership Connection tour - I saw two of those shows - and maybe Sly Stone, et al, real early on.) It seemed like everyone there knew all the chants and the and sing-along parts, and the responses to Marley's calls. We were pretty high, of course - you couldn't avoid it in that place, unless you'd stopped breathing - and every time the audience sang back to Marley, loudly and in unison, I got chills. One could sense that he dug it, as well. I'm pretty sure it wasn't just the weed; it was just a great experience.
The concert had originally been scheduled for the first part of May, but they cancelled some early shows on that tour, we didn't know why at the time. The Music Hall show was rescheduled for July, on the second part of the US phase of their tour. At the time, no one realized Marley would be dead within three years, or that it was the last time he'd come through Houston, I believe (he was in Dallas a year or two later, but I couldn't make that show.)
I have a much longer story surrounding that concert. Maybe some other time.
