Todd Totale: Out Of The Closet

Crazy bouts of nostalgia. First off, I get an email from a friend advising me that The Residents are playing in Chicago around my birthday. I’ve already seen them (the story some other time), but it got me thinking about them after many years of not keeping up to speed on their bizarre musical world.
Then I receive a pair of Residents re-issue discs for consideration, Eskimo and Duck Stab!, which are two fine examples of the band’s brilliance and records that I haven’t listened to in some time. A few spins has me thinking about those times in my past where The Residents and hallucinogens seemed to go hand-in-hand and some of the activities involving them now seem curiously obsessive. I immediately documented a few of those incidents under the guise of reviews and they should be posted on the Glorious Noise website in the near future.
To be honest, I had no idea that those two aforementioned albums had fallen out of print, and I’m thankful that I now have a pair of new copies to replace those still good vinyl versions.
I’ve also taken a curious initiative to track down a few albums from my childhood years that I enjoyed and then outgrew.
One of those artists is none other than Peter Frampton, who’s Frampton Comes Alive is most certainly a prerequisite album for anyone who grew up in the 70’s. There’s a reason why it was so well received: because it’s a really good album.
I took the path to Frampton a little more seriously than perhaps I should. It started with Frampton’s previous band, Humble Pie, who’s Smokin’ was a strange childhood favorite for me. I think this was the first album the band had without Frampton, and so then I was required to check out what Peter was doing as a solo artist.
Briefly, he decided to start his own band, Frampton’s Camel, which may qualify as one of the dumbest ideas ever put on paper. Not the music of Frampton’s Camel or the album…called Frampton’s Camel in case you’re wondering…but the notion that you’re going to start a band that’s named after you and then decide to incorporate a very decidedly un-rocking animal as your identifier. When I think of “Camel,” I think of my favorite cigarette when I was a smoker or I think of a filthy, gynormous tooth creature that has a tendency of spitting on you when provoked.
So I locate a copy of Frampton’s Camel online and it’s follow up, the proper solo album Frampton. These are the two albums that led up to Frampton Comes Alive and they’re not bad documents of mid-70’s arena rock. Frampton had some chops and about four albums worth of material when making up the setlist for Comes Alive. Not only did he choose the right tunes for the show, his live abilities enhanced them and made the majority of the cuts definitive versions. The original studio cuts seem a bit tepid, with Frampton’s Camel being a bit more aggressive and, as a result, similar in feel to the live versions.
And then my parents come up to visit with a fair warning that they’re cleaning out closets in preparation for what will be a move from my old hometown. That’s family speak for “If we come across some of your shit in the closet or attic, we’re bringing it up to you and letting you deal with it.
So I get a box of albums, many of which I had no idea that I still possessed, and they did indeed contain those aforementioned Frampton albums as well as the Comes Alive follow-up: I’m In You. It should comes as no surprise that I stopped keeping track of Peter Frampton after that album, aided in large part by the utterly retarded decision to star in the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie with the Bee Gees and easy-to-knockout-nursing-home-mainstay, George Burns. With the exception of Burns, I hated every one of the artists that joined in this assfucking of Beatles favorites. I waited until Oh God, You Devil! before I started to hate George Burns.
There were some other surprises in that box of albums, most notably dozens of record sleeves that I took out and replaced with non-scratch sleeves that I bought to prevent damaging my priceless vinyl. So now I have the inner sleeves to such wonderful titles like Sports and High Infidelity while not being in possession of the actual album itself. I wisely unloaded them for pennies on the dollar, and probably would have done the same had I maintained my vinyl collection like I now admit that I should have done.
To be honest, I probably would have kept those Frampton albums too, but thanks to their strategic location (read: in the back of one of my parent’s closets) I was unable to unload them when I didn’t know any better.

The booty:

The Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (red Capitol label pressing)
The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (purple Capitol label pressing)
The Beatles Let It Be (original red Apple pressing)
John Lennon Imagine (purple Capitol label pressing)
George Harrison Spirits In The Material World (original Apple pressing)
George Harrison Somewhere In England (US pressing)
The Yardbirds Yardbirds Favorites
Cheap Trick At Budokan
Elton John Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player
Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones
The Velvet Underground V.U.
U2 October
U2 Wide Awake In America
Pete Townshend Who Came First
The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed
Humble Pie Smokin’
Frampton’s Camel Frampton’s Camel
Peter Frampton Frampton
Peter Frampton Frampton Comes Alive
Peter Frampton I’m In You