Peter Frampton: ‘Do You Feel’ Charted Musical Growth

Peter Frampton is back with his new DVD and Blu-ray disc, FCA 35 Tour: An Evening With Peter Frampton, and it's companion triple CD set, Best Of FCA! 35 Tour. The DVD features footage taped at New York City's Beacon Theater and Milwaukee's Pabst Theater, with Frampton personally going through the tour's performances for the best versions of all the songs for the CD -- which features his son, Julian Frampton, guesting on two songs.

Frampton spoke to Spinner.com and talked about how the epic Frampton Comes Alive! album closer, "Do You Feel Like We Do" has evolved over the decades, explaining, "The thing is, I think we all know the original, the one on Comes Alive! That was like the Eric Clapton album called Just One Night -- that's what the album was, that one night frozen in time. For me, Alive was like that, as was that song. Things always changed. The night before and after, 'Do You Feel' was very different."

He went on to shed light on the mechanics of the tune, which became an instant staple on rock radio upon release in 1976: "It's all very extemporaneous, that song, it's all very ad lib. There are signposts along the way to the sections of course, but we can go off in all sorts of directions. 99 percent of the solos I do and that everybody play in the band are different from the night before. We don't work out solos. I don't think I could be on the road this long if that were the case."

Despite being a professional performer since childhood, Frampton still looks to the stage for new ideas: "I actually go on the road to find something new in my playing. Some night it works and some nights it doesn't. That's what it's all about, growing as a musician. I practice, but the way I grow the most is on stage. You can practice 'til your fingers are raw, but you get on stage and it's a completely different ballgame, a totally different energy."
Frampton's classic "All I Wanna Be (Is By Your Side)" appears twice on Best Of FCA! 35 Tour -- both in its acoustic and electric arrangements. Frampton told us that revisiting the original 1972 "plugged in" version during his recent tours made him fall back in love with the piece, which has always remained a fan favorite: "I used to just do it acoustically and 'All I Want To Be' then, sort of became a sing-along, y'know, with the crowd, just me and an acoustic -- and a chordal-type solo in the middle. The studio version on Wind Of Change is, I don't know, it's about seven minutes long, and it goes on and on and on. And there's a lot of room for guitar and as soon as we started working it up, electrically, I just realized how much I missed not doing it that way, ever."