For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: Frampton Comes Alive on KZEW on July 4, 1975

It's perhaps the most common request among the Friends of Unfair Park: Where oh where is Peter Frampton's January Sound Studios sessions, which aired on KZEW back in February of '75? The complete show too -- not just "Do You Feel Like I Do," the version of which hopped to the top of the local pops long before Frampton Comes Alive hit your neighborhood Peaches. Long story short: Dunno.

But this much I can offer right now: Frampton's return to Dallas and The Zoo a mere five months later, when he played the Electric Ballroom -- the same venue at Industrial and Cadiz where Freddie King recorded this posthumously released essential one year earlier. (Others who played the Electric Ballroom -- which had been the Aragon Ballroom and was located across from the Sportatorium -- included Bruce Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, the Ramones with opening act the Nervebreakers, AC/DC, Rush and Tim Buckley.) The Zoo broadcast many shows from the Electric Ballroom -- even one featuring Billy Cobham, John Scofield and George Duke on New Year's 1975.

This one just hit Dime a few weeks ago, then made its way elsewhere -- then disappeared altogether, till someone rescued it from the virtual abyss on Tuesday. Which is why I'd hustle -- it may disappear again by the time you finish this sentence. I vaguely recall hearing this as a kid; maybe that's because the transistor dial never budged off The Zoo. And even now there's something kind of nice about hearing classic rock back when it was brand-new -- so brand-new, as a matter of fact, that when he introduces "Baby, I Love Your Way" and "Show Me the Way" off the just-released Frampton, the crowd barely responds. "Do You Feel" runs close to 14 minutes; it only feels 12 and a half minutes long. Still, he never could get "Jumpin' Jack Flash" right. Yeesh.