***Preliminary liner notes, subject to change. ***

I would like to dedicate this CD of a very memorable evening to the memories of two musicians and dear friends. Both were key players in my sound, feel and eventual success of Frampton Comes Alive. Firstly, I would like to mention Bob Mayo. Bob has been a brother and my 'main man' musically for thirty years. This was one of the earliest shows he played with the band. Unfortunately, we played our last show together in Paris earlier this year. I first played with John Siomos on the track, 'Lines On My Face' at Electric Lady Studios in 1972 for my Frampton's Camel album. From that moment on John was and will always be my favorite drummer. I miss them both dearly. – Peter Frampton

When Peter Frampton decided to record a live album in 1975, he didn't think twice about where to cut the record. San Francisco had long been noted for its musical trend-setting, and The City (as it bills itself) had already adopted the soon-to-be-ubiquitous rock star. When he started the tour with his first headline concerts, March 21-22, at the 5400-seat Winterland and stayed over to perform on Monday, March 24 for the influential FM radio station KSAN, as part of the station's series of live broadcasts from Sausalito's Record Plant, he was on the cusp of a great seismic shift in his fortunes.

"We owned the station," said Frampton. "KSAN was really responsible for making San Francisco the city that broke me so far ahead of anywhere else in the country."

Frampton returned at the tail end of the same tour three months later to Winterland and recorded the blistering concerts that became Frampton Comes Alive, the biggest-selling live album in history and a record that made him one of the leading stars of the day.

When Frampton came back in June to record what would be his breakthrough album across the country, he was already selling tickets for a baseball park concert in August at the Oakland Coliseum Stadium. The live album that would introduce him to the rest of the country was a mere formality to Bay Area rock fans, who had already enshrined Frampton as rock's new prince.

"By the time Frampton came out in '75 that was it - we seemed to own the airwaves. It had been building up, but after that they played our records non-stop around the clock. We always looked forward to going to San Francisco at the time. It was really quite amazing."

He didn't need to add any new material to his set for the live album. He easily drew from under-exposed material scattered across the four solo albums he'd released since leaving Humble Pie in 1971, songs that he and his band had honed into razor-sharp performances over years of incessant touring.

"We'd been doing those songs for quite awhile," said Frampton. "We'd been working so much."

The blueprint was familiar from Humble Pie's lurch toward greatness - it took a live album collecting previously ignored material, Rockin' the Fillmore, to launch Pie properly in America - but Frampton was already starting to feel the breeze fill his sails. His fourth album, Frampton, was showing signs of life and there was San Francisco, where he was already treated as a bonafide star, largely because of the massive airplay he received from KSAN.

The first fulltime underground rock station in the country when ex-Top 40 disc jockey Tom Donahue brought his team of ragtag hippies to the station in June 1967, KSAN was the first U.S. radio station to play records by British rock aristocracy such as Cream, Traffic, Led Zeppelin. The station treated Frampton as a kind of pet project. His latest album, firmly entrenched mid-chart in many other cities, was outselling all the competition down at Tower Records on the corner of Columbus and Bay.

After serving his apprenticeship as a teen idol with the Herd in the U.K., doing yeoman's duty alongside ex-Small Faces vocalist Steve Marriott for years in Humble Pie, not to mention making noteworthy appearances as a studio guitarist on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and Nilsson's Son of Schmilsson albums, Frampton auspiciously first went solo in 1972 with Wind of Change, a debut anointed by the presence of Ringo Starr on drums and Billy Preston on keyboards.

Although Frampton made headway with every new release, he still was definitely one step removed from the superstardom that would find him in the American bicentennial year. Mining the gold from his four, little-known albums, Frampton had developed quite a fine set of material. Plus, by the time he rolled into Sausalito's Record Plant that Monday night, he had sharpened his performance touring practically non-stop for more than three years. He only weeks previously added Bob Mayo to the band on keyboards and switched keyboardist Andrew Bown to bass, after Rick Wills left to join Foreigner. KSAN disc jockey Richard Gossett gave Frampton a typically low-key introduction, mentioning his previous live concert for the station the year before, and Frampton plunged into his set.

"Three gigs in a row - I remember feeling nervous because I was lacking in the vocal area a little bit. In those days, playing eight or nine shows in a row, that was something of an occupational hazard. But knowing that it was going to be recorded, I was a little nervous. On "Baby I Love Your Way,' I remember that I changed the melody slightly. I didn't even want to venture up there to those high notes that early in the show."

The Record Plant in Sausalito was a gleaming new facility, a zenith of '70s audio engineering and lifestyle design that would draw clients such as Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder and Fleetwood Mac, who would record Rumours at the studio. KSAN produced a weekly series of live broadcasts from the room, scrupulously engineered by Plant ace Tom Flye, that were also recorded at the time on 24-track tape.

"The fact that there was no audience meant that we could concentrate on the intricacies," said Frampton.

The KSAN broadcast seems downright intimate and confessional compared to the arena sounds on Frampton Comes Alive. Frampton comes across confident, certainly, but less audacious than on the subsequent landmark live session. The links with San Francisco music of the day flow out of him - some of his guitar playing, particularly the lithe "Lines On My Face," shows clear evidence that Frampton had been listening to Jerry Garcia and, of course, his vigorous "Doobie Wah" was an undisguised tribute to the chugging guitars of the Doobie Brothers.

The golden era of Peter Frampton may not have lasted as long as one might have hoped; they never do. This long-lost Record Plant session is a glorious relic of the brief shining moment just as the roller coaster was about to take Frampton on a ride he could never have imagined.

-- Joel Selvin; author, pop music critic San Francisco Chronicle; June 2004