In the same article, Frampton states that Frampton Comes Alive sold 8 million copies in its first year. I suspect that this may have been a record at the time (most records sold in one year) and is the one people are referring to when thet say it broke sales records.
weren’t frampton records given to everyone in suburbia
Why is it so hard to believe that Frampton sold many more albums worldwide than Springsteen did? There are lots of artists who are huge in one place an unheard of in another. Julio Eglesias was one of the biggest recording artists in the world, and had never been heard of in the U.S. David Hasselhoff sells millions of albums in Germany.
Frampton is Australian, and it’s reasonable to conclude that he may have been much bigger in Europe and the East than someone like Springsteen, who is a very American artist, writing songs with American themes.
My original source for the 15 million was an article in Rolling Stone, and I followed up on some web searches and found that same 15 million number from a new more reasonably reliable sources (articles on popular music in mainstream mags).
This quote comes from www.frampton.com, the official Peter Frampton site:
"In 1976, Frampton was named Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘Artist of the Year’ and received innumerable industry plaudits for album and concert sales. The album was the biggest selling live album in rock music history, selling an estimated 10 million copies. By the end of 1976, Peter had reportedly earned an estimated gross of $70 million in concert fees and royalties. To date, the album has sold over 16 million copies. "
Psst… It’s not entirely unknown for an artist to ahem exagerate his record sales…
Thus far, the only couple of cites which I see saying it’s as high as 16 million are from Framptom or his official website…
Yer pal,
Satan
Are you guys sure Frampton used a Heil talk box on that album? I know he later endorsed Heil, but I had always heard the one he used on “Framptom Comes Alive” was home grown. They’re pretty easy to make, I had a home grown one for a while. It’s just an amplified guitar signal (preferably with a little fuzz or flange to get some harmonics) coming out a horn driver with the horn cut off. A plastic tube carries the sound from the driver to your mouth. From there you change the envelope mechanically (i.e. you mouth the words). It’s just like speaking except that the sound originates from the horn driver instead of your vocal chords. Then your mic reamplifies the sound. The tube does tend to get a bit slobbery, so you wouldn’t want to share this effect with a second guitarist…
The more modern, less sloppy, and more expensive equivalent is called a vocoder. I’ve never used one, but I’ve heard them and they sound pretty good.
On the other hand, the only refutation of the 16 million figure we have comes from a web site which lists only American sales and which admits that many mega-selling albums are not on the list because the numbers weren’t available.
I was listening to music when ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ came out, and I remember the tremendous impact it made. If it only sold a couple of million albums in that year it would have been no big deal. It was a MONSTER. Everyone owned it, everyone was talking about it, you couldn’t get away from Frampton and his damned Vocoder. Rolling Stone claims that 8 million copies were sold in the first year - Frampton’s web site says 10 million.
So even if it never sold another copy after that, it should have made the album list we’re talking about, and it’s not on there. So the list is useless for determining its ranking.
Now, that album is still in print, 24 years later. And the songs on it still get tremendous airplay. It’s not unreasonable to assume that in 24 years it sold a few million more copies (look at the Eagles Greatest Hits - It went from selling a million or two albums in its first couple of years to something like 27 million total by today).