Graciously

 We saw Peter Frampton the other night in Salt Lake City, and he was great. We go way back together.   I felt like I was hanging from a tree in Central Park watching his free concert in ‘75 or dancing in my dorm room playing my lacrosse stick, before he came Alive.   This was the ‘Never say Never’ tour and it was bittersweet, but I like my friend Terry’s tour title of ‘Frampton is Still Alive’.  Frampton covered Georgia on my Mind early with no words and finished with While my Guitar Gently Weeps that was a great sentiment but it was ultimately not Prince, who now owns that song. In between he played his schtick songs as the structure for some great jams.  Even the mouthpiece stuff was unabashedly good.   ‘Lines on my Face’ was my favorite, whether it is about grief, age or cocaine, I still love the practical line, ‘I still got a house I got’ta heat’.   His big hit ‘Show me the Way’ surprisingly felt like Peters rendition of a wanderers Ripple by The Dead.  When he sang the line from ‘Shine On’ -  ‘Find it hard to see you in the darkness, I looked around, you were besides me’, I turned to my wife Tracey, smiling next to me.

Salt Lake was great with easy travel and parking and a dinner at a nice old speakeasy cat-house on Franklin Street in the Tenderloin.   It is a good size city now with critical mass and there is finally some there, there. The Eccles theatre is a modern version of Carnegie Hall that I didn’t even know was there. There are high rises going up even taller than The Church, and large apartment buildings employing structural architectural gymnastics just for post-modern style.  We arrived in Salt Lake in the 70’s when the Central Business District was vacated by an exodus of business to the suburbs and the malls.  We fled to the hills and small town Park City.  There were less than a million people in Utah at the time and Frampton was an unknown outside of NYC.  Since then SLC has enjoyed a resurgence spurred by the 2002 Winter Olympics when ‘The World Was Welcomed Here’ and they stayed.  Throw in a successful conservative State Economy, the marketing moniker of ‘The Silicone Slopes’, the diverse beauty of the state with the heavily promoted ‘Mighty Five National Parks’ and 80% of the state being federal land, as well as the acceptance of the quirky but friendly Mormons and you have one of the most successful cities in the country.  They announced recently that we will get an NHL hockey team, and possibly a MLB baseball team and the 2034 Winer Olympics.  The sky is the limit for ‘This is the Place' and with its rebuilt International Airport, and growing cultural diversity, Salt Lake City, as well as Park City and Peter Frampton, grew up with us.

The all-star band was on stage right that night, admiringly facing Frampton on stage left. They were good but it was his show.  There was a video screen behind the band showing Monte Python type clips like ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ on a rocket blasting off into space. The band was rocking, and Peter’s fingers were dancing dexterously with upbeat tempos and solos.  He still has it. He was very gregarious and personable. Sounding Happy. Lively. Fun and funny. Frampton is the rock sound and attitude that I grew up with and brought here, and thereby compare it to all other rock.  Peter is sick and dying and came onstage with a cane while I had brought my Sciatic cane for walking in the big city.  I held it high during the encore and he acknowledged.   There are no coincidences.  Peter and I, Salt Lake and Park City had come a long way and successfully grown older graciously, together.  Frampton left extorting the crowd to consider that we are all struggling with something in this life, and to try not to be judgmental of others, not knowing their trials and tribulations.  Like the Grateful Dead ask in 'Uncle John’s Band', Peter asked us, "Are you kind."