Peter Frampton‘s Frampton Comes Alive!, undisputedly one of the greatest rock and roll live albums of the 1970s, turns 40 today.

Originally released on January 6, 1976 as a 2-record set, Frampton Comes Alive!, unexpectedly catapulted the young musician into the success stratosphere. The British-born former Humble Pie guitarist had previously released solo albums to no fanfare in America, but his double-live album saw radio and chart hits with “Show Me the Way,” “Baby, I Love Your Way,” and the lengthy, guitar de force “Do you Feel like We Do,” replete with voice box and axe histrionics which sent the live audience into a frenzy.

The Best of the 1970’s, part of The 20th Century Masters Millennium Collection, is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.00. (The CD is currently $6.77 and is an AutoRip, which means with the CD purchase you’ll also get a FREE MP3 download of the entire album.)

At first quick glance, with its garishly colored cover, replete with appropriate 70s-esque font and the silhouetted shot of bell-bottomed people “getting down,” one would think that this album spans the disco/kitschy end of the 1970’s spectrum, but not so with this collection. Spanning from 1970 (with Edwin Scott’s urgent, explosive plea for ending global combat with the funky “War”) to 1976 (Nice Guy Finishes First guitar virtuoso Peter Frampton doing the voice box vox on the pop classic “Show Me The Way”), The Best of the 70’s contains 12 songs that run the gamut that while were hits and remain for the most part radio and pop cultural classics, (Rod Stewart’s lovely and pendulum swing of folk and rock blends “Maggie May,” Three Dog Night’s anthemic “Joy to the World,” Southern Fried Rock with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” or the political yet accessible to all “Wild World” and “What’s Going On”, by Cat Stevens and Marvin Gaye respectively) are also finely crafted slices of a musical era where things were reflected by a time in history that was still hungover from the fallout of a 1960s that pushed and pushed and pushed. By the time most of these songs were released, those times were rife with a sort of a collective impotence, but the music retained and foraged a vitality that made it memorable and a perfect aural reflection of a decade that on the surface seemed carefree and innocuous, but in reality, was anything but. Kind of like the music.

Browse hundreds of albums on sale this month for only $5 each!

Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore, with all its pumped up, sonically dirty cannon fire of rock and roll by the classic powerhouse quartet Humble Pie, is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.00.

Led by the soulfully aggressive and pained gritty vocals of the late Steve Marriott (who remains one of the great unsung rock and roll singers in music history), and complimented by the razor sharp guitar notes and riffs from Peter Frampton (who later went on to his own dizzying superstardom), Humble Pie took what Led Zeppelin did, mixed it with some of the sounds of Marriott’s former group The Small Faces, and presented it hot off the blues/rock presses. Each studio album released by the band was met with more and more success, here stateside and overseas in their homeland of Britain.

One of the great live rock and roll albums of the 1970s is only on sale for only $3.99 right now! Amazon is offering up a MP3 version of Peter Frampton‘s Frampton Comes Alive! in a fantastic deal. This is the 35th anniversary deluxe edition, which means that 19 songs right now are available for instant download.

Frampton Comes Alive!, which was originally released as a 2-record set back in 1976, unexpectedly catapulted the young Frampton, born of English heritage and had been in Humble Pie and had released solo albums to no fanfare in America, into the success stratosphere, with radio and chart hits “Show Me the Way,” “Baby I Love Your Way,” and the lengthy and guitar de force “Do you Feel like We Do,” replete with voice box and axe histrionics which sent the live audience into a frenzy.

On Saturday another round of musicians and bands were inducted into Cleveland’s storied and controversial Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The triangular glass edifice (which the term “glass house” certainly applies here) has been home to many musical artifacts and slightly biased and even ass-kissing styles in terms of its adoration and out and out blatant favoritism in terms of who gets inducted into this sprawling pyramid of a place.

The history of the hall itself is also as messy as the communal responses to it. The Rock and Roll Foundation itself was founded on April 20, 1983. But the physical building itself did not open until over 10 years later, finally opening on September 2, 1995. There were a few different choices originally where the building should have been built, Memphis (birthplace of Sun and Stax Records), Detroit (home of Motown Records), Cincinnati (home of King Records, which showcased early Rockabilly and James Browns’ embryonic musical start), and New York City (home of many songwriters and producers). But Cleveland was chosen for a few reasons. One, $65 million in public money was pledged to the funding of the construction, which certainly whetted the Rock and Roll board’s appetite; Two, many public polls favored Cleveland to having the hall built there; and most importantly, three, Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed has been considered in essence the first person to credit, acknowledge, and even coin the term “Rock and Roll.” Freed even organized in Cleveland in 1952 what is widely considered the very first Rock and Roll concert as well there. These factors were main catalysts in creating and finalizing the decision to have The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame erected in downtown Cleveland, where it stands today, right by the banks of Lake Erie, just east of where the NFL team The Cleveland Browns play in their stadium.