I've heard it all at least once, listened to a lot of it a thousand times, and I've even played some of it backwards, so if you ask me what's the greatest Rock song I'll reply with another question: "Do You Feel Like We Do."

Peter Frampton's live rendition of "Do You Feel Like We Do" on the 1976 double-album Frampton Comes Alive! is the single greatest performance of the music known as Rock . . . ever.

Yes, I know, Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" was one of the songs chosen for Voyager's Golden Record—a sonic ambassador of humanity itself. And for good reason: it's a killer track that will give the aliens a genuine taste of what the genre is about, but it won't give those groovin' little green men or pan-dimensional dolphins or whatever the hell they are the ultimate dose.  For that we'll need to send up another rocket with Frampton Comes Alive! and a superior set of headphones, assuming the aliens have heads. Or ears.

The studio version of "Do You Feel Like We Do" appeared in 1973 on Peter Frampton's second solo LP, Frampton's Camel; the live rendition was recorded June 14, 1975 at San Francisco's famed Winterland Ballroom and has since become canonical.

That live version has all the virtues of a first-order Rock masterpiece.

Swagger. Yeah, a quality gone missing from the bloodless, tepid schlock touted as Rock music for so long now. By 1975, Peter Frampton had swagger in excelsis, nearly a decade into his career. That's right, a 16 year-old Frampton joined the Herd in 1966 as lead singer and guitarist. Then, in 1968, he left to form Humble Pie with already established Rock legend Steve Marriott, founding member of those mod icons, the Small Faces. You can hear Peter's self-assurance throughout Frampton Comes Alive!, but nowhere more so than on "Do You Feel Like We Do." The lyrics ooze real -deal Rock star bravado. Frampton's guitar tends to steal the spotlight, but his voice is a beautiful instrument too and he sings these lyrics with such youthful vigor and feeling. And swagger:

Woke up this morning

With a wine glass in my hand —

Whose wine?

What wine?

Where the hell did I dine?

Must have been a dream

I don't believe where I've been —

Come on! Let's do it again!

Do you—you!

Feel like I do? (how'd you feel?)

Quiet Time. The greatest Quiet Time of any Rock song. As the rhythm section of drummer John Siomos and bassist Stanley Sheldon lays down a hypnotic shuffle of hi-hat, bass drum, and thick-string thumps, Bob Mayo serves up a delicious course of Fender Rhodes ("Bob Mayo on the keyboards, Bob Mayo!") Mayo's solo lasts a full minute and you've just started the Quiet Time! Frampton sings a little, pause, he plays an exquisite solo, pause, no hurry, and then comes the talk box….

Talk Box. Unquestionably, the greatest use of it. The 1970s gave us many delectable deployments of this curious gadget which feeds a guitarist's notes through a tube back up into the guitarist's mouth where the sound can be re-shaped before going out again into a microphone: Jeff Beck's cover of The Beatles' "She's a Woman" on Blow by Blow; Steely Dan's "Haitian Divorce" on The Royal Scam; Joe Perry with "Sweet Emotion" on Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic; and Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way" on The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get and then later his use of it with The Eagles on "Those Shoes" on The Long Run. And Frampton gave us an even more well known talk box application on the live version of "Show Me the Way."

But the talk box solo on "Do You Feel Like We Do" glides over you with licentious textures, scratching your musical itch. It's positively lascivious. But then it talks! It sounds like a giant bong become sentient through the mystery of electricity and music's magic! Set against the vast plain of Quiet Time, Frampton's talk box solo is a colossal transport, folding space and elongating time into Rock's greatest continuum.

Guitar Solo(s). Crazily, "Do You Feel Like We Do" has not one but three guitar solos, all of them superb. If the gods could reach down and instantly enable me to play like any guitarist, there are three from whom I'd choose: Peter is one of them. Frampton's unique filigree with which he adorns his licks brings me daily joy. He's not just a technically brilliant guitarist, he's an artist with an unerring sense of play. 

And he can play several guitars, but the one he wields on this
song, many others, and with which he is pictured on the literally iconic cover of Frampton Comes Alive! is a customized Gibson Les Paul known as The Phenix. Like the ax itself, its story is the stuff of Rock legends.

One night in San Francisco when Peter was still with Humble Pie, his regular guitar, a Gibson ES-335, kept producing unwanted feedback when he'd go to turn it up for a solo. A friend, Marc Mariana, offered Peter the use of his 1954 "Black Beauty" that he'd modified with a third pick-up to look like a '57 Les Paul Custom. As Frampton recounts:

I tried it for both sets that night and then I tried it the next night and the next night . . . and at the end of the engagement at the Fillmore West, I gave Marc the guitar back and said to him, "I know this is a silly question, but do you think you would ever sell this guitar?" and he said, "No. I want to give it to you."

Telegram to Stockholm: please award Mr. Marc Mariana a Nobel Prize.

Then, in 1980, the cargo plane carrying the gear for Frampton's band crashed after take-off from Caracas, Venezuela, killing the crew and, presumably, destroying all the instruments on board. But in 2011, Frampton received an email from someone in Holland saying that a luthier in Curaçao (a boat-ride from
Caracas) had serviced the Gibson and photographed it inside and out. Four instruments, in fact, had survived the wreck and had been rescued, poached, and sold. After some sleuthing and negotiations, Peter bought the aptly named Phenix in 2012 for
$5,000 from the government of Curaçao.

Odyssey. At 14 minutes 15 seconds, this song is an odyssey—it takes you on a trip. Like many of the contenders for greatest Rock song—Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" and "Kashmir"chief among them—"Do You Feel Like We Do" is long, maybe not by symphonic standards but for commercial radio play or the device -addled attention spans of contemporary humans. On Olympus, it lasts one eternity.

Apotheosis. The triumphant emergence out of the Quiet Time—punctuated by Frampton's Wellllll!—into the full-on Elysium of a third blistering guitar solo is to my mind and ears the greatest single moment in Rock music. It marks the height, the bell curve's apex, the Everest atop the genre's Earth. For that alone, "Do You Feel Like We Do" is the greatest Rock song ever.

And oh by the way, Frampton's autobiography is called Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir.

* * * * *

One magical evening in early 2012, I sat in the loge of Manhattan's Beacon Theater to attend the Frampton Comes Alive 35 concert, a performance of every song on Frampton Comes Alive! in the order in which they appear on the LPs, as well as another 90 minutes of Peter and his mates (including Stanley Sheldon, his longtime bassist who played on all those original recordings) blazing away on a second set of gems, such as his talk box bravura cover of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and an encore of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Unbeknownst to the audience beforehand, Frampton had reunited with The Phenix. He unveiled it beneath a spotlight, this sable Rock relic like The Grail itself, and recounted the impossible story of its recovery.

And then he blew us all away with The Greatest Rock Song.