You’re not going to believe the answer

While recently perusing the pages of a very popular musicians’ forum, we encountered a thread asking users for their opinions on who the most influential artists of all time could be.

But the question didn't specify what type of influence. One could imagine a group that was most influential artistically, or stylistically, lyrically, musically, compositionally, et cetera, ad nauseum. Which influence is most important, the one that really changed the face of popular music the most? Depends on where you're standing, and what you're using for criteria.

So, is it the Beatles? They certainly inspired a lot of the musicians that followed them. Led Zeppelin? They broke a lot of new ground, too. Black Sabbath was hugely important, and virtually every hard rock/metal band that came afterward cites them as an influence. Elvis Presley brought black music to the white masses, thanks to the keen eye of Sam Phillips, who by chance heard the seminal rocker goofing off one day behind the microphone during an otherwise straightforward rendition of a blues standard, and was smart enough to know a good thing when he heard it.

Some forum users followed a "chain of fools" reasoning that stated because X was influenced by Y, who was previously influenced by Z, means Z wins the debate. Of course, that argument was eventually reduced to absurdity by a poster who cited stone-age cavemen literally "rocking out" to return to the ultimate root.

But all of those approaches fall short. There's one artist that changed the face of popular music much more than anyone who came before or since. An artist that by virtue of their success transformed the world of music almost overnight, and whose indelible mark on the business blasted away every preconceived notion of what a band could be.

That artist was Peter Frampton. And we submit to you that his 1976 album Frampton Comes Alive did more to change pop and rock than all the previous bands mentioned combined.

Before that album, it had been established that rock and pop were mainstream culture vectors, and that it was possible to be "bigger than Jesus" by virtue of one's measure of popularity. Bands could be often imitated but never duplicated, and they could set off chain reactions of inspiration among their fellows that would echo many years later, and still resound today.

But until Frampton Comes Alive, no one envisioned that a single hit record, recorded from a truck in a field, at a live concert for a pittance, with minimal control and even less studio dressing, could make an artist stinking, filthy, fully and completely rich.
Frampton reportedly made more than $70 million in 1976 alone. It was a complete game-changer, the kind of alteration in thinking that happens only once.

Where before there were many minor players, and the capability of making quite a comfortable life for oneself, the lure of that many dollar signs began to attract the interest of serious money. They entered the game when they saw the kind of money that could be made from a single album release. They shaped the music business, already geared toward maximizing profits at the expense of the artist, into the music industry, where the pursuit of the almighty dollar became the music business' raison d'être, its entire reason for being.

That "influence" has never stopped being the only reason that the music industry exists, up to this day.

The point wasn't lost on Johnny B. Goode, either. Where before his prime motivator for ringing that bell was for the sheer joy of making great sounds, for being loved by millions and encountering the fairer sex as often as possible, he now had a better reason - to become wealthy enough to ski behind multiple yachts. No pimply-faced greaser who ever dreamed of being a jukebox hero that followed Frampton didn't dream of it as a means to an end, and an easy means at that.

Money for nothing. Chicks for free.

So debate away at who gets the most love in guitar heaven, who garners the most genuflections at the shrine of the Rock and Roll Hall of Flame, who was the firstest with the mostest at the studio sliders. It’s an issue that likely won’t be settled to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all actual musicians.

But by virtue of being the artist who most influenced pop and rock, and whose shining-like-gold example set the precedent for the entire sea-change in music that followed, Frampton trumps 'em all.

Personally, I can't stand that record, but there you go.