The broad outline of Peter Frampton’s career is a familiar story to most classic rock fans: The guitarist left Humble Pie in 1971 to start a solo career, struggled a bit early on, became a global superstar thanks to the 1976 concert LP Frampton Comes
Alive!, starred in the notorious 1978 box-office bomb Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band alongside the Bee-Gees, and then struggled to pick up the pieces of his shattered career until childhood buddy David Bowie brought him back in front of stadium crowds on the Glass Spider tour.
But that capsule summary leaves out so much. That’s why Rob Arthur, Frampton’s longtime band leader, spent the last few years filming the intimate documentary Frampton, which premiered June 4 at the Tribeca Film Festival. It traces Frampton’s life story from his childhood in London through the formation of early bands the Herd and Humble Pie, before Frampton Comes Alive! forever changed his life, and gave him an impossible act to follow.
The second half of the film is devoted to his post-Frampton Comes Alive! journey, including a devastating car accident, the dissolution of his first marriage, battles with cocaine, losing nearly all of his money due to ineffective management, and his diagnosis with the muscle disease inclusion body myositis, which has made it increasingly difficult to tour or even play guitar.
The story is told through archival footage and new interviews with Frampton, his ex-wife, children, bandmates, and friends, including Roger Daltrey, Tom Morello, Sheryl Crow, Cameron Crowe, Herb Alpert, Glyn Johns, and Kate Hudson. It’s packed with revelations. Here’s 10 things we learned.
Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman produced his very first recording session.
When Frampton was just 14, his R&B group the Preachers recorded “Hole in My Soul” with Bill Wyman serving as producer. It was Frampton’s first time in a recording studio. “You were playing incredible jazz licks,” Wyman recalls in the documentary, sitting alongside Frampton. “I thought, ‘God almighty, this guy’s amazing. Where the hell did he learn to play like that? He must have been listening to Django Reinhardt or Les Paul.'”
He hated being a teen idol years before Frampton Comes Alive!.
When his early group the Herd took off, the press largely focused on Frampton due to his looks, even calling him “The Face of ’68” and plastering it all over the cover of teen magazines. The other members of the group were largely ignored. “The band wasn’t thrilled, and I wasn’t either,” he says. “And that was king of the beginning of the end for the Herd.”
His best memories come from working with George Harrison on All Things Must Pass.
Frampton wasn’t a credited musician on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, but his acoustic guitar work is all over the album. In the documentary, Frampton returns to Abbey Road Studios, and nearly grows teary-eyed as he points out the exact spot he sat when he recorded his parts directly next to Harrison. “If there’s acoustic on the album, I’m on just about every [song], but I can’t remember,” he says. “I was more interested in when they changed reels, which they did back then, George and I would jam…People say, ‘What is the most memorable part of your career?’ They all think I’ll say Frampton Comes Alive!‘ I go, ‘Sitting on two stools in Abbey Road, looking through the glass, playing with George, and talking to Phil Spector.'”
He changed Sheryl Crow’s life on the Frampton Comes Alive! tour.
When Sheryl Crow was just 13, she went to the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee, to see Frampton. “That was my first concert,” she says. “It was literally the summer of Frampton. You wanted to say you went to that show. For us, driving from a tiny town with only a couple of traffic lights, to make the trek, to climb down from the nosebleeds seats, and make it all the way to the floor, and that being your first concert…that paved the way for me to think, ‘Man, would I love that to be my job.'”
Cocaine hit in a big way when the fame hit.
For several years in the mid-1970s, Frampton practically lived on the road. And as the pressure to top Frampton Comes Alive! mounted, he took more and more cocaine. “The clubs in New York didn’t open until 1:00 a.m.,” he says. “You didn’t have to buy any drugs. They were just shoved up your nose. I didn’t realize at the time, but I have an addictive personality. On the I’m in You tour, I was self-medicating more than ever.”
He agreed to star in the Sgt. Pepper movie because he was told Paul McCartney would be in it.
When producer Robert Stigwood initially approached him about staring in the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie, Frampton was understandably very hesitant. He only agreed after Stigwood told him that McCartney would be in the movie as well. “We were playing Wembley, and the night before us was Paul McCartney and Wings, so I went to see them,” Frampton recalls. “I’m in the dressing room with Paul and Linda. Linda says, ‘Paul, Peter is doing that Sgt. Pepper movie.’ I said, ‘Apparently I’ll see you on the set.’ He goes, ‘Why? No. I’m not part of that. I’m not in that.’ So I’m already signed to do the movie.”
Pete Townshend asked him to join the Who.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Pete Townshend phoned up Frampton to see if he might join the Who as their touring guitarist, giving him a chance to stay home and focus solely on songwriting. “I said, ‘Really? Have you spoken to Roger [Daltrey] and [John] Entwistle about this?'” Townshend said he planned on speaking with them the next day. “I said, ‘Pete, why don’t you do this for me?” Frampton asked. “Why don’t you call them and call me back?'” It took several weeks for Frampton to re-connect on the phone with Townshend. Unsurprisingly, the offer was no longer on the table. It was a devastating blow to Frampton since he could have really used the work.
He had to borrow $100,000 from Ahmet Ertegun.
After he was dropped from his label and learned he didn’t have nearly as much money in the bank as he presumed, Frampton was essentially broke. “I had to borrow some money to live,” he says. “I went to my dear friend, [Atlantic Records founder] Ahmet Ertegun, sat down in his office, and was so nervous. I’d never asked for money before in my life. He said, ‘How much do you need?’ I said, ‘$100,000.’ [He imitates Ertegun quickly writing him a check.] That was it. I got chills then. I get chills now. That’s a friend. And in this business, there aren’t many of those. That was a bottom for me.”
He credits David Bowie with reviving his entire career.
In 1987, over a decade after his Frampton Comes Alive! peak, when his career was as dead as disco, Frampton was invited into the studio by David Bowie to play guitar on Never Let Me Down. The album was such a notorious disappointment that even Bowie himself would later disown it. But it sparked a huge tour that put Frampton back onto big stages for the first time since the Seventies. “I thanked him profusely while he was alive,” Frampton says. “And I thank him every day. That’s when things started to happen for me again. By the early 1990s, I get my band together and I’m touring again. I’m back.”
Inclusion body myositis has made it very hard for him to tour.
In order to keep playing shows these past few years, Frampton has devoted himself to an intensive workout regime that minimizes the impact of IBM. But he still walks with a cane, has trouble gripping his phone, moves very slowly, and often loses his balance. “It’s incredible how I’ve been able to keep going and do what I do,” he says. “I’m learning how to do what I hear up here [in my head] with fingers that maybe didn’t want to go to that specific place when I wanted them to. I have to work out other ways of doing that. And I’m kind of enjoying that.”
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