BACK IN BLACK

Peter Frampton’s Gibson Les Paul Custom is arguably more famous than any other of its kind – and the story of its loss and eventual return reads like a great detective novel…

From his days in Humble Pie to the height of his fame during the …Comes Alive-era, Peter Frampton’s Gibson Les Paul Custom was his constant sonic companion. It was famously lost in a plane crash in 1980, but miraculously reappeared some years later and the two were reunited. The tale of how the ‘Phoenix’ found its way back to its owner is a mix of coincidence and blind luck with twists and turns aplenty. We’ll let Peter himself tell the story, so sit back and listen to a slice of guitar history, as well as some remarkable detective work…

“The very first time I played the guitar was in 1970. Humble Pie was performing at the Fillmore West and the gentleman whose guitar it was at the time, Marc Mariana, had been a friend ever since Humble Pie started playing the year before in San Francisco. I had just swapped my Gibson ’62 SG for a 335 and every time I turned up for my solo it just fed back and this was totally demoralising. So after the second set Marc said, ‘Would you like to try my guitar tomorrow? It’s a Les Paul.’ I said, ‘Anything’s better than what I’ve got.’ So we met at the coffee shop at the hotel where we were staying and it had just come back from Gibson. He’d had it refinished and he opened the case up and it looked like a brand-new 1957 black Custom, but it was a 1954 Black Beauty that he had messed with, sanded and

routed for three pickups. There’s this wonderful picture of a ’57 Les Paul Custom on the front cover of a Miracles album [The

Fabulous Miracles, 1963] and he wanted to make it like that. It’s a slightly smaller body than a regular Les Paul, because he was heavy-handed sanding it. I took it up to my hotel room and started playing it acoustically and it played like a dream. So 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.’

Crash and Burn

“I had it for 10 years and in 1980 we toured South America. We’d just finished Venezuela, Caracas and had a day off, so we flew ahead to Panama, which was our next stop. Rodney, my road manager, came in with this completely white face. I was in the restaurant and he sat down next to me and said, ‘I have some really bad news.’ I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘The cargo plane with all the equipment crashed on take-off. People died.’ There were six people onboard: two pilots, a navigator, loading inspectors and I was just devastated, we all were. And the pilot’s wife was sitting at the bar in the restaurant waiting for him to come in; she