Peter Frampton: 'I was kept high. If I needed cocaine, he made sure I had it'
Peter Frampton recalls with stinging clarity the moment in 1976 when he realized his career was about to take a perilous turn. “I realized that instead of the front row being a mixture of 50-50, male and female, in the audience, it was all females at the front and the guys are pissed off at the back,” he said. “The guys would jeer at me.”
In that moment, Frampton was downgraded from a respected musician to a disposable teen idol. His credibility was being questioned at a time when the standards for such things in music were set in stone, with particular scorn directed at any rock star who was swooned over by teenage girls. Worse, his sales of over 14m copies of the double album Frampton Comes Alive, a world record at the time, set expectations impossibly high for his future. “The success was just so enormous,” he said. “I’m sure it affected me mentally.”
In fact, it set in motion a perfect storm of factors that turned the commercial peak of Frampton’s career into a case-study in rock stardom gone wrong. Now, the musician, aided by writer Alan Light, has detailed all of those issues in a bracing new memoir titled for one of his best-known songs, Do You Feel Like I Do? It’s a question few are likely to answer in the affirmative given the series of rip-offs, sketchy management deals and unfortunate choices Frampton made back then. At the same time, the book highlights his many creative achievements, from his days as a guitar prodigy, to his time fronting the hit band the Herd, to his formation with Steve Marriott of one of the world’s first super groups, Humble Pie, to his promising early solo work. More, the book shows how Frampton eventually managed to refigure his career, putting the focus back on his unique approach to the guitar. “I knew I would make it back,” Frampton said in his characteristically upbeat tone. “It just took a lot longer than I thought.”
He credits that belief in himself – a trait which is currently sustaining him through a highly publicized degenerative muscle disease diagnosis – to his stable and loving upbringing. It helped that he shared a flair for creativity with his father, who served as the head art teacher at the school he attended. It was there Frampton met one Dave Jones – the future David Bowie – who was taking a class taught by his father. “Everything my dad taught, Dave lapped up,” Frampton said. “Dad recognized his brilliance in art. And we became friends.”
His father’s taste even wound up affecting Frampton’s approach to the guitar. As a kid, he was drawn to the barreling instrumental work of the Shadows, but his dad introduced him to the fleet work of Django Reinhardt as well. “That led me to George Benson and Kenny Burrell and all these jazz guys,” he said.
The influence of such artists gave Frampton a different template to draw from than most of the British guitarists of his day who obsessed solely on the blues. “Every guitarist wanted to play like Eric Clapton,” said Frampton. “Of course, I love Clapton’s playing but I thought if I just do that, I’m going to be another copyist. I wanted a combination of jazz and blues and heavy rock.”
That combination inspired Frampton to create a unique style in which he often plays around the melody rather than hitting it straight on. Unfortunately, his first successful band, the pop-oriented the Herd, offered limited chances to develop his skills. Instead, the media focused on Frampton’s uncommonly pretty looks, setting off what became a lifetime issue for him. The music papers named him “The
Face of 1968”. Still, his fellow musicians recognized the elevated power of his playing. Steve Marriott, of the hugely popular Small Faces, approached him about joining that band, though the other members felt they were fine as they were. It was during this time that Frampton got his first hint at how difficult and self-destructive Marriott could be. One time when he was hanging out with the Small Faces, their agent received a call asking if they would like to be the opening act for Jimi Hendrix’s first American tour. “Steve said, ‘Fuck that! We’re not opening for anybody,’” Frampton recalled. “I’ll never forget Ronnie [Lane’s] face. It was despair.”
Frampton believes that had the Small Faces toured the US at that time they “would have been a second Who”. Instead, Marriott ditched them and started jamming with Frampton, along with the ex-Spooky Tooth bassist Greg Ridley and drummer Jerry Shirley, the powerhouse foursome that became Humble Pie. In 1969, they issued a brilliant debut, As Safe as Yesterday Is, but the album and its follow-up had limited distribution. Humble Pie’s early music was wildly creative but it lacked focus until producer Glyn Johns whipped the band into shape for their impressive fourth album, Rock On. He pushed them towards harder sounds, an approach intensified by their fifth release, the live Rockin’ the Fillmore, released in the fall of 71. The power of that album set the band up for a huge breakthrough in America but, to everyone’s shock, Frampton chose that moment to split. “I thought, if I don’t leave now, I won’t be able to,” Frampton said. “I’ll get drawn into it.”
The other members thought he was crazy, but he considered the band’s harder direction too limiting. Another factor was Marriott’s difficult side. “We were like brothers,” Frampton said, “but he could really suck the oxygen out of a room. I didn’t need to deal with that any more.”
As big a leap as the move to a solo career was, Humble Pie’s label, A&M, supported the decision, as did their powerful manager, Dee Anthony. Still, going it alone meant Frampton would have to serve as sole lead singer, a role he knew wasn’t his forte. “I was nervous, especially after coming from a band with one of the all-time greatest rock singers, Steve Marriott,” Frampton said. “I was jumping off the high wire.”
Luckily for him, A&M provided him a wide enough net to float three solo albums that didn’t sell well. His fourth, Frampton, began to turn things around. But no one anticipated the blockbuster breakout of Comes Alive the next year. Thrilling as that was, Frampton’s looks once again upstaged his talent. This time the issue became so overwhelming, the guitarist found himself thinking often of a quote from Sir Laurence Olivier about his wife, the actor Vivien Leigh. “He once said in an interview, ‘it’s so upsetting that she is always told how beautiful she is. She’s a phenomenal actress,’” Frampton recalls. “I absolutely understand that.”
It didn’t help that Rolling Stone featured him as a shirtless object of teen fantasy on their cover. At the same time, he had to endure intense pressure to follow up a smash. The rushed result, I’m In You, was excoriated by critics. As the coup de grace, Frampton agreed to star on an epically awful film version of Sgt Pepper. Though wary about the project, he went along partly because his manager told him that Paul McCartney would be in it – a bald-faced lie. Of the film, Frampton writes, “there was barely a script. It just said, ‘Walk in here, someone will yell “playback” and then you lip-sync.’ Everyone thought we were too big to fail.”
When the film, in fact, failed spectacularly, Frampton was too doped up on morphine to notice. Doctors prescribed the drug to him to help him recover from a near fatal car accident he just suffered in the Bahamas. Then came a new horror: his manager had been ripping him off all along, resulting in his total bankruptcy. “I had less than nothing,” said Frampton. “I owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
While he now takes responsibility for putting his trust in people who didn’t deserve it, Frampton asserts that manager Dee Anthony (who died in 2009), had been telling people not to discuss finances with him. “I was kept away from those things,” he said. “I was kept high. If I needed weed, he made sure I had weed. If I needed cocaine, he made sure I had cocaine. He didn’t want me thinking about what was going on. It was criminal. I could have put him in jail.”
In fact, Frampton says Anthony did have criminal connections. Early in his solo career, the manager introduced him to his associate Joey Pagano, a known mafia don. “He was saying to me, ‘look how powerful I am,’” Frampton said.
Even after he fired Anthony, the guitarist struggled financially and creatively. At a low point, he got a puzzling call from Pete Townshend who told him he was leaving the Who and wanted to know if he would take his place. “It was the most bizarre thing I ever heard,” Frampton said, with a laugh. “Three men couldn’t fill his shoes!”
Consequently, he first turned the offer down. Some days later, however, Frampton’s sad financial state spurred him to call back, at which point Townshend acted like the whole thing never happened. Things kept going in a bad direction until 1987 when Frampton’s old pal Bowie called to ask if he would be a guest player on the hugely popular Glass Spider world tour. The result
energized his spirit. As a result, Frampton’s next solo album, When All the Pieces Fit, in 1989, was the first work he was proud of in years. In the time since, the guitarist has continued to tour and put out albums up through 2018’s All Blues. Last year, he launched a highly successful “farewell” tour necessitated by the advance of his disease, known as inclusion-body myositis.
These days, Frampton says he feels largely well. He’s still able to play guitar at home. And he just cut a new song with members of the Doobie Brothers. Regarding his current ailment, Frampton takes a philosophical view. “It’s lifechanging, not life-ending,” he said. “Is it sad? Yeah. But I have to put it in perspective. I’m here. And I’m very pleased with how everything in my life turned out.”
Do You Feel Like I Do? is released on 20 October
the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, I instead witnessed those impacts first-hand. I saw the muted beauty of the Blue Mountains when shrouded in wildfire smoke. If Trump is re-elected, and we collectively continue down a path of insufficient climate action, it may not be long before those fires rage year-round, and the Blue Mountains are lost in a perpetual grey and dismal haze.
It’s the same with the vibrant sea life of the Great Barrier Reef, which I was fortunate enough to witness with my family during my time in Australia. The delicate ecosystems of the GBR are already on the ropes, with fossil fuels pushing up temperatures in the ocean to the point where bleachings occur with such frequency and ferocity that corals simply cannot recover. Research released this week found that the reef has lost half its coral, largely due to warming oceans caused by climate change. Add the impact of ocean acidification from increasing carbon emissions, and we could sadly, within a decade or two, be reading the GBR’s obituary for real.
It doesn’t have to be like that. For one thing, renewable energy costs are plummeting while the technology just keeps getting more efficient and better, so dirty energy no longer makes economic sense. For example, on one recent Sunday, all the electricity demand for the entire state of South Australia was met by solar power alone, and every state and territory in Australia has committed to go carbon neutral by 2050. Here in the US, we’ve seen a record number of cities and states stepping up on climate goals too, knowing clean energy is good for their communities’ health, resilience and prosperity.
Policymakers must accelerate the shift to clean energy that is already under way. As we’ve learned in the Trump-era, some fossil fuels are too far gone for even the most determined polluter-in-chief to save. Though another term would give Trump time to defend his environmental rollbacks in court and solidify his dirty energy policies, he has already failed to save coal from market forces, and another four years isn’t going to reverse the long-term decline of the industry.
This is a cautionary tale for Australia. In both the US and Australia, conservative politicians seem more eager to bail out dirty polluters than protect the public, denying politically inconvenient science in order to offer lavish payouts to help unprofitable fossil fuel companies.
If we are to avert catastrophic warming, we must do just the opposite, providing financial incentives for renewables and disincentives for fossil fuels. That will level the playing field, and accelerate the clean energy transition.
We must take the earliest exit possible off the fossil fuel highway. By trying to squeeze out the last drop of fossil fuel industry profits, the Morrison government could well be on its way to bleaching the life from Australia’s coral reefs and blighting the blue of its mountains.
There is some good news, however. Regardless of whom Americans vote for – and for the sake of the planet, I hope it’s Joe Biden and the Democrats – Australians can still work together for structural change at home. You can’t solve it alone, but we also can’t solve it without you. Australia has seen that the sun can power an entire state’s electricity for a day. Now it’s time to make that happen every day.
Australia must distance itself from the handful of bad petrostate actors who have sabotaged global climate action and rejoin the coalition of the willing, when it comes to the battle to save our planet.
• Michael E. Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of the upcoming book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January (Public Affairs Books)
insult has just come out of Trump’s mouth, staying focused instead on the issues that matter to voters. As Biden said in their TV debate, addressing the audience after Trump had attacked Biden’s son: “This is not about my family or his family. It’s about your family.” So far it seems to be working – handily for Starmer who, with his refusal to play the Captain Woke role assigned to him by Tory HQ, has adopted the same tactic.
If Biden were to lose, the chorus from the Democratic left will be loud and vociferous: Biden was too mild, too centrist, too modest in his ambition. They will be adamant that a radical voice, like that of Bernie Sanders, would have won the votes to eject Trump from the White House. If Biden loses, that argument will echo across the Atlantic, as the British left urges Starmer to learn the obvious lesson: abandon caution and turn left.
But surely that means the reverse must apply if Biden wins. He will have prevailed by appealing to the broadest possible coalition of voters – and not only by not being Donald Trump. The polls show, yes, dreadful numbers for the president, but also that Biden’s ratings have steadily gone up as the campaign has gone on. Even back in 2019, his poll lead over Trump was larger than that enjoyed by the likes of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. So this is not only a negative verdict against Trump, though that’s part of it: there’s also good evidence that Americans warm to Biden and the kind of politics he embodies. It may not fare well on Twitter, but a message that combines reform, patriotism and reassurance, rather than ideological fervour, seems to appeal.
That said, Starmer should be careful to take one more bit of advice from Biden. The Democrat has worked hard to unite all wings of his party, to ensure Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are on side as well as Obama and Hillary
Clinton. If Biden wins, that too will be a valuable lesson for Labour. But let’s not get carried away: it’s still an if.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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