TECH TALK

TECH TALK

FRAMPTON COMES TO TERMS WITH HIMSELF

Billy Cioffi

Few recording artists in the last decade have experienced the enormous success and subsequent fall from grace Peter Frampton has. If ever a pop artist suffered a classic case of backlash from both the record buying public and the critical media, Frampton is a textbook case. The guy. has had pendulum swings that would scare Vincent Price.

Frampton began playing guitar when he was eight, and, by the time he had reached the ripe old age of 16, he had joined the Herd. Although well-known in England, few but the most raging Anglophiles (John “Move” Mendelssohn, myself and various long-in-the-tooth CREEM editors) ever heard of the Herd on these shores. The group was distinctive, however, for not only their teen idol cuteness but their instrumental ability and rather adventurous approach to pop. After Frampton left the Herd he formed Humble Pie with Steve Marriott, who had just said goodbye to the Small Faces. (Rod Stewart replaced Marriott, but the original Faces were huge in England, rivaling the Stones and the Who in Mod popularity. They failed to really make an impression in the U.S.A. but for one Top 40 hit, “Itchykoo Park.”)

Humble Pie, anti-image and much more blues-based, was a forerunner of today’s heavy metal bands. While not as influential as Zeppelin, Jeff Beck or Deep Purple, the group toured incessantly and built up a loyal American audience. On their third American release, Rockin’ At Fillmore, the group broke and placed high on the American charts, finally garnering considerable airplay. Just as the album came out, Frampton decided to move on.

He then formed his own group, Frampton’s Camel, and hit the road for the next several years. Along with Fleetwood Mac (in their salad days), the Frampton band became a reliable if not spectacular opening act. Oh the road for as much as six months a year, he would only come off the circuit long enough to cut a new record before he was out again. And the work ethic worked once again. When Frampton released Frampton Comes Alive it exploded to the #1 spot on the American charts and refused to come down for a long, long time. Suddenly, Peter Frampton was everywhere. National magazines showed his beatific boynext-door-smile; Mike Douglas had him as a co-host on his then top-rated afternoon television show. The shrieks of the teenyboppers were heard over the din of Marshall amps at his shows and the critical catcalls were swift and brutal. It was quickly forgotten that he had solid musical credentials and had worked hard to get where he was. Frampton has mixed emotions about those days as he discussed them in the midst of rehearsing for David Bowie’s tour. (More about that later.)

“If you think of the period immediately after Humble Pie and up to the year the live album first hit, it was just this low-profile thing building up. Alright, here’s this guy fronting his own band, but you basically go to see this guy because he’s a guitar player. At that point—and throughout the majority of 1976, because the record came out in March—I believed that there was at least respect. I got voted #1 guitarist in the Playboy poll. Being a guitarist, it was a really great thing for me. Things like that you dream about when you’re a kid, but never really believe it will happen.”

Frampton was a marketing dream and no opportunity to cash in on the success of the rocker was overlooked. How many Frampton lunch boxes were sold? And what about those Frampton posters that semed to find their way into every K-Mart on Earth? The world seemed to eat up Frampton to the tune of about seven million records for a period of about 18 months. Finally, the hype began to get frayed around the edges.

I can t pinpoint exactly when it was,” he reflects. “But I’m to blame as much as anybody. The inexperience of the phenomenon and dealing with all of that. I also share the blame with those people who were supposedly suggesting the right guidance. I think what we did was let the media decide what they wanted to do with me, as opposed to guide them from our point of view: which was, and is, Frampton as a musician. Very quickly there were pictures of my face all over the place—it was very reminiscent of my earlier group, the Herd. The managers at that time specifically singled me out for that purpose. In Humble Pie we definitely set out to rid ourselves of that teenybopper image. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not blaming the media so much as the people that were handling me at the time.”

When Frampton released the follow-up LP, I’m In You, it didn’t come close to the units sold by it’s predecessor. While selling two million-plus units, it was a bomb.

“At that point, I was completely wrapped up in the whirlwind of ‘do this, don’t do that, but basically let’s do everything.’ The pressure to come up with another hit album was tremendous. I have never had a hit album in the studio; every hit record I have been on—bona fide hit—was a live record! So not only did I have to do a follow-up to a big hit, I had to do it in the studio, something I’d never done successfully before. All the songs on Comes Alive were written and refined over a period of six years and rerecorded on the live album. How long has it been since Thriller came out? I think I should have taken at least a couple of years off to write and actually live. It had been the experience of the years before Framptom Comes Alive that had created the music of that record.”

The tailspin had begun and each subsequent release sold less and less. Somewhere in the middle of all this someone with more money than brains came up with the bright idea of making a movie out of Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Robert Stigwood Organization decided to throw money at it. Whatever respect or credibility Frampton had left was obliterated by scathing reviews that questioned his motives as well as his integrity, both musical and otherwise.

Frampton went from bad to worse when he was dropped from the label (A&M) where, six years before, he had been its best selling artist. Frampton was backed up against the ropes and slugged into an emotional stupor by one blow after another. First his career faltered, then he suffered a serious auto crash that injured his face and hand (a broken arm). Then a couple of messy personal affairs and rumors that certain wretched excesses of rock ’n’ roll had taken their toll. It was time to take some time. The rethinking and re-evaluation he should have taken after the live record was essential if he was to continue. After three years of seclusion, Frampton has slowly come to terms with himself and his music. He does exactly what he wants and makes no bones about it. He re-emerged in 1986 with a new wife, a child, a new label (Atlantic) and a new LP, Premonition. With his sights set much more realistically, the guitar player is back on a steady course. While Premonition didn’t set the charts on fire, it did reasonably well and showed that Frampton can still wield a mean axe. The follow-up record, this time, is being put on a temporary hold while Frampton plays lead guitar on David Bowie's upcoming tour.

“I think it’s only natural for a record company to have giant expectations from someone who has had a blockbuster record. From a business point of view it’s only natural. To be honest, I don’t know how thrilled Atlantic is about me doing the Bowie tour when both of us were planning on me being in the studio. There is the opportunity to be seen doing the thing I love most— playing guitar—by a hell of a lot of people, and the record company and I agree that this is a terrific thing. Having lived through a lot of ups and downs, I’m the person who decides what I do and when I do it.”