![]() Still, going it alone meant Frampton would have to serve as sole lead singer, a role he knew wasn’t his forte. I didn’t need to deal with that any more.”Īs 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. “We were like brothers,” Frampton said, “but he could really suck the oxygen out of a room. Another factor was Marriott’s difficult side. The other members thought he was crazy, but he considered the band’s harder direction too limiting. “I thought, if I don’t leave now, I won’t be able to,” Frampton said. 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. He pushed them towards harder sounds, an approach intensified by their fifth release, the live Rockin’ the Fillmore, released in the fall of 71. 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. In 1969, they issued a brilliant debut, As Safe as Yesterday Is, but the album and its follow-up had limited distribution. 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. It was despair.”įrampton believes that had the Small Faces toured the US at that time they “would have been a second Who”. “Steve said, ‘Fuck that! We’re not opening for anybody,’” Frampton recalled. 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. It was during this time that Frampton got his first hint at how difficult and self-destructive Marriott could be. 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. Still, his fellow musicians recognized the elevated power of his playing. The music papers named him “The Face of 1968”. Instead, the media focused on Frampton’s uncommonly pretty looks, setting off what became a lifetime issue for him. Unfortunately, his first successful band, the pop-oriented the Herd, offered limited chances to develop his skills. ![]() That combination inspired Frampton to create a unique style in which he often plays around the melody rather than hitting it straight on. I wanted a combination of jazz and blues and heavy rock.” “Of course, I love Clapton’s playing but I thought if I just do that, I’m going to be another copyist. “Every guitarist wanted to play like Eric Clapton,” said Frampton. 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. “That led me to George Benson and Kenny Burrell and all these jazz guys,” he said. 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. His father’s taste even wound up affecting Frampton’s approach to the guitar. ![]() Photograph: Photo courtesy of Peter Frampton Peter Frampton at the age of eight in 1958. “Everything my dad taught, Dave lapped up,” Frampton said. It was there Frampton met one Dave Jones – the future David Bowie – who was taking a class taught by his father. It helped that he shared a flair for creativity with his father, who served as the head art teacher at the school he attended. 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 just took a lot longer than I thought.” “I knew I would make it back,” Frampton said in his characteristically upbeat tone. More, the book shows how Frampton eventually managed to re-figure his career, putting the focus back on his unique approach to the guitar. 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. 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. 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.
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