Peter Frampton: ‘Acoustic Classics’, George Harrison Sessions, Stolen Guitars and More (Q&A)

Written by: Ken Sharp

The music business is often a fickle and unforgiving beast, rewarding some with their “15 minutes” of fame before snatching it away.

Peter Frampton had his “it” moment as an artist flying high on the unprecedented worldwide success of his 1976 album, Frampton Comes Alive, which rocketed his profile dramatically.

Once playing small theaters, he was now headlining huge outdoor stadiums like Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium and playing to lover 100,000 people.

And while that mega watt “15 minutes“ of fame has diminished, now in 2016, he’s still standing and it comes down to one simple thing: the quality of your body of work, the songs themselves.

His new album, Acoustic Classics, is a striking reminder of his timeless songs rendered by the artist revisiting his catalog with songs like Show Me The Way, Baby I Love Your Way, Lines On My Face and I’m In You stripped down and delivered in an acoustic setting.

Rock Cellar Magazine: Do you stand by the philosophy that you don’t have a good song if you can’t deliver it simply on an acoustic guitar?

Peter Frampton: Yeah, when people say ‘a good song is a good song is a good song,’ and they’re right. It’s like how people used to play songs in Tin Pan Alley years gone by. There’d be rooms with lots of pianos and you’d go to a writer’s room and they’d have a piano and they’d play a song live to you; there was no demo to hear. So if it doesn’t sound good in that format, a basic format of one instrument ad once voice that it was written on, then yeah, you’ve probably got a problem. (laughs)

What sparked the idea to compile the album Acoustic Classics?

Peter Frampton: I think that I found out quite a few people had done acoustic versions of their hits and I thought that it was potentially a good idea. In fact, I took me a while to come around to that idea. And also at the same time it was suggested, “Well, what about going out on tour acoustically? Just you and an acoustic and maybe one other guitarist?” I was like, “No I don’t wanna do that.” (laughs)

Too intimate?

Peter Frampton: Yeah, I think so. It was fear of the unknown. So doing both was actually a challenge. I thought I got it wrong both ways.

I thought that recording the songs that I’d been playing for 40 years plus would be a breeze but it was much more difficult than I thought.

Then something that I never wanted to do, go and play acoustically without a full band, it turned into something that I enjoyed so much that we’re doing it again. (laughs)

But with recording, I thought, this is gonna be easy; we’ll get a great sound on the acoustic and I’ll sit down and play these songs and I should have this done by tomorrow’s afternoon. (laughs)

So I did three songs and came into the control room and I went, “You know what, it sounds like there should be a band there but there’s no band.” I realized that this is not the way I performed these. If you had come into my living room and I went, “Hey, listen to this, I just wrote this song last night.”

Then I picked up an acoustic and played you Lines On My Face, I wouldn’t play it to you the same way that I played it when I first went into the studio to try it artistically, which was too forceful. I’m playing to one person and that’s the M.O. I’ve worked out.

That’s what I wanted. I wanted to draw people in and give it the emotion as if I’d just written it. So I reverse engineered the songs a little but, you know.

So it was challenging to get that intimacy across?

Peter Frampton: Yeah, to start with and then I go it. I realized this is the opposite of what I’m looking for. I’m looking for something much more expressive that what was coming across to me. My level of quality control when it comes to emotion and what you capture is very high and it’s gotta move me.

So I would go in and do the song and then I’d do them again and then I’d do them again until I got the right performance of each song.

Was there one song in particular that you were particularly excited to cut in this format?

Peter Frampton: I’d have to say Do You Feel Like We Do because I wasn’t gonna do it to start with and then I just tried the intro with the two guitar and it made me smile.

So then I said maybe this is gonna be fun, and it was. I really enjoyed it. My original feeling was, I can’t do the talk box and I don’t have the band behind me; you’ve got all this stuff going on that people are used to. But once you get away from all that and think, Well, how did I write it?  I basically wrote the chorus and verses of Do You Feel Like We Do the night before and came in and jammed the intro with the band and then we put everything together.

So I just went back as if I was coming up with the chorus and the verse and performed it that way and it was very enjoyable.

True or false, two of your biggest hits, Show Me The Way and Baby I Love Your Way, both of which appear on the new CD, were written on the same day?

Peter Frampton: Very true. (laughs) In the acoustic show I tell everybody how that happened. I had three weeks to write the Frampton record, the one before the live record and I had nothing.

So I borrowed Steve Marriott’s cottage in the Bahamas and went down there. For the first two weeks I wrote nothing. I guess I was just assimilating and winding down. And then the last week I virtually wrote the whole album. But the first day of writing anything that I really liked was when I wrote Show Me The Way in the late morning after breakfast and then thought it was the best thing I had come up with so far and everything had to be as good or better than that.

I went for as swim, had some lunch and came back and as the sun was setting wrote Baby I Love Your Way. Yeah, it was one of those days. I wish I had a few more of those up my sleeve.

What’s the back story behind writing I’m In You?

Peter Frampton: I had not written or played anything or sung anything like I’m In You before. When I played it to everybody it was just voice and piano. The voice isn’t perfectly in tune either; there are imperfections there but there’s something about the emotion where it doesn’t always have to be one hundred percent perfect.

I think people have found that along the way. There was a backlash against the ‘80s and ‘90s perfection of recording because we could…computers came in and all that.  I think when you see someone live, there’s going to be imperfections ‘cause we’re human, all of us. It doesn’t matter how good you are but it’s the combination of the emotion and the performance and the vibe that comes from the performer.

Did you know I’m In You was a special song when you’d finished it?

Peter Frampton: I was very sure that it was the most powerful song on the album but I’m not necessarily sure it should have been the first single released because it was such a ballad compared to what I had just put out with the live album and was known for now with this big live thing. So it was a complete 180.

But it was a smash hit.

Peter Frampton: Yeah, it was and yes, I’m proud of that song. I just wish that I had longer to write the rest of the album ‘cause they could all have been of that standard had we waited a year.

Your influences as an electric guitar player have been well documented. I’m curious, in terms of acoustic guitar playing, who caught your ear and helped shape the manner in which your approach that instrument?

Peter Frampton: Gosh…See, I grew up listening to electric guitar players. The first one I heard was Hank Marvin of the Shadows and people like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly. The first person I heard acoustically was Django Reinhardt ‘cause that’s what my parents listened to. That was the approach to me. I’ll never come close to his style.

The man was inhuman and he learned how to play twice. He learned to play with five fingers on his left hand and then he had to relearn with just two fingers on his left hand. There was definitely something wrong but something ever so right about him. It’s just a once in more than a lifetime kind of thing. I’ve taken a lot from Django melodically; his dexterity is far beyond what I can do.

But as far as his melodic approach, I’ve listened a lot to him.

You were childhood friends of David Bowie and in later years, specifically 1987, you joined him playing lead guitar on the Glass Spider tour. In light of David’s recent passing, how do you remember your friend?

Peter Frampton: Well, it’s kind of hard right now to go into stuff so soon after his passing. But what I will say is that as far as childhood memories, David was a friend of mine. We got to know each other early in our lives. I was 12 and I think he was 15. We played guitars together and stuff like that.

He was always a mentor to me because he was always in that band that I wanted to be in locally. But even most recently when I was working on my instrumental record, I called David up to ask his advice on something and he really helped me at that point.

Apart from asking me to play guitar on the Glass Spider tour, which was reintroducing me as a guitar player I think after the pop star thing had happened. (laughs) It was a gift and you keep thanking someone for that one. So he was a true friend in that regard and was always there for me.

Taking me out of the equation, everyone’s better off with the fact that he was in our lives. He brought so much creatively with his art and that encompassed visual as well as his music. He left us way too soon. I just sent him an email the other day saying how much I loved the Blackstar video and obviously I didn’t get an answer.

Speaking of another departed legend, you appear uncredited on George Harrison’s classic album All Things Must Pass playing acoustic guitar?

Peter Frampton: Yes, I did play on the record and why I didn’t get credited, I have no idea. I never could ask George (laughs), Mr. Beatle, you left me off. (laughs)

It was a big thing at the time but it’s one of those things; it even got remastered and I got left off but it doesn’t matter. I know I was there.

It was George and myself playing acoustics and then most of Badfinger were there as well. Phil Spector was the co-producer with George and his philosophy was more of everything. It was quite amazing being on those sessions and hearing the acoustic sound that we got, which was incredible.

What songs did you play on?

Peter Frampton: I played on all the ones that Pete Drake played on; he was a pedal steel player who came over from Nashville. So I played on songs like If Not For You and Behind The Locked Door.

I played on five or six of the basic tracks and then George called me and asked me to come back. He said, “Phil wants more acoustics.” And I said, “You’re kidding me?” (laughs) I came back and the two of us came on two more tracks with both of us playing acoustics on I don’t know how many tracks but I think I played on quite a few.

That same session, pedal steel player Pete Drake helped turn you on to the talk box that became your trademark in later years.

Peter Frampton: That’s right. Before computers, I’d always heard that computerized sound that radio stations used to use in the ‘50s and ’60 to do their call letters. All of a sudden there was this guy playing pedal steel and the sound was coming out of his mouth and he was talking or singing to me. And there it was, this sound that I heard since I first listened to the radio and it was jaw-dropping to say the least.

That particular one he lent to Joe Walsh and he used it on Rocky Mountain Way.

What was the first song you used the talk box on?

Peter Frampton: Oh… when we played Do You Feel Like We Do. I started using it live before we recorded Show Me The Way for the Frampton record. It was all over that record. It was on various tracks.

Do you have a “man cave,” if so, what would we find in it?

Peter Frampton: Yes, you’d find a very large screen TV (laughs), a great sound system and then of course my guitars. I have an electric and amp and effects in my bedroom. That’s my man cave. I have a music room too but it’s funny how all the ideas tend to come from if you’re just going to bed or if you just woke up in the middle of the night.

I’d grab a guitar and a digital recorder and off I go. So that’s still my man cave, acoustics, keyboards; everything’s here right next to me. (laughs)

Finally, tell us the story how your trademark black Gibson Les Paul, the one you’re pictured with on the cover of the Frampton Comes Alive album which was miraculously returned to you decades after it was believed to have been destroyed in a plane crash.

Peter Frampton: I was given the guitar by a dear friend in 1970 in the San Francisco area when I was playing with Humble Pie because the guitar I was using just wasn’t sounding right. He said, “Well, you can borrow my guitar tomorrow” ‘cause we were doing three nights at the Fillmore West.

So I played it, I loved it and said to him, ‘Would you ever sell it to me?’ and he said, “No, I’m gonna give it to you” so that was another jaw-dropping moment.

It was a special guitar in the way I had received it was as a gift. So for the next ten years, everything I played from 1970 to 1980 was that guitar apart from one other guitar, a red ’55 Strat that I played. So then 1980 comes and there’s a cargo plane crash with our equipment on it. It crashed in Caracas, Venezuela on a day off. We were already in Panama.

So unfortunately everything went, all the equipment went but people died which put the seriousness into the situation. It’s hard to worry too much about gear with people tragically losing their lives. But lo and behold there was my Gibson Les Paul and my ’55 Strat and my ‘63 P bass; there was a lot of great stuff on there that was lost.

Then we fast forward 30 years to 2010 and I get an email to my web site saying, “I think you ought to look at these photos” and there were these photos taken of what I now called “The Phoenix” guitar. It was a little singed but still there in working form. I thought it had gone back to the earth as cinders.

So for the next two years I worked on getting the gentleman who showed me these pictures to start with to find a way to get it back to me. The most difficult part was convincing everybody that I wasn’t gonna have them arrested. (laughs) I just wanted the guitar back and then I got it back.

It was 32 years that I was without it.

Playing that guitar again, one which you assumed had been destroyed, must have been a joyous experience.

Peter Frampton: Oh it was. I think the most exciting time was when the band and I were rehearsing to do the FCA (Frampton Comes Alive) 35 tour. We’d had a break and in the break I got it back—this was now 2012. So I put the guitar on without them seeing and then we started playing something from Frampton Comes Alive and I just looked ‘round and everyone’s jaw had dropped because it’s an unmistakable sound.

It’s not the best Les Paul but it’s just my Les Paul (laughs) and it was that Les Paul that played on those tracks. People say, “Does it work on everything?” and I say, “It works best on those things we know it from.” It’s that iconic guitar that played on all those tracks from 1970 to 1980.

You must have felt you were hallucinating when you were first contacted and saw photos of that missing guitar.

Peter Frampton: Yes I did. I screamed. It was loud, it was loud. (laughs) It was unbelievable. Gibson did 35 clones of what we call “The Phoenix” and they’re out there. The very first one, number one, went to Marc Mariana, who’s the guy who gave me the original back in 1970.