Peter Frampton became one of rock’s biggest stars with the blockbuster success of 1976’s Frampton Comes Alive! But five years earlier, he’d made a career-defining gamble, walking away from Humble Pie just as the band stood on the verge of an even bigger commercial breakthrough.

Frampton had co-founded the band with former Small Faces frontman Steve Marriott in 1969, helping turn Humble Pie into one of rock’s most formidable live acts. But despite the success of 1971’s Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore — and with an even bigger hit on the horizon — he says he’d already decided it was time to leave.

“It wasn’t just the direction, it was personality-wise, as well,” Frampton tells Record Collector (via Guitar.com). “Steve and I were not on the same planet anymore, unfortunately. I loved him dearly, but he was a handful. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore.”

Frampton says the seeds of his departure had been planted well before the band’s celebrated Fillmore East performances. Ironically, the success of Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore — particularly the hit “I Don’t Need No Doctor” — only confirmed that he was making the right decision.

“We started out doing acoustic without drums, [then] acoustic with drums, electric guitar, pianos, keyboards, and then heavy… we did it all,” he recalls.

“That’s what I loved about Humble Pie, to start with,” he continues. “But our direction was kind of chosen for us by what we put on the live record, and I knew that everyone was going to expect that — and only that — from then on, on record.”

Frampton chose to leave before Humble Pie released Smokin’ in March 1972. The album became one of the band’s biggest commercial successes, earning Gold certification after Frampton had been replaced by former Colosseum guitarist Clem Clempson.

“I decided to leave before the record came out,” Frampton says. “I believed it was going to be a small hit, not knowing it was going to be a much bigger hit than I thought, and then it would be much more difficult for me to leave.”

In hindsight, the timing looked risky. But Frampton’s gamble paid off. Five years later, Frampton Comes Alive! became one of the best-selling live albums in history, turning him into an international superstar.

Ironically, Frampton has since admitted that the phenomenal success of Frampton Comes Alive! also marked his least favorite period as a musician, as burnout and the pressures of fame took their toll. Even so, his decision to walk away from Humble Pie at the height of its ascent ultimately paved the way for the solo career that made him a rock icon.

If Rob Arthur gets to do a director's cut of his new Frampton documentary, he knows what the first addition to the story will be.

“The one thing I regret we couldn't fit in is the Phenix story,” Frampton's longtime keyboardist tells us via Zoom. He's of course referrnig to the famed 1954 Gibson Les Paul that was given to Frampton by a fan after a 1970 Humble Pie gig but was presumed destroyed in a 1980 crash of a cargo plane transporting his gear from Caracas, Venezuela.

The tail section of the plane stayed intact amidst the debris, however, with all of the guitars intact — although it wouldn't return to Frampton until 2011, after passing through a variety of hands in the Caribbean. He rechristened it Phenix at the time, as in rising from the (literal) ashes. Frampton also gave the name to his Nashville recording studio and to a film production company he and Arthur started during the pandemic, which produced Frampton.

“It's a really fascinating story about the guitar. A great story, an amazing story — but not a character-based story,” Arthur says of the decision to leave Phenix on the cutting-room floor. “We had so much to say about him and how he maneuvered his career and his life that I just couldn't see taking any of that stuff out to fit in the Phenix story.

"If we ever get a chance to make it longer, then maybe it gets back in. On the other hand, it's been covered. Gibson did a whole piece on Phenix, and it's beautifully shot and really well done, so the story's still out there for people to get.”

Frampton had its premiere on June 4 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Its future has not been announced yet, but Arthur is confident it will be picked up by a streaming service and perhaps even have some sort of limited theatrical release.

The deeply candid Frampton does, however, cover the story of how he “almost” became part of the Who.

It occurred during the early '80s, when the glow of 1976's Frampton Comes Alive! had faded. The combination of the I'm in You album and the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie had made him a punchline, he'd been dropped by his label (A&M Records) and split with his manager, Dee Anthony.

All of which left him in such deep financial straits that Frampton had to borrow money from Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun. Around then he received a call from Pete Townshend, explaining that he'd decided that, à la Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, he was going to give up touring with the Who but would still write songs for the band.

“I didn't think it was a great idea,” Frampton says now, with a laugh. “I was kind of laughing as he was talking about it, to be honest. I wanted to say, ‘You must be kidding! First of all, I can't jump that high. Secondly, I'm not you, and you've got an awfully large pair of shoes to fill, live.’

"I really didn't think it would happen. But when the leader of the Who or a founding member of the Who says, ‘I think I want you to play with the Who now,’ you go, ‘Well, that's crazy ... But wait. I don't have anything going on, so maybe it is a good idea.’”

Frampton — who first revealed the invitation in 2020's Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir — told Townshend he wanted assurances that the other members of the Who, particularly singer Roger Daltrey, were onboard with the idea. Townshend said he would discuss it with them and get back to Frampton, who even started practicing his windmills at home.

But there was radio silence from Townshend for three weeks after that, and an anxious Frampton had to track the guitarist down at a recording studio, by phone, to receive a profuse apology and an acknowledgment from Townshend that he “should never have” made the offer. (Years later, while suffering from tinnitus, Townshend brought Steve Bolton on tour to handle electric guitar duties for the Who's acclaimed 1989 tour — although Townshend was along as well, playing acoustic.)

Arthur says the incident “symbolized to me that here's a guy who's so desperate, he's grabbing at anything. He's got to get something going on. There's no way Pete Townshend is going to let someone else be in his place onstage, but Peter just didn't have a lot going on and was like, ‘I need to know! I need to know!’ That, to me, was the bottom for him. That's a rock 'n' roll bottom — really wishing that might happen so he could ignite a fire again after the fall.”

Frampton — whose career, of course, picked up again after childhood friend David Bowie took him out as a guitarist on his 1987 Glass Spider Tour — adds that the Who story was “too big a deal to leave out” of the film. “I didn't want to put down Pete, but it happened, and he knows it did. He was there.”

The two bumped into each other not long after backstage at a Bruce Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden, where they kissed (Townshend on Frampton's head) and made up. “He apologized, and I love him dearly and we're great friends,” Frampton says. “It was just a brotherly problem for a minute — a big one, though.”

In addition to the documentary, Frampton is also promoting Carry the Light, his 19th studio album as a solo artist and first of all-new songs in 16 years. Released May 15 and co-produced with his son Julian Frampton, it features guest appearances from Tom Morello, Sheryl Crow, Graham Nash, H.E.R. and saxophonist Bill Evans. His continuing struggle with the degenerative Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), however, has kept him from making any tour plans in the near future.

Peter Frampton keeps himself surrounded by guitars in his Bigsby Park home studio outside Nashville. In fact, they’re just about everywhere you look, save for the computer console in front of him and the faithful service dog the room is named after, who’s lounging on a white couch nearby (“his spot,” as Frampton tells us via Zoom).

He’s flanked by a pair of Gibson SGs — “‘Cause you have to have two, and I actually have three,” he says — including a 1962 model he played with Humble Pie on one side and a ’61 on the other. Over the course of the conversation, meanwhile, the barefoot Frampton pads around the room — sans the cane his degenerative Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM) usually requires him to use — pointing out an Eventide Riptide Drive & Vibe pedal, a Dupont guitar similar to the one used by Django Reinhardt and other pieces of gear.

Reinhardt has long been one of Frampton’s heroes, and even more so now as the IBM — fortunately slow-moving enough to have allowed him to continue playing years beyond his 2019 Finale Farewell Tour — continues to rob the dexterity from his left hand.

“It’s obviously getting more and more difficult to play,” Frampton, 76, acknowledges, “but I’m still enjoying working out what I can do that’s different because of my lessened ability.

“It’s the pressure that goes, and obviously the speed of getting from one note to the other: ‘Well, that finger’s not gonna make it, so I’ll use that finger.’ I’m using thinner strings now. All the string gauges are coming down, which really helps me.

“I’m very strong with myself about that: ‘Get over yourself and play the guitar! Django had only two fingers, Pete. He only had two! Get on with it!’

“That’s me. I’ve always been like that. And I try to play as if I’ve got no problem at all.”

The resilience has certainly been on display since Frampton revealed his diagnosis. There have been four albums — including the brand-new Carry the Light, a guest-filled set that’s his first collection of all-original songs in 16 years — along with several tours (performed sitting down), a best-selling memoir and inductions into both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Frampton, a documentary directed by his keyboardist and musical director Rob Arthur, premieres June 4 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

IBM may be affecting Frampton’s hands, but clearly not the middle finger he’s giving the disorder as he continues the musical journey he began more than 60 years ago in his native England.

“I really do admire him for that,” says his son Julian Frampton, who co-produced Carry the Light. “He always says the big things don’t really matter — he handles them. It’s the little things that bother him; the crumpling of a potato chip bag will set him off. But when he got the diagnosis of having IBM, he was like, ‘Okay, what do we do next? How do we get through this?’

“That’s been his motto his whole life: When the big things happen you can’t change them, so you ride the wave, stand tall and work your way through it.”

Frampton is well aware of the gap in new material since Thank You Mr. Churchill in 2010, though he did release pieces he composed for the Cincinnati Ballet in 2013. Since then he’s issued Acoustic Classics in 2016 and two covers albums — All Blues in 2019 and the instrumental Frampton Forgets the Words in 2021.

“As soon as we announced the Finale tour, that’s when we went into the studio,” he explains. “And I said, ‘I’ve got to play as much as possible,’ for obvious reasons. ‘I want to play as much as I can until it’s not easy for me.’

“Now it almost feels like I’m starting from scratch again, like I felt I was on Wind of Change [his 1972 solo debut], because it’s been so long and I’ve had so many new ideas — either brand new or from the last six years.”

The hard-hitting “Lions at the Gate,” in particular, dates back several years. Frampton was recording “Peggy Sue” for a Buddy Holly tribute project and used the extra studio time to jam with bass guitarist Dave LaBruyere and drummer Chad Cromwell. The Framptons later recruited Tom Morello to play on the finished, politically charged track.

“If there was ever a song he should play on — the rage man himself — it’s ‘Lions at the Gate,’” Frampton says. “He took it, wow, and played in the places I left him. Then I said, ‘If you feel like harmonizing or playing with me…’ So there are some beautiful harmonies he does with me at the end that are just great.”

There are, not surprisingly, plenty of six-string heroics throughout Carry the Light’s 10 tracks. There’s compositional integrity and songwriting craft, but at the end of the day, as Julian notes, “the guitar is the star of the show.”

“That’s always the priority,” he says. “Always at the top of his list. That’s always going to shine.”

“It’s always about the guitar — the sound and the inspiration,” Frampton adds. “I play during the day and work out stuff that I came up with the night before, before I go to bed. If my girlfriend’s not here when I sleep, the acoustic guitar or an electric is on the other pillow, and Bigsby’s at the foot of the bed.

“I pick up my phone and hit ‘record’ before I pick up the guitar, because so many times the first thing you play, you’re not thinking at all. Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘What was that?!’ and it’s good that I got it recorded. You can try to play it later and it’s still me, but it’s not the same — ’cause now you’re thinking about it.

“So it’s best for me to always put the iPhone in record so I get it. That’s how they all started.”

Frampton’s famed Phenix — the 1954 Gibson Les Paul “Black Beauty” Custom recovered in 2011 after a 1980 plane crash in South America — was his primary instrument on Carry the Light. But Julian notes that “we used whatever sounded best.” That included a Dupont on the jazz-inflected “Islamorada,” featuring H.E.R., which grew out of a voice memo Julian recorded of some jazz chords.

“He’s such a jazzy guy I thought he’d like it,” Julian says. “We started writing to that a little bit and he really wanted to sing on it. But I had a vision. I said, ‘I want you to sing — but I want you to sing with your guitar.’

“He fought me on it a little bit and then eventually gave in. I was playing acoustically and he brought out his electric, and when we started playing over the chorus melody we both looked at each other and he said, ‘OK, this is an instrumental song. You won me over.’”

That kind of input, Frampton says, helped elevate his Los Angeles–based son’s role from occasional lyrical collaborator to full co-producer, spending weeks at a time in Nashville. The two had previously worked together on “Road to the Sun” from Thank You Mr. Churchill.

“I have to credit Julian with coming up with some incredible ideas that made this album so much better,” Frampton says. “Maybe if I was working with another producer, the control freak in me would’ve said, ‘I don’t think so.’ But because it was my son, we said we’re not gonna settle on any level for this album.

“That was our motto: We have to try everything. We have to try each other’s ideas — otherwise, what’s the point?”

Frampton also made a rare and previously unrecorded foray with a Fender Telecaster on “Buried Treasure,” a high-octane tribute to the late Tom Petty inspired by Frampton’s love of Petty’s Buried Treasure program on SiriusXM.

“That’s the guitar sound of Mike Campbell and Tom. That’s a Tele,” Julian explains, singing the track’s ringing riff.

“And then, for the whole album, he’s got such incredible pedals to dig in and try different effects — his Mutron, his Eventide choruses. It was so fun to play with him, with his sound, which I’d never experienced before.

“And most of the album was cut with this little SIR amp that he just loves. It’s got an incredible sound.”

Recorded primarily at Frampton’s Studio Phenix in Nashville, with overdubs at Bigsby Park and elsewhere, Carry the Light includes a number of other experiments as well. The title track incorporates a Shawnee stomp dance and chants recorded by Frampton’s guitar tech Nick Gibson with his tribal elders in Oklahoma, while Frampton pulls out the Dupont for “I’m Sorry Elle” (with Graham Nash), an ode to his granddaughter, who was born during the height of COVID — and whom he couldn’t visit for several months.

“It’s a nod to Django,” Frampton says, “even though I could never play like him. But I hinted at what I can do.”

Two tracks with jazz saxophonist Bill Evans — “Can You Take Me There” and “Tinderbox” — explore vibey terrain and deep grooves. The former evokes Marvin Gaye circa What’s Going On, while the latter features fiery instrumental exchanges between Frampton and Evans.

“‘Tinderbox’ is so varied,” Frampton says. “It’s a journey. All of a sudden you’re in a jazz bar.”

Every song on the album — which also features Sheryl Crow on “Breaking the Mold” — houses a noteworthy solo, often the first element Frampton says he came up with.

“I don’t like thinking about what I’m gonna play at all, even while I’m playing it,” he says. “I like the fresh ones, where there are new ideas and places I haven’t been before.

“I’ll do three or four takes, take a break, save those and then stop thinking. I’ll come back and do three or four more takes. Usually the first take of each batch is the best — because you don’t care.”

“I try to play as if I have no problem,” he adds. “Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Okay, this is just a thruway. I’ll just throw this one away.’ That’s usually the one that ends up being the best — because you’re not thinking.”

Frampton currently has no touring plans but will make appearances to promote both the album and the documentary. He’s already looking ahead to the next record; he and Julian recorded six additional tracks during the Carry the Light sessions, and Frampton says he already has “four embryonic ideas ready for me and Julian to sit down and do the same thing.”

“That’s what makes me feel so good,” he says. “I come from an album perspective, where you’ve got 19 to 21 minutes at most on either side. Just because you’ve got the time on a cassette or CD doesn’t mean you should put it all out.

“I’ve never been a fan of that. It’s quality versus quantity — and we’ve got more quality coming your way.”

Peter Frampton’s career has produced only one Grammy for the classic-rock guitarist. It’s not for Frampton Comes Alive!, the 1976 smash hit that made him a global superstar, but for Fingerprints, his 2007 instrumental album.

Now, as the 76-year-old guitarist prepares to release his new album, Carry the Light, on May 15, he’s measuring success on his own scale.

“In my mind, I’m more successful than I’ve ever been — because I like myself, I like what I do,” Frampton tells The New York Times in a new interview. “I’ve always been someone who didn’t think I was good enough, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I should have felt that way a long time ago.”

Frampton’s regret is poignant. In recent interviews he’s said the success of Frampton Comes Alive! overwhelmed him — and that its hastily recorded follow-up, I'm in You (1977), was a mistake. Suddenly he was everywhere — on the radio, TV and posters on fans’ walls, with his famed Fenix Les Paul electric guitar.

“The pressure was so great,” he said. “There was absolutely no need to do I’m in You then and there. The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

His career slowed afterward as musical tastes shifted. Years later, speaking at The Art of Music event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last year, Frampton said it was then that he began planning for the next phase of his career.

“That’s when I sort of stopped working and basically just started writing on my own and getting ready for something that was to come.”

His evolution since then has resulted in what may be his most personal — and political — record. Carry the Light finds the guitarist reflecting on life, family and the current political climate, with assistance from friends that include Graham Nash, Sheryl Crow and Tom Morello.

The album developed over the past three years, as he and his son, Julian, reconnected following the COVID-19 pandemic. Just before then, Frampton became a grandfather for the first time.

But the joy of that milestone was tempered by the effects of Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a progressive muscle-wasting disease that weakens the arms and legs. Frampton learned he had IBM around 2014 after suffering several falls at home and onstage, but he didn’t publicly reveal the diagnosis until 2019.

He recalls the first time he sensed something might be wrong. It was 2009, when he was 59. He and Julian were on a rare road trip to Big Sur to reconnect and write songs together.

“Julian said, ‘Let’s run up this hill.’ Normally I would beat him, and I didn’t,” Frampton says from his home studio in Nashville. “It felt like there were insects in my legs, like they were vibrating.”

Since revealing his diagnosis, Frampton has made fewer appearances. He surprised attendees at the 2025 NAMM music show with an appearance at the Martin Guitar booth, where he first hinted he was recording Carry the Light. But standing — and even playing guitar — has become more difficult, forcing him to adjust how he frets chords and notes.

While he’s unsure whether he’ll tour again, he remains hopeful. And he’s keeping positive.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must be so upset,’ and, yeah, I am. But you can fix the little things,” Frampton says.

“But big things never worried me, because they’re the things you can’t do anything about. If I don’t accept what I have, I’m going to be mad for the rest of my life.”

It’s been 50 years since Frampton Comes Alive! reached the top of the charts. When it did, on April 10, 1976, Peter Frampton felt like he was on top of the world.

The live album became a breakthrough beyond anything he had imagined — an instant FM radio staple that sold millions of copies. Its iconic cover photo, showing Frampton mid-performance with his “Phenix” Gibson Les Paul Custom, ended up on bedroom walls across America, cementing his status as a teen idol nearly a decade into his career.

But it didn’t take long for the high to shift. Almost immediately, Frampton began wondering how he could possibly follow it — or even come close.

“I felt like I had lost before I started the next part of my career,” the guitarist told Billboard. “Before there was nothing to compete with. Now, I felt, ‘I’m competing with Peter Frampton.’”

He had sensed early on that the recordings were special. Shortly after the tour wrapped, he and bandmates Bob Mayo (keyboards) and Stanley Sheldon (bass) gathered at New York City’s Electric Lady Studios to review the tapes. (Kiss were also in the building working on their 1976 live album Alive!, and even used some of Frampton’s gear while sweetening their tracks.)

As the engineer rolled the tape, the impact was immediate.

“Me, Bob Mayo and Stanley just sort of got knocked backwards as soon as it came on, because the energy that came from the tape just leapt out of the speakers,” he says. “I started laughing. I just said, ‘Oh my God, we’re good!’”

Radio followed suit. Released on January 15, 1976, Frampton Comes Alive! generated three hit singles — “Baby I Love Your Way,” “Show Me the Way” and “Do You Feel Like We Do,” the latter two showcasing Frampton’s distinctive combination of an electric guitar and a Talk Box.

The record surged to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 by early April, where it remained for 10 nonconsecutive weeks, ultimately becoming the best-selling album of 1976. Over time, it would surpass eight million copies sold, its appeal enduring well beyond its initial wave.

Success brought its own momentum. Frampton returned to the road to promote the album even as it still sat in the Top 10. By the final shows, exhaustion had set in — along with a growing sense of pressure about what came next.

“Everyone was saying, ‘Oh man, this is so good. You must feel so great,’” he recalls. “Yeah I do, but I’ve got tomorrow to deal with. Hell, I’ve got to do a studio record to follow this up. And in my mind I’m not proven in the studio, like I am now. I’m stamped ‘The Live Guy.’”

Within weeks, he was back in the studio cutting I’m in You, released June 3, 1977. The pace of expectations, however, was relentless — and Frampton felt it.

“That was probably the least favorite period of my life,” he says. “The pressure was so great. There was absolutely no need to do I’m in You then and there. The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

The album was hardly a failure. It went Platinum and, at the time, became his most commercially successful release. The title track reached No. 2, marking his highest-charting single.

But it never carried the cultural weight of Frampton Comes Alive! — and the landscape had already shifted. Punk and new wave acts such as Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, and Television were reshaping rock’s center of gravity.

Against that backdrop, I’m in You felt out of step. Even its pin-up style cover — Frampton shirt open, posing directly to camera — read like an attempt to extend his teen idol moment rather than evolve beyond it.

Looking back, Frampton has pinpointed that era as a turning point. Speaking at The Art of Music event at New York City’s Met Museum, hosted by Warren Haynes, he reflected on the aftermath.

“After the I’m in You record came out — which I didn’t want to make, let alone release — I realized that it was time to take stock, and a lot of things happened there,” he said. “Money was going astray by the hundreds of thousands.

“And so I needed to sort all that out. And that’s when I sort of stopped working and basically just started writing on my own and getting ready for something that was to come.”

Now, Frampton is preparing to release his new studio album Carry the Light, written with his son Julian. It arrives May 15, 2026, but he chose today to release its debut single, “Lions at the Gate,” featuring Tom Morello.

He says he’s clear eyed about what success means today.

“I have no expectations of it doing anything,” he tells WIVB. “But Julian and I love it, so that’s all that matters.

“I enjoy the creative process more now than I ever did,” he added. “I don’t have to do anything, which is so great.

“I should’ve thought about that back then. But the pressure was on.”

Working with George Harrison led Peter Frampton to fall in love with an effect he would go on to popularize so completely that he ultimately eclipsed one of its earliest champions.

From an early age, a life in music seemed inevitable for the English-born guitarist. By 12, Frampton was already playing in a band — the Little Ravens — alongside a three-years-older David Bowie. Two years later, he joined the Preachers (later Moon Train), a group managed by Bill Wyman, then bass guitarist for the Rolling Stones.

By 18, Frampton was fronting Humble Pie with Steve Marriott, co-writing a run of hits before leaving the band in 1970. That departure marked a shift away from traditional band life and toward session work — a move that soon placed him at the center of one of the most important albums of the post-Beatles era.

“In 1970, when I left Humble Pie, I was doing sessions for lots of different people,” Frampton told the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “And one of the best sessions I ever did was for George Harrison, who asked me to play on All Things Must Pass.”

It was during those sessions that Frampton witnessed a moment that would quietly reshape his career.

“On the second or third day, George told me he had invited Pete Drake, the Nashville pedal steel player who played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album,” Frampton recalled.

Drake’s reputation preceded him. By the late ’50s, he was a cornerstone of the Nashville A-Team, the East Coast counterpart to Los Angeles’ Wrecking Crew, and his pedal steel appeared on countless hit records. He was also known for a curious piece of sonic wizardry: a “talking” steel guitar created using a homemade talk box — an effect he was eager to demonstrate to Harrison and Frampton.

“In comes Pete that day, and he’s setting up his pedal steel,” Frampton said. “He goes, ‘Do you want to hear something a little different?’ George and I are sitting there watching him, and he gets this gadget out. Then he puts a tube onto it and puts the other end in his mouth.

“I had this funny feeling I knew what this was going to be.”

As Drake launched into the demonstration, Frampton was both astonished and entertained.

“Me and George are laughing, because what do you do?” he said. “It’s the most incredible sound. And it’s funny. It’s humorous, which is what I like about it.”

The talk box itself dated back decades. Jazz guitarist Alvino Rey had pioneered the effect in 1939 using a microphone designed for military pilot communications. But Drake brought it to a wider audience in 1964 with “Forever,” and Frampton immediately saw its potential.

“I said to him, ‘Where did you get that? Because I’d really like to get one,’” Frampton recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, I made this one myself.’”

It would take a few more years before Frampton got his own. In 1974, he received a talk box from Bob Heil, the sound-system innovator behind touring rigs for the Who and the Grateful Dead. Heil’s version followed earlier commercial attempts — most notably the Bag, released by Kustom in 1969 — but it proved especially roadworthy. Around the same time, Joe Walsh used a talk box on his 1973 hit “Rocky Mountain Way,” while Rick Derringer employed it on “Teenage Love Affair,” recorded with Walsh and Barnstorm.

With Heil’s talk box now on his pedalboard, Frampton took the electric guitar effect further than anyone before him. On Frampton Comes Alive! — one of the best-selling and most celebrated live albums in rock history — the talk box became a signature voice, featured prominently on “Show Me the Way” and “Do You Feel Like We Do.” Though later embraced by players like Slash and Richie Sambora, the sound became inseparable from Frampton himself.

Ironically, that success came at a cost. Frampton admitted last year that the album’s runaway impact ushered in “a very difficult period” as work began on its follow-up—proof that even a career-defining moment can cast a long shadow.

George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh has gone down in history as the first all-star benefit rock concert. The former Beatle called upon many of his famous musical friends to perform at the two shows for humanitarian relief in the war-torn country, which were held August 1, 1971, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr played, as did Bob Dylan, guitarists Jesse Ed Davis and Don Preston, keyboardists Billy Preston and Leon Russell, and the rock group Badfinger, among a host of others.

One person who was invited but didn’t play? Peter Frampton.

The guitarist was five years away from becoming a megastar with the release of his 1976 live smash, Frampton Comes Alive! At the time he was still performing in Humble Pie, which is why he was in New York City. The band was touring England and the U.S. that summer and spending what free time remained at Electric Lady Studios, where they were mixing their 1971 live breakthrough, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, recorded the previous May 28 and 29.

“On the weekends, we’d fly off to perform, opening the bill for many different artists, and on weekdays we’d be at Electric Lady Studios in New York with Eddie Kramer, mixing the Rockin’ the Fillmore album,” Frampton recalls to Guitar Player.

Frampton knew Harrison. He had performed lead electric guitar alongside him on singer Doris Troy’s self-titled album, produced by Harrison for the Beatles’ Apple Records. He had also played acoustic guitar on All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s first post-Beatles solo album.

“I knew I was going to see George’s shows, and I asked if he needed me to play guitar,” Frampton explained, “but they were overbooked with guitarists.”

Indeed they were. In addition to Harrison, Davis and Preston, the shows would feature Eric Clapton, who was making his first live appearance since his late 1970s shows with Derek and the Dominos.

Depressed over that band’s failure, the death of Duane Allman and his unrequited love for Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, the guitarist had fallen into heroin addiction and withdrawn from recording and touring. Harrison had recruited him for the concerts, hoping it would help pull him out of his decline.

Frampton accepted the news with grace. “I wished him all the best with the show,” he says, “and told him I’d come see it.”

Unexpectedly, the guitarist soon found himself invited to dine with Harrison and Pattie, while they were in Manhattan.

“Afterwards, we went back to the Pierre [Hotel], and he invited me up to their suite,” Frampton continues. “There were two electrics sitting by the window, and maybe one or two little amps. George asked if I wanted to play some guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ trying to keep my excitement under control.

“And without a word, he just started running through the songs they were going to do. My mind started going 14,000 miles an hour. I couldn’t understand why we were doing this if the guitar positions for the concert were filled.

“We must’ve played six to 10 songs, and he was checking me out to see if I was up to speed, which, of course, I was. How can you not be when it comes to the Beatles’ songs?”

But to Frampton’s confusion, Harrison said nothing about performing at the concert. In the days afterward, the guitarist flew south to play a couple of shows with Humble Pie.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the behind-the-scenes drama around Clapton escalated as the August 1 concert date arrived. The guitarist, suffering through heroin withdrawal was bedridden throughout his stay in the city and had been unable to make any of the rehearsals.

Frampton returned to New York on the day of the show. “I’d missed the first one, but I planned to go to the second, and so I picked up my tickets and backstage pass,” he says. “I watched the entire show, and at the end, I made my way to the side of the stage.”

When he got there, he didn’t get the welcome he expected.

“Terry Doran [Harrison’s personal assistant] saw me, and his eyes got really big,” Frampton continues. “He said, ‘Where have you been!?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’ve been on the road.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but we had no way of getting hold of you!’

Frampton was thoroughly confused.

“And Terry says, ‘Well, George wants to speak to you!’

“So as he takes me backstage, he pulls me right into Bob Dylan, who gives me the ‘I could slice your head off with the back of my hand’ kind of look.”

Doran delivered the guitarist to Harrison, who explained their growing terror as the concerts approached and Clapton appeared unable to perform.

“This was during his heavy drug phase,” Frampton says. “Whether he had some or was trying to give them up, I don’t know. But when he wasn’t able to rehearse, they tried to get hold of me, because they wanted me there — just in case.

“I asked George and Terry, ‘You mean you wanted me to play?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’”

In the end, a cameraman from the crew hired to film the shows provided Clapton with methadone, which made him well enough to perform both shows.

“I’m glad that Eric was able to play somehow, since a lot of people would’ve been very disappointed if he didn’t, especially George,” Frampton says.

“The last thing I wanted to be was a stand-in for Eric Clapton. I would’ve done it if George had gotten hold of me and the situation was more dire. But I’ll never know how dire it actually was.”

In 1976, no musical artist was bigger than Peter Frampton. His live double-album Frampton Comes Alive! was at the top of the charts and went on to become the year’s biggest seller, with its songs in constant rotation on the radio.

But as Frampton reveals in the new public television series The Art of Music, behind the scenes he was struggling with his newfound fame and the question that dogs every artist who creates a culture-shifting moment: What’s next?

“When they told me it was the biggest record ever, I got scared,” Frampton tells his interviewer, guitarist Warren Haynes. “Because you know that you've got to follow it up.”

Frampton’s revelation is one of many discussions the guitar icon has with Haynes in The Art of Music, which premieres September 6. Filmed before an audience at New York CIty’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show combines interviews with music performances, as Haynes leads Frampton through a conversation about his musical journey and creative processes.

Frampton’s 1976 rise to superstardom is among the many topics discussed, revealing his emotional vulnerability at a time when he was at his commercial peak. As Haynes notes, Frampton Comes Alive! was a seismic event in American music, one that reverberated well beyond the album’s initial release. The album remains one of the top-selling live records of all time, with more than 17 million copies sold worldwide.

“In 1976, it was the biggest-selling record in America,” Haynes says. “But in 1977, it was still the 14th biggest-selling record in America. That's amazing.

“So now we’re back to that question of what happens when you do this?” he asks, raising his hand. “Like, your career just went skyrocketing.”

Frampton doesn’t miss a beat.

“What goes up….” he deadpans, drawing laughter from the audience.

The rocket analogy is appropriate. As the guitarist explains, Frampton Comes Alive! was the culmination of all the work he had done both solo and with Humble Pie, the British blues-rock group he formed in 1969 with former Small Faces singer/guitarist Steve Marriott. After years of working to build an audience, Humble Pie had a bona fide hit with Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, the live 1971 album containing their hit version of “I Don’t Need No Doctor.”

But Frampton exited the band before its release to launch his solo career. Over the next four years he put out a quartet of albums, building momentum with tunes like “Lines on My Face” and “Do You Feel Like We Do?”

Then came Frampton Comes Alive!, a live double-LP document of the tour for his 1975 studio album, Frampton, which contained the songs “Baby, I Love Your Way” and “Show Me the Way.” Both tunes, as well as “Do You Feel Like We Do?,” became monster hits when they were released as singles from Frampton Comes Alive! Their success helped propel the album to the top of the charts, where it spent 10 nonconsecutive weeks from April through October of 1976.

But while the album made Frampton a global star and established him as one of the 1970s’ top performers, privately he was rattled by his sudden ascension.

“First of all,” he explains in The Art of Music, “it had taken me six years to write all that material, culled from Humble Pie, from all my solo records up to that point — and a cover,” he adds, referring to his live version of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

“So, yeah, it was a very difficult period for me, especially when they told me that I was not only number one in the charts but that I'd sold more than Carol King's Tapestry, which was the top-selling record ever at that point.”

But while teens grooved to his music and lined their bedroom walls with posters of the album’s cover — featuring Frampton playing his celebrated Gibson Les Paul Custom electric guitar — he fretted over his next move.

“You're only as good as your last record, and I should not never have made any other records,” he tells Haynes. “I should have just [said], ‘That's it!’

“But there's nothing better than having the biggest record in the world, I guess,” he adds with a wry laugh.

Haynes — who has had his own share of career transitions between his time with Dickey Betts, the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule — certainly knows a thing about riding music’s unpredictable waves. It undoubtedly informs his followup question.

“Did you feel like you had to rethink everything from that point?” he asks. “Like, take some time and figure out what’s going to be next?”

As Frampton explains, he did reach that point, but not until after he’d released his next album, 1977’s I’m in You, almost a year and a half later. It hit number two on the charts to become his most commercially successful album.

But as he reveals in The Art of Music, he was never fond of it.

“After the I’m in You record came out — which I didn't want to make, let alone release — I realized that it was time to take stock, and a lot of things happened there,” he says. “Money was going astray by the hundreds of thousands. And so I needed to sort all that out.

“And that's when I sort of stopped working and basically just started writing on my own and getting ready for something that was to come.”

Frampton credits his long career to his resilience in the face of adversity. And he's continued to demonstrate it in his 10-year fight with Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative order that weakens muscles.

“I’ve always been knocked down,” he says, “and then you take a second or two, and if you don't go to 10, you're okay. You get up on nine, and then you start again. And it's never too late to start again.”

In addition to the great and informative discussion, The Art of Music features Frampton and Haynes performing live, with assistance from bass guitar player Alison Prestwood and keyboardist/musical director Rob Arthur on “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Lines on My Face” and “Do You Feel Like We Do,” shown below.

Created and executive produced by iMaggination’s Don Maggi, The Art of Music was developed to give viewers a rare look inside musical artists’ lives and their creative practice before an invited audience at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Frampton’s episode will air on public television stations nationwide beginning September 6, 2025. Viewers can also stream it on the PBS app and watch it on the Art of Music website, where additional artists in the series will be announced.

It’s no secret that Kiss’s 1975 album Alive! was doctored in the studio with overdubs. Guitarists Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss have confirmed it in their autobiographies, while bassist Gene Simmons has discussed it elsewhere.

While the album was intended to capture the energy of a live Kiss show, getting all the pieces to work with a group like Kiss proved difficult. Stanley’s animated stage moves meant he wasn’t always on mic, and the heat from the stage lights could throw the guitars out of tune.

Overdubbing and re-creating those parts in the studio allowed them to rectify the issues while maintaining the live energy of the original recording.

Alive! producer and engineer Eddie Kramer confirms that the shows’ production elements were largely to blame.

“Bombs going off, Gene spitting fire, rockets from Ace’s guitar. And imagine leaping about the stage in those super-high-heeled boots!” he tells Guitar Player today. “It’s no wonder things got a little bit out of whack.

“Kiss was a new band and the effort they put out in those shows was monumental, so we did a bunch of guitar and vocal overdubs at Electric Lady Studios,” he says, referring to the facility he helped Jimi Hendrix build in the heart of Greenwich Village.

By coincidence, Peter Frampton was at Electric Lady working on Frampton Comes Alive, his monumental live album that topped the charts in 1976. And as Frampton revealed to this writer in a 2005 interview, Frehley and Stanley made ample use of his gear while sweetening up Alive!

“We were mixing Frampton Comes Alive, and Kiss were next door doing the same thing for Alive!,” Frampton said. “But they kept on coming to us and asking if we got guitars, amps or basses, as they were doing some fixing on their live record.”

Among the guitars Frampton had with him was his famous mid-1950s Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty,” the iconic instrument featured on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive! and the same electric guitar he played on Humble Pie’s breakthrough album, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore. Frampton would dub the guitar Phenix after it survived a 1980 plane crash and was considered lost before he recovered it some 32 years later.

“They just kept on coming in and borrowing all sorts of different stuff,” Frampton confirms. “So my equipment is on that album — but not me!”

Kramer confirms Frampton’s account but doesn’t recall if any of his guitars made an appearance on Alive!

“I do remember Peter’s amps in Studio A other than the Marshall stacks that Ace and Paul had,” he says. “Aside from them doing lead vocals and some harmonies, that’s all the gear I can remember now, as it’s ‘only’ 50 years ago now.”

Although some critics have taken shots at Alive! over the years, given the studio work that was performed, Kramer has no regrets about the decision to improve upon the performances.

“After having heard all of the original shows and the rehearsals, they were remarkably good,” he affirms. “The essentials were there and well played, and we did whatever was needed to make that a great live album.

“In the end, it was the album that broke Kiss big time by going multi-Platinum and selling close to eight million copies.”

As for Frampton Comes Alive!, it also gave the guitarist his breakthrough and became the best-selling album of 1976 after spending 10 nonconsecutive weeks on the charts and producing three smash singles. Like Alive!, it has gone on to move eight million units, putting Frampton’s gear on two of the biggest-selling live albums of the 1970s.

Prior to etching out a solo career and morphing into one of the biggest stadium rockers of the ’70s, Peter Frampton had been a fully paid-up member of the English rock group Humble Pie. By 1970, the band had during the course of its relatively short existence, transitioned from a soulful bluesy infused combo into a much heavier- and darker-sounding outfit which would be showcased in its full glory on the group’s 1971 live outing, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore.

Frampton’s reputation as a hard-rocking guitarist was solidified on that album, in particular on its stand-out track, “I Don’t Need No Doctor.” Written by the team of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, with Jo Armstead — a former Ivette with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue — “I Don’t Need No Doctor” first achieved popularity after Ray Charles recorded and released a version in 1966.

But Humble Pie’s dynamic cover, performed live onstage, would forever secure it as a rock and roll classic. It would even go on to become a staple of Frampton’s solo live set for many years to come.

Remarkably, it all came into being out of a spontaneous soundcheck jam at Madison Square Garden in December 1970 as Humble Pie prepared their opening set for headliners Grand Funk Railroad.

“It was the first time I ever played Madison Square Garden, right before we were to do the Rockin' the Fillmore record,” Frampton recalled to this writer in 2005. “I just remember never ever having seen one of these places. And it was quite a large 22,000-seater venue at the time.

“We were doing the soundcheck, and as my amplifier was one of the first ones to be plugged in, I just started playing this heavy E chord so I could hear how long the reverberation was on it.”

As Frampton recalls, drummer Jerry Shirley happened to be sitting at his kit.

“Jerry began playing a rhythm as I started playing these three chords: E G and A,” he explains.

Lead singer and guitarist Steve Marriott was off in the seating area, standing by the mixing board. The music coming off the stage clearly had him excited.

“Steve came running toward the stage,” Frampton continues. “Then Greg [Ridley] starts playing along with me on bass, and Steve starts singing, ‘I Don't Need No Doctor.’

“So we rehearsed it then and arranged it, and did it that same night. And it just tore the place apart.

“And then we did it every night after that.”

For their May 1971 performance at New York City’s Fillmore East, Frampton plugged his 1954 Les Paul Custom electric guitar into a 100-watt Marshall head and 4x12 Marshall cabinet, paired with a 50-watt Marshall head into a 4x12 cabinet, turning the track into a powerful show-stopping anthem. Pie’s set was filled with blues rock and boogie rock tunes, but “I Don’t Need No Doctor” offered fans a glimpse into Frampton’s preference for heavy rock and what lay ahead for him in his solo years.

Shortly before Rockin’ the Fillmore’s November 1971 release of the live album, Frampton exited the group for a solo career where, in 1976, the phenomenal commercial success of Frampton Comes Alive propelled him to superstardom.

But he never forgot the thrill that came from Humble Pie’s spontaneous transformation of “I Don’t Need No Doctor.”

“That was one of the most exciting moments in my musical career,” he states. “Just the fact that it came out of nowhere!”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton continues to defy the odds by playing live and has now added a guest spot with Pearl Jam in Nashville to his growing list of 2025 performances.

When the "Show Me the Way" guitarist embarked on his 2019 farewell tour, he did so in light of his inclusion body myositis diagnosis, believing his playing days were numbered. The degenerative disease, which he has been battling against for 10 years now — six of which have been in public — progressively weakens muscles throughout the body. But since that run of dates came to a close, he's proved that, though his legs aren't what they used to be, his chops are as sharp as ever.

Speaking to Guitar Player in the wake of his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction last year, Frampton says he isn't sure if his body could take touring, and so 2025 is proving to be a year of guest appearances for the guitarist.

He’s already made a surprise appearance at the Martin booth during NAMM 2025 and has since taken on a Beatles classic with Grace Bowers and Trey Anastasio and, to make it a hat trick, he’s teamed up Seattle icons Pearl Jam, playing "Black" at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on May 8.

“This gentleman was someone we looked up to before the Ramones,” frontman Eddie Vedder had told the crowd before welcoming Frampton onto the stage. “Some of our first guitar heroes, [like] Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend, he was right up there.”

In particular, it seems his 1976 live LP, Frampton Comes Alive!, has resonated with the band.

“It was one of the reasons why we loved live records, and later we decided to release bootlegs because of his influence,” Vedder says.

“He’s such an incredible human being on top of it. It is our honor because at this point he’s become a good friend to the group we get to play with him tonight.”

Guitarist Mike McCready and drummer Matt Cameron — who is set for his second Hall of Fame induction when Soundgarden are honored later this year — featured on Frampton’s 2006 record, Fingerprints. They guested on a cover of “Black Hole Sun,” which saw Frampton’s signature guitar style handling Chris Cornell’s iconic vocals.

Holding Frampton’s presence in high regard, McCready sits back for the performance, letting the 75-year-old prove that age is just a number with crooning-but-biting licks played on a Les Paul through a clear-as-glass clean tone.

McCready opts for an all-white Fender Stratocaster for the spot, offering a yin and yang vibe between the guitars, while the song’s main melody floats around Frampton’s playing.

Discussing the future of his guitar-playing career with Guitar World in April '24, Frampton put his emphasis on making the most of the time he has, rather than counting down the days with a sense of dread and solemnity.

“Every note I play now is so much more important to me because I know one of the notes I play will be the last I play within my lifetime,” he said. “But what I have to do now is create new ways to play because I’m a fighter, and I’m not giving up.

“I have weakness in my fingers, but I have created different paths to get to the end point of what I want to play.”

The guitarist’s pioneering and resilient attitude saw him honored with the Spirit of Les Paul Award last year. He’s also spoken to Guitar Player about guitar lessons learned from George Harrison, which often ended with scribbling obscure tunings down on cigarette packets.

Grace Bowers' star continues to rise after the young, hot-shot blues player shared the stage for a guitar solo-stuffed rendition of a Beatles classic with Peter Frampton and Trey Anastasio.

The trio joined forces at the Love Rocks NYC benefit concert at The Beacon Theater on March 6, dishing out a sumptuous cut of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. It was a performance that saw Frampton fulfill a longstanding desire to play with Anastasio, and champion Bowers as “a wonderful wonderful talent”.

Nashville prodigy Bowers, 18, was a breakout performer in 2024, with Grace Bowers & the Hodge Podge's debut vintage-yet-contemporary album "Wine on Venus" garnishing praise from across the guitar community. Her talents have won over Devon Allman, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Susan Tedeschi amongst others, and now she can also count Peter Frampton as a fan.

“[I'm] a huge, huge fan of both of them,” Frampton had said of his two co-guitarists for the performance. Bowers, though, is at the center of his warming words.

“One is a lady that is going to be on your mind for the rest of the weekend because she is an incredible player, [and] one of the up-and-coming phenomenal players,” he continues.

Phish's Anastasio, he says, is a “gentleman that I've always wanted to meet and play with,” before referencing Phish's live album "Hampton Comes Alive", which is a very tongue-in-cheek nod to 1976's "Frampton Comes Alive!"

To say their 10-minute performance had plenty of guitar solos would feel like an understatement, but what the trio delivers is as tasteful as it comes; egos are left resolutely at the door as they weave their respective personalities into the song's tapestry.

Bowers employs her sidekick Murphy Labs Gibson SG, Anastasio his hollow-bodied Languedoc G2, and Frampton his triple humbucker "Phenix" Les Paul, with Bower's hugely soulful solo leaving her colleagues beaming, and earning raucous applause for the audience.

The young prodigy's rise hasn't been without its adversity, though. Speaking last year, Bowers explained how she is regularly underestimated.

“I get disrespected before I even play, she said. “People take one look at me, and immediately get a thought in their head of what I am, and they don’t take me as seriously as they should.”

She is in a sense, an old soul in a young body – which is compounded by the fact one of her prized SGs, a 1961 model, is 45 years her senior.

She cited players like Leslie West, Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, alongside contemporary talents Bruno Mars and Childish Gambino, when discussing the 10 albums that changed her life with Guitar Player, but it's those flavors of yesteryear that shine brightly through her playing.

Gear-wise, she usually runs her guitars through a cleanly dialed Fender Twin amp, letting her pedalboard – which she gave Guitar Player an impromptu tour of earlier this year – do much of the heavy lifting.

Meanwhile, Peter Frampton continues to play live as much as possible, despite battling with inclusion body myositis (IBM), which forces him to perform sat down.

Frampton made a surprise appearance at the Martin Guitars booth at NAMM 2025, where he stated: “I'm gonna keep going as long as my fingers… well... it's getting more difficult, I have to admit.

“The worst thing about playing for me is when I'm soloing I have to actually think about what I'm playing. I don't want to think; I want it just to be coming from my heart. That's how I always played.

The “Lucy” Les Paul with which the Beatles and Eric Clapton recorded their classic hit, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was famously “kidnapped” in 1973, and George Harrison went to extreme measures to get it back.

Long before he became known for hits like “Show Me the Way” and “Do You Feel Like We Do,” Peter Frampton was building his career as a guitarist in his native England. After finding success at age 16 in the U.K. rock band the Herd, he joined Steve Marriott in Humble Pie, which quickly established itself in England in the last years of the 1960s.

It was sometime in early spring 1970 that Frampton had a chance meeting with George Harrison that would lead to what he called “one of the highlights of my life.” Thanks to that introduction, Frampton — who previously revealed some of the lessons he learned from Marriott and Harrison — would go on to play acoustic guitar on All Things Must Pass, the former Beatle’s celebrated triple-disc magnum opus.

As Frampton explained to Reverb, their friendship began when he was invited to attend a recording session Harrsion was producing for Doris Troy, his latest signing to the Beatles’ Apple Records. Troy, who would go on to sing backup for Humble Pie as well as Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and countless acts, was known at the time for “Just One Look,” a 1963 hit she’d co-written under the name Doris Payne, with which the Hollies had a U.K. hit the following year.

As Frampton explained, he was having a drink in a London pub with his friend Terry Doran — who also happened to be Harrison’s assistant — as the session was going down around the corner at Trident Studios.

“Terry said, ‘Do you want to come and meet Harry?’ ” Frampton recalled. “I said, ‘Harry?’ He said, ‘No, no — it's George.’

“They had code names,” he said, laughing.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, uh — yes!' This would be my first Beatle meeting, you know?

Walking into the control room at Trident, Frampton immediately spied Harrison behind the console. “And it's sort of like an apparition, you know, when you see a Beatle. And he goes, ‘Hello Pete!’ And I literally looked behind me to see if Pete Townshend walked in.”

Harrison and Troy were cutting “Ain’t That Cute,” a song they’d co-written and which would be the lead track for her self-titled Apple debut.

“And George says, ‘Do you want to play?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Yes. Okay.’ And he hands me that red Les Paul — the storied Les Paul. And, of course, I had no idea what it was.”

It was, of course, Lucy, the red-finished 1957 Gibson Les Paul that Eric Clapton gifted to Harrison in 1968 and that he subsequently played on the White Album and Let It Be.

“So he shows me the chords and we’re starting to play, and I’m playing very quiet rhythm behind him,” Frampton’s says laughing. “You know, and not wishing to stand out or overstep my bounds.

“And he stopped, and he said, ‘No, I play rhythm, you play lead.’

“So that's when I ended up playing all the licks on this, which ended up being the single,” Frampton says.

Frampton couldn’t have met Harrison at a better time, given that the former Beatle was beginning to record All Things Must Pass, an album that featured an all-star cast of guest artists, including Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, members of Badfinger and many others. Harrison was clearly impressed by Frampton’s performance and manner at the Troy session, and just a few weeks afterward invited him to participate.

“He said, ‘I’m doing a solo album. I'd like you to come and play some acoustic with me,’” Frampton recalled.

It’s not clear which tracks Frampton performed on, and he has stated he can’t remember after so many years. He refers to playing on “about five or six of the more country tracks,” and it’s largely accepted that he played on “Isn’t It a Pity.” Part of Frampton’s confusion is down to producer Phil Spector, who requested numerous instrumental overdubs to achieve his signature wall of sound production. As Frampton told Reverb, Harrison requested his presence for many of these overdubs, which have blurred his memory.

“After we’d finished those sessions, George called me back up and said [imitating Harrison], ‘Guess what? Phil wants more acoustics!’ I said, ‘You're kidding me!’ He said [in Harrison’s voice], ‘No!’

“So we're sitting in front of the control room, there’s Phil Spector in there, and the two of us are just between takes, jamming, you know,” he recalled. “Probably one of the highlights of my life.”

Frampton, who is planning two 10-date tours of the U.S. this year, recently told attendees at Martin Guitar's NAMM 2025 booth about the time he performed Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" onstage with Harrison's pal Clapton. He said that, just like Harrison, Clapton insisted he play lead.

"It was one of the most exciting moments of my career," he said. "I've met Eric many times. I've spoken with him, but we've never ever played together. And, of course, I'm a huge fan."

This story was updated on January 27, 2025, with video from the event.

Martin Guitar’s press preview at the 2025 NAMM Show on January 22 got added excitement when Peter Frampton made a surprise appearance.

Looking healthy and leaning on a cane for assistance, Frampton appeared to cheers from the audience, who had gathered to learn about the famed American acoustic guitar makers’ 2025 guitar offerings, which include a model marking their three millionth serialized instrument.

Led in conversation by Martin CEO Thomas Ripsam, the guitarist regaled the audience with tales about his first Martin acoustic, his recording and touring plans, and performing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Eric Clapton at the 2019 Crossroads Guitar Festival. He also gave the crowd an update on his fight with Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative order, that he's been battling for the past 10 years.

Taking a seat, Frampton shared how he was first turned on to Martin guitars when he heard Neil Young and Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield. Soon after, probably in 1971, he bought his first Martin acoustic, a D-45, at Manny’s on 48th Street in New York.

“I had just left a band called Humble Pie," he said, "and I had $3,000 left. So I went to what was then called Manny's... And I used that D-45 for the whole of the Frampton’s Camel record — ‘Lines on My Face,’ all those songs,” he said, referring to his 1973 album that included his hit “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

Soon after, the guitar was stolen. “We went on tour and it got taken away from me by someone who preferred to have it himself,” he deadpanned

Frampton went without a Martin for several years. That changed when former Martin historian Dick Boak made him a surprise offer..

“It wasn’t until later, in the ’90s, when I came to the NAMM Show and Dick Boak welcomed me into the booth, and I told him the story,” Frampton explained. “And that’s when he said, ‘We don’t have a Peter Frampton model. How about we do one and call it the Frampton’s Camel?’

The result was Frampton’s own signature D-42. “And so I’ve got three of them,” he said. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful guitar,” Frampton said. “I played it on many, many sessions.”

After Frampton shared his story, Ripsam surprised him with the gift of another Frampton's Camel D-28.

While IBM has affected his ability to play guitar, Frampton has continued to record and tour as his health allows. Speaking with Guitar Player last October upon his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, he revealed that he’s working on an album of new original songs.

At NAMM, he told the Martin crowd the record is still on track and said he’s been in the studio as of late. The news was applauded by fans. After all, Frampton hasn’t released an album of all-original material since Thank You Mr. Churchill in 2010. His last release was 2021's Frampton Forgets the Words.

“I keep saying, ‘Oh, that's the last one, that's the last one,’” he said. “And then, of course, I go, ‘Can we do it again?’ So we’ll call this one Let’s Do It Again."

The guitarist also announced two 10-date tours for 2025: one beginning the March 31, and another in June.

“I'm gonna keep going as long as my fingers… well — you know,” he said, as the audience cheered.

“And it's getting more difficult, I have to admit,” he said. “But the worst thing about playing for me is when I'm soloing I have to actually think about what I'm playing. I don't want to think; I want it just to be coming from my heart. That's how I always played. And now I do have to think a little bit, because I’ll be in the middle of the passage and I'll say, ‘That finger is not going to get there in time!’ So I do a regroup and I use one finger for many notes that I used to use three fingers for.”

He recalled the experience of Django Reinhardt, who lost the use of his left-hand ring and pinkie fingers in a caravan fire and was forced to rework his technique using his index and middle fingers.

“That’s what I’m doing,” Frampton said, “because I enjoy music so much. It sounds weird: You're losing the power to play. Yeah, but I'm working out — and enjoying working out — a different way of playing, so that I can keep playing.

“People say, ‘Aren’t you depressed?’ You know, you have to accept the things you cannot change. I learned that in AA, and in many other places.

“I will keep doing music for the rest of my life,” he said as the audience applauded. “What I have is not life-threatening, thank God, but it's life-changing, and I'm going with the flow.”

At the request of Martin CEO, Frampton spoke of performing George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2019 Crossroads Guitar Festival with Eric Clapton, who played the uncredited lead guitar on the Beatles’ 1968 recording. Frampton — who has previously spoken to Guitar Player about Harrison’s influence on his playing — told the back story to that performance and how he and Clapton didn't meet until they were both onstage.

“He has a neurological thing, and sometimes his legs work and sometimes they don’t,” Frampton explained. Clapton has suffered for years from peripheral neuropathy, a nerve disease that can cause pain, numbness and weakness in the hands and feet, as well as make balancing difficult. “He was over the other side of the stadium in a dressing room. And I had broken two toes that morning, because I’d fallen."

Under the circumstances, neither guitarist was able to visit the other.

“So my road manager, Donnie Lewis, he took my phone to Eric, and we FaceTimed in the building," Frampton continued, laughing.

“I said, ‘Do you want to play your solo?’ and he said, ‘No, no, you play it.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to do anything in the verses?’ I said, no, so he said, “I’ll do that then.

“But we were just laughing about the whole situation, that we couldn't get to each other.

“And when we did meet onstage, it was one of the most exciting moments of my career. I've met Eric many times. I've spoken with him, but we've never ever played together. And, of course, I'm a huge fan.

“And so to actually look at him and listen to him — I'm like, Oh my God, that's Eric Clapton! It was wild.”

As he neared the end of recording his first solo album, Hiding in Plain Sight, Chris Herin was approached by the Laser's Edge Records owner Ken Golden with a question.

"He said, 'You've got all these guitar players on here. Did you do any of your own soloing?' " the Michigan-based Herin recalls with a laugh. "I said, ‘Well, you bring up a good point.' I didn't end up doing a whole lot of soloing on this. I'm mostly there as a songwriter, and I play almost all of the rhythm guitars and different fills and embellishments.

"I guess you could say I got a bit carried away bringing all the guitar players for all the lead work."

But it's an impressive corps Herin assembled for the 11-song set — one that might lead some to wonder how this guy who has limited (but not unsubstantial) stature get all these people to play on his album.

Hiding in Plain Sight — co-produced by Herin and Terry Brown (Rush, Cutting Crew, Fates Warning) — features contributions by the likes of Peter Frampton, Rush's Alex Lifeson, Jethro Tull alumnus Martin Barre, Kim Mitchell and Crown Lands' Kevin Comeau. In all more than 30 musicians are part of the project, including a cadre of vocalists ("I'm not much of a singer," Herin confesses) and other instrumentalists.

"I'm certainly one of the luckiest guys when it comes to being able to enlist so many fabulous musicians — not just the marquee-value guys but some of the other guitarists and drummers who aren't elevated into the stratosphere end of the general public's awareness," says Herin.

Herin isn't exactly unknown. He's the cofounder of the Detroit prog quartet Tiles, a group that's been in existence since 1993 and is one of the first bands signed to Germany's InsideOut Music. Tiles earned international acclaim with its six studio albums but went on hiatus during 2018 after singer Paul Rarick retired, giving Herin an opening to do something on his own.

"Over the years I've demoed songs with Terry as they cropped up," he says, "and I wanted to memorialize them so they didn't slip through my fingers. These songs had been developed up to a certain point with guitar parts, bass parts, some placeholder drum patterns, and I could kind of hum the melody lines. I thought, Well, jeez, these songs are fairly well developed, and I liked them all. So I thought, Let's finish these off and put them out to the public."

Fans of Tiles — and of Discipline, another Detroit band Herin works with — might be surprised by the results. While prog and what he calls "melodic rock songs" are the core of Hiding in Plain Sight, the material stretches in a few different directions, whether it's the straightforward mainstream rock of "The Heart of You" (which features Frampton), the elegiac madrigal of "Living in the Night" or the jazzy touches of the album-closing "White Dandelion."

"I didn't feel like I needed to stick really close to what I had written with Tiles," explains Herin, who played primarily his 1990 Paul Reed Smith with the occasional Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster and Gibson ES-335 for "a nice blend of tonality." He used a Mesa/Boogie 2/Ninety power amp with a Boogie TriAxis preamp and a John Petrucci signature head, as well as a Mesa TA15 with an open-back cabinet when he was working at Brown's studio in northern Ontario.

"I think it was just natural the way the songs came out," Herin continues. "I looked at the variation in the compositions as a good thing, and hopefully people will like that variety."

The guests, meanwhile, came from a combination of "my associations and Terry's connections," according to Herin, and the two "recruited people and kind of aligned them with the style of songs and what we felt would be suitable for their contribution." Lifeson says Brown contacted him during April 2019 and delivered his work by September of that year. "Chris is a well-rounded player, and his songwriting has a nice balance of instrumental and vocal pace that accommodates atmospheric layers of instrumentation," Lifeson says. "It was a pleasure for me to add to his work."

And Herin was happy to showcase what he felt was some different kind of playing from Lifeson on "Second Ending."

"He's not playing a solo and he's not playing power chords," Herin notes. "He's doing acoustic guitars and a whole tapestry of atmospheric soundscapes, and they sound really, remarkably beautiful."

For his part, Lifeson explains that, "I prefer to keep a relatively low profile when I'm guesting on another artist's work and look to provide a fuller background to their arrangement. I concentrated on the choruses and layered electric and acoustic guitars with an ambient approach." Herin says he's planning to create some alternate mixes "that focus on Alex's soundscapes and texture and will be a different experience to the entire band approach."

Brown also reached out to Frampton, who, like many of the album's contributors was struck by Herin's lyrics drawn from his late father's battle with Alzheimer's disease during the 2000s. "The unfortunate thing is almost everybody who participated had some close family member that has suffered from dementia or Alzheimer's," says Herin, who will donate some proceeds from Hiding in Plain Sight's sales to Alzheimer's charities. But having the newly minted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee onboard for "The Heart of You" was a particular thrill, he adds.

"I've been a Peter Frampton fan for 40-plus years, so it was just so fun to have him participate," Herin says. "It's a pretty catchy pop-rock song, and he's got such an identifiable melodic sense, besides his touch and phrasing. He provided a little lead guitar in the intro and then the re-intro, and of course the solo. We left him a lot of space to stretch out on the ride out of the song, too.

"It was just so fun to hear his track all by itself and the effects he used. For a guy that's been around for a long time it was so great to see just how enthused he was in getting the sound he wanted, the effects he used, the microphone and the setting. He and Terry went back and forth and talked about the technicalities of that approach, which was pretty fascinating."

Barre, meanwhile, was full of surprises for "The Darkest Hour," a track that reunited him with longtime Tull drummer Doane Perry for the first time in more than a dozen years.

"Doane had already done his drum parts, so Martin was immediately kind of intrigued," Herin says. "I just asked if he would do a guitar solo in the middle of the song...and when we got it back from Martin he did the guitar solo but also did a bunch of great mandolin, additional electric rhythm guitars and, to our surprise, all of a sudden there's flute parts!” In addition to his guitar talents, Barre is an able flutist, saxophonist and mandolin player. “He clearly kept his flute skills up all these years.

"The one thing I can say about Martin, besides the uniqueness of his style, is he is playing just jumps right out at you. It has that presence...and it just took the song and elevated it with the energy that he brings through his playing."

For his part, Barre says that, "I love that I was given free rein on the track and gave it the full MB treatment — mandolin, flutes, floating guitar chords and a melodic solo. Essentially it's a great song, and I thought, Don't fuck it up!"

Herin has several songs he worked on for Hiding in Plain Sight but didn't include on the album, and he won't rule out the possibility of another solo effort. But his next move is "getting the Tiles machine back together" with drummer Mark Evans and bassist Jeff Whittle. Two epic-length tracks have been written so far, Herin says, and he doesn't expect it to be long before the proverbial LP's worth of tunes will be in hand.

"As this project was wrapping up I started to feel the energy to get back to writing, so I've got this huge backlog of ideas that just come popping out of your head," says Herin, joking that since he's "on the older end of the spectrum" he still uses a hand-held cassette recorder capture those. "We do need to take a different approach to the vocal chair; maybe now that I've seen what it takes to bring in guests that might be a new and viable approach that never used to be there, so there are some exciting possibilities."

Peter Frampton declined an invitation to sit down as he enters a backstage interview area at Cleveland's Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Saturday, October 19, shortly after his emotionally charged induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"I might not get up," he quipped.

That, of course is due to the Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative order, that he's been battling for the past 10 years and made public about six years ago. But it was also because Frampton was still floating on air after his long-awaited (and overdue) Rock Hall honor on Saturday. It included a robust induction speech from Roger Daltrey — the two have been friends since Frampton's band the Herd opened for the Who on its first tour during the mid ’60s — and a truncated but chops-filled rendition of "Do You Feel Like We Do" performed with another pal, Keith Urban.

"It's just a huge honor getting to play with him, period — and that song, of all songs," Urban said afterward. "He's got such a control over sensitivity and dynamics and intent. He makes it look easy, but it's really hard to do what he does."

Frampton, who was accompanied by all of his children at the ceremony, found the Rock Hall experience — including an appearance at the new inductees' plaque dedication on Friday — "totally overwhelming for me, because I'm a person of the moment. When the nominations have come out over the years, or the inductees, I’d…” Frampton grumbles. “But I never really thought about it. I figured if it's not to be it's not to be. So now that it's a reality, it's almost more overwhelming than I thought it was going to be. So, yeah, it's a big deal."

That, Frampton added, was hammered home during rehearsals, when he turned around at one point and saw "this 60-foot photo" of himself on a screen behind the stage. "I said, 'Wow, look at that. Is that his son?!' " he says with a laugh.

This year's class of inductees also included some of Frampton's own influences, including late British blues men John Mayall and Alexis Korner, as well as his longtime friend Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, whose band was also inducted this year. "I am so thrilled Foreigner are getting in as the same time as me, because we do have so many connections,” Frampton says. That includes Rick Wills, the longtime Foreigner bassist who played on Frampton's first three solo albums and co-wrote "Do You Feel Like We Do."

"I saw Rick earlier," Frampton says. "He said, 'I'm only here because of you.' I said, 'I know.' [laughs] He said, 'No, you brought me to America.' I said, 'That's right.' I didn't even think about it. It's wonderful he's here, too."

With his past celebrated, however, Frampton is eyeballing a busy future. That includes a documentary that's being directed by his keyboardist and video partner Rob Arthur, who spent part of the Rock Hall festivities filming interviews — including Daltrey. "Ringo's in it," Frampton reports. "Sheryl's [Crow] in it. Herb Alpert just did an interview; he's such a dear friend, so I'm thrilled he's in it. We've got Heart's Nancy Wilson, Kate Hudson from Almost Famous and [former Rolling Stone bassist] Billy Wyman of course. There’s a lot of really good people in it." Arthur said he had a chunk of the film already edited and hopes to have it out during 2025.

Meanwhile, Frampton is also working on a new album, the followup to 2021's Frampton Forgets the Words and his first of all-original material since Thank You Mr. Churchill in 2010.

"I've got quite a few songs now," he reports, "so I think after Christmas it's time to take it into my big studio. I've got this wonderful studio in Nashville that everyone loves now — and I have to book it to get in now 'cause everyone wants to use it, which is great. There might be a couple of instrumentals on there, but basically the whole thing is new songs." He does not want fans holding their breath for its release, however.

"It'll probably take me awhile to actually finish it, 'cause I'm such a perfectionist — but aren't we all?" he says.

Also potentially on tap for next year are more performances, which Frampton continues to do despite the IBM, though nowadays he enters and exits the stage using a cane and plays sitting down. The IBM "has affected my hands," he acknowledges, "but I still enjoy playing for people, so why am I gonna sit home when I'm still able to play. The reason I was doing the Finale tour was that I didn't want to go out and tour if I wasn't at the top of my game, but I think I'm still playing in top form.

"I didn't think I was going to enjoying playing sitting down, but I can sling the guitar to my right side, kinda like I'm standing but I'm sitting. It's not the ultimate for me but I've learned how to do it and feel a little like I did when I was standing up."

Frampton, who did a short Positively Thankful Tour during September, says "there's talk of going out in the spring for one-more go 'round, I'm hoping," but he acknowledges that he's in a proverbial day-by-day situation with those kinds of decisions. "People say, 'Well, do you think you'll be able to go out for 10 days' in whenever it is. I'm like, 'I can't tell you. I just have to pick up a guitar and tell you, 'It looks good right now.' So I take it as it comes, but I want to go out and play for as long as I'm able."

Peter Frampton said that he felt “validated” as a musician after his Fingerprints album won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Album in 2007 – a sentiment that some might find surprising.

After all, Frampton had achieved fame with Herd at 16, co-founded Humble Pie with Steve Marriott two years later (recording five albums, including the legendary Performance Rockin’ the Fillmore), recorded with luminaries such as Bill Wyman and George Harrison, and released the astronomically successful Frampton Comes Alive! in 1976. But Frampton had come to feel that after appearing shirtless on the cover of Rolling Stone, and as Billy Shears in the ill-fated film Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, attention had been diverted away from his abilities as a serious guitarist and songwriter.

Reinvigorated by his Grammy win, Frampton chose to follow Fingerprints with the hard-rocking Thank You Mr. Churchill, a highly personal album replete with strong songwriting, imaginative riffs and solos, and some of his best guitar tones ever.

“I wanted to reintroduce my singing voice on this one and do something completely different than Fingerprints, even though I did maintain a connection by including two instrumentals,” explains Frampton. “That said, I never really sit down to write anything in a specific direction. Whether I’m writing alone or with others, what happens just happens, and then at some point in the process I get a sense of what an album is going to be as a whole.”

There are lots of outstanding tones on the new record, particularly huge crunch and distortion sounds. Did you have a basic setup or did it vary from song to song?

“It varied, but I got most of the sounds – especially the lead sounds – with one of two Marshall amps. I used a ’70s Marshall that was modified by Jose Arredondo, the guy who modified Eddie Van Halen’s amps, and a 1962 JTM-45, which I called ‘the million-dollar Marshall’ when I bought it, and now its worth even more [laughs]. I often just played straight through the amps, though sometimes I boosted the gain with either my Klon Centaur or Fulltone OCD pedals. I experimented with lots of different pedals this time.”

What are a few examples?

“I had never used a DigiTech Whammy before – I’m a late bloomer – and I love that pedal. I also really like the stuttering sound that Tom Morello gets by flicking the pickup selector switch on his guitar, and I used a Gig-FX Chopper to get a similar effect on Asleep at the Wheel.”

Is that the Whammy on the solo on Solution?

“No, that’s actually a Foxx Tone Machine. I have a couple of the real old ones, but that was a new one they gave me because they know that I’m a Foxx Tone guy. There’s nothing like that effect. I did use the Whammy to add a high octave to the solo tone on I Want It Back, however, though it doesn’t stick out as much as with the Foxx. It added great top without being too treble-y, and a bit more ferociousness. I was going for sounds that were a little more angular, ugly, and ferocious on this album.”

Suite Liberté begins with a sort of Hank Marvin by way of Jeff Beck sound and feel. Was that intentional?

“Well, the Hank Marvin part was very intentional, because having played with him on Fingerprints and with the Shadows, I had tried his Strat – or rather I was allowed to play it [laughs] – and I found out how to go about getting one.

“I started playing as a kid because of Hank, and I’ve always wanted a guitar just like his. Mark Kendrick at the Fender Custom Shop in California made me a Hank Marvin model, and then Mark Pressling in the Fender Custom Shop in England, who tailors guitars to Hank’s specifications, worked on the neck.

“There’s also the VML Easy-Mute tremolo unit made in England by Ian St. John-White, on which the bar is at a 90-degree angle so that you can mute the strings and hold the bar at the same time, which I guess is something that Hank wanted. Then, on the same day that the guitar arrived, I also got the Alesis Echoes From the Past effects unit, which has echo presets named after Shadows songs.

“I plugged the guitar and the Alesis into a ’59 Fender Deluxe and spontaneously recorded what became the intro to Suite Liberté – so it was absolutely inspired by Hank Marvin. And when you’re playing a Strat you obviously think of Jeff, as well, and the combination of those two is pretty powerful stuff.”

You transition out of that section using a fat, bluesy tone. What’s happening there?

“That’s my Gibson 1960 Les Paul reissue aged by Tom Murphy. I plugged it straight into the JTM-45 and went for a Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton sort of tone. I came pretty close, except that I added a little more room ambience to get that everybody-playing-around-one-microphone old-school blues sound.”

There’s a sort of manic, maniacal acoustic groove thing happening on Restraint. Was that played in an altered tuning?

“The first and sixth strings were tuned down to D, which enabled me to play mostly normal fingerings while at the same time creating an ominous dissonance that lent itself to the theme of the song, namely the greedy pigs on Wall Street.”

The huge tones you got on Performance Rockin’ the Fillmore came from plugging a Les Paul into a Marshall though, right?

“That was it. The only trick I used was that I would plug into the high-gain input [input 1] of the second channel – the bassier one – and then patch the other input from that channel to the high-gain input of the first, or more trebly, channel. I’d just bring in a little of the brighter tone by turning that channel up to about one quarter, while adjusting the tone controls for the second channel. I believe that’s the opposite of how most people did it.”

Speaking of Humble Pie, what was the most significant thing you took away from your years playing with Steve Marriott?

“The riff! Steve was the riffmeister. He taught me a lot about how you attack a note or a chord – he was very precise – and also about how long to hold each note or chord and the space that you leave in between them. Those things are as important as the notes and chords themselves.

“Steve was also a really good orchestrator of big guitar riffs. I would write big riffs, too, based on what he had taught me, and then we would combine them into these enormous arrangements. And although Steve was very blues oriented, he also had a great melodic sense. Like on the track Black Dog, where he came up with a really beautiful melody that I just harmonized with. He was a much broader musician and writer and singer than I think he even knew himself.”

You also worked with George Harrison. In what ways did his guitar playing influence what you do?

“I definitely stole a couple of tunings from him [laughs]. He used to have acoustic guitars all over his house that were tuned in various ways and I’d pick them up and say, ‘What the hell is this?’ and then get out my cigarette pack and write down the tuning. I hadn’t really experimented with alternative tunings before that, and he definitely pushed me in that direction. And obviously his slide playing influenced me. The lead riff on Something’s Happening is sort of Harrisonesque.”

Do you remember any of those tunings you wrote on cigarette packs?

“The tuning that I remember the most is one that I used myself on Wind of Change. The low E and A strings drop down to D, the fourth string remains unchanged, the third string goes up to A, the second string up to D, and the first string up to F#, so there’s a D triad on top and three Ds on the bottom. It’s a very strange tuning, but oh my God, it sounds huge.”

Django Reinhardt was a big influence on you early on, and you recorded a gypsy jazz-style tune with John Jorgenson on your last album. How would you say your interest in Django is reflected in your playing?

“The piece I recorded with John, Memories of Our Fathers, is clearly in that style, but I think the way that Django used diminished runs, for example, is something that is visited on the current album as well as when I play live.

“Listening to Django all the time has also influenced the way that I attack notes, which is a hugely important part of the sound. And Django was an incredibly melodic player who could obviously play a string of notes from one end of the fretboard to the other in a half second, but also knock you out just by playing a single note across six chord changes. In other words, he didn’t play fast all the time just because he could.”

• This interview with Peter Frampton was originally published in the July 2010 issue of Guitar Player.

Electric guitar hero Peter Frampton will be bestowed with the Les Paul Spirt Award at a ceremony at the Gibson Garage Nashville on June 9. 

The accolade, given out by the Les Paul Foundation in partnership with Gibson Gives – the company's philanthropic division – is given in recognition to those who share the life, spirit, and legacy of the late Les Paul. 

The Baby, I Love Your Way guitarist has been championed for “personifying the spirit of excellence through musicianship and industry recognition,” and joins a list of previous recipients that includes Nile Rodgers, The Edge, and Bob Weir.

The private event, which will take place on what would be Les Paul’s 109th birthday, also marks the third anniversary of the Gibson Garage in Nashville and comes one month after it was announced that Frampton would be inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

A grant from the Foundation will also be made in Frampton’s name to a charity of his choice.

Michael Braunstein, Executive Director of The Les Paul Foundation, says he “cannot think of anyone more fitting to be honored with this year’s Les Paul Spirit Award than Peter Frampton.

“Not only is he an extraordinary talent who has given us an amazing array of extraordinary music, but he is an innovator who understands music, technologies, and the spirit of Les Paul.

“If Les were still alive today, I have absolutely no doubt that he and Peter would be experimenting together at Les’ house. I am personally thrilled to be able to present Peter with this award because I know he exemplifies everything Les was about and wanted to accomplish.”

Frampton, who has 18 studio albums to his name from a career extending over half a century, has continually embraced innovation and technology, most notably bringing the talk box to popularity with huge hit singles like Do You Feel Like We Do and Show Me the Way.

His 1976 live album, Frampton Comes Alive!, has long been considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. It, like many of his shows, concluded with a performance of Do You Feel Like We Do, a track that Frampton told Guitar Player was “the ultimate capper to a concert.”

Away from the legacy of his discography, Frampton’s playing has inspired generations of guitarists, including Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora, who used the talk box to write the band's mid-'80s mega-hit, Livin’ On A Prayer. 

The guitarist let Guitar Player inside his sizable gear vault back in 2021, having become a Gibson signature artist with his Phenix Les Paul model, which was a wider reissue of the ultra-limited-edition 2015 replica of Frampton's iconic, triple-humbucker Black Beauty. 

In a further nod to Les Paul’s legacy, the physical award is hand-carved from acoustic boards built by the luthier, which he used in his home studio. This means that no two awards are the same, with Frampton set to add the award to a growing collection that includes a Grammy win for his 2006 album, Fingerprints. 

When Peter Frampton co-founded Humble Pie in 1969, he was already regarded as one of England’s hottest guitarists, but his songwriting skills hadn’t yet blossomed. He contributed a number of strong cuts to the four studio albums he recorded with the band during his brief, two-year tenure, but it wasn’t until he turned solo and began issuing his own albums, starting with 1972’s Winds of Change, that his compositional chops began to equal his skills as an instrumentalist.

“I can’t say I always enjoy the process of writing,” he says. “I do like coming up with bits – a riff or a chord pattern. Sometimes a title comes to me that sparks something. But putting a song together and actually finishing it can be quite painful, especially when it comes to writing lyrics. That can take a while. It isn’t until I’ve got the whole thing down and I’ve got a little demo version of a song that I can feel enjoyment.”

In 1976, Frampton released his monster-selling concert recording, Frampton Comes Alive!. The album was something of an unofficial greatest-hits collection, containing the tastiest gems from his previous solo albums, among them Show Me the Way, Baby, I Love Your Way, Lines on My Face, and Do You Feel Like We Do. 

Although the two-disc set spent 10 weeks atop the U.S. Billboard 200 albums chart, none of its singles hit number one. At the height of his fame in 1977, Frampton came close to that mark when the title track from his studio album I’m in You reached number two on Billboard’s Hot 100.

“Everybody thought I’m in You would hit number one because the live album was enormous,” the guitarist tells Guitar Player. “It was the lead single from I’m in You, which certainly isn’t my favorite album or anywhere near my best, but it’s a great song and I thought it deserved to be a hit. 

“The truth is,” he continues, “I never thought about chart positions and things like that. After I left Humble Pie in 1971, I didn’t give any thought to having hits. That just wasn’t what I concentrated on. I was more concerned with being inspired, and writing good songs and making sure they were recorded right. My attitude was, ‘Do I like the song?’ It always came down to that.”

After announcing that he was suffering from a progressive muscle disorder called IBM (inclusion body myositis), Frampton embarked on a 2019 “farewell tour,” which fortunately didn’t live up to its billing. Last year, he came out of retirement and hit the road on his Never Say Never tour, which he’s extended into this year. 

Meanwhile, he’s combing through demos and planning a studio album of all-new material, but as he jokes, “I’ll probably be 86 by the time it comes out, because I’m such a perfectionist.”

Here, he shares the stories behind five key tracks from his storied career.

1. Stone Cold Fever – Humble Pie (Rock On, 1971)

“I came up with the opening riff the night before a rehearsal. I played around with it on an acoustic – it sounded kind of Zeppelin-esque. We were all influenced by them. In fact, if we were recording at Olympic Studios, we would often hear Zeppelin. To get to the mix room, we’d have to walk through the control room of Studio A. I’d see Jimmy Page sitting there, overdubbing in darkness.

“Anyway, I recorded the riff on a Sony recorder and I brought it in to play for the guys. We were rehearsing at this place in the country – Magdalene Laver Village Hall. The second Steve Marriott heard the riff, he jumped on it right away. He loved it. 

“We started arranging the song pretty quickly. I remember we would go into the kitchen to have a cup of tea or light up a joint – ’course, I wasn’t smoking then. Quite often we’d all come up with our words for verses, but for this song Steve wrote the whole thing. He did all the vocals.

“We had the song down before we started recording. It was a very special session for me, actually, because I played a very long solo at the end – it goes into a jazzy, almost freeform kind of thing. I tracked it live with the band, and then we went in the control room to listen back. I didn’t say anything to the band, but as I heard my solo I got this feeling in my stomach, and I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m copying anybody else anymore. I really believe this is me for the first time.’”

2. Lines On My Face – Peter Frampton (Frampton's Camel, 1973)

“My marriage was breaking up. It was a very sad time, and basically the whole Frampton’s Camel record is about lost love and wanting someone back who doesn’t want you. 

“I wrote the music to Lines on My Face in Manhattan. I was staying at my manager’s place on Park Avenue. I had a Martin D-45 that I bought at Manny’s, and with that I wrote the music and melodies. But I needed a quiet place to write the lyrics, so a good friend of mine, Frank Carillo, a wonderful guitar player and singer, said I could stay at his place on Long Island. Frank’s mom kicked his brother out of his room so I didn’t have to sleep on the couch. I sat on the bed and wrote the lyrics.

“Before we started recording, my drummer exploded, as usual, so [engineer/co-producer] Eddie Kramer gave me names of the best session guys in New York City. The only one who answered his phone was John Siomos, who turned out to be one of the best and most unique drummers I’ve worked with. Lines on My Face was the first song we did. It was me, Frank Carillo, Rick Wills on bass, Mick Gallagher on keys, and John on drums. Frank played a D-35 and I had my D-45.

“For the electric parts, I used my ’54 Les Paul – the one everybody knows as the Phenix. I remember we spent a whole day getting sounds, and Eddie Kramer was getting ready to leave. I told him I wanted to cut the solo, and he said we only had 25 minutes left. I said, ‘It won’t take long,’ even though I didn’t have anything worked out, which I never do. I never work out my solos in advance. What you hear on the record is one take.”

3. Show Me The Way – Peter Frampton (Frampton, 1975)

“I had three weeks to write before we started the album, so I took my Les Paul and an Epiphone acoustic and I went to the Bahamas, where I stayed at Steve Marriott’s cottage on the beach. I ran into Alvin Lee and his wife, and we spent two weeks hanging out and having way too much fun. Thank God I had eight days left after they left. On my first day to myself, I picked up the Epiphone, tuned it to open G, and within 20 minutes I had most of the music and melodies to Show Me the Way.

“I put the guitar down and said, ‘I’ve got to write.’ I started singing ‘show me the way.’ The words just came out – I was in the moment. As I’m doing this, I’m thinking, ‘What am I trying to say?’ But the words came easily and they fit, so I kept going. I put down what I had on my Sony CF-550A [boom box]. It felt pretty good.

“The band recording went smoothly. We did it as a three-piece: me, John and my old cohort from the Herd – Andrew Brown, on bass. This is the first time I used a talk box in the studio. I had been using one live since ’73, but I never recorded with it. Nobody was around except Chris Kimsey, the engineer, so we experimented with it and we loved it. It’s a very clean talk-box sound compared to the way it sounds on the live record. On Frampton Comes Alive!, we were a four-piece, so everything sounded bigger.

“Show Me the Way got tons of play on KSAN in San Francisco. That station jumped on the Frampton album – it was Frampton all the time. That’s why we recorded the live album at Winterland. San Francisco was our town. They were way ahead of Detroit and New York.”

4. Breaking All The Rules – Peter Frampton (Breaking All The Rules, 1981)

“I was going through old tapes of jams because I wanted to do a real rock and roll–type track. I found this jam of me and John Siomos and thought it sounded great. It was like we were doing the Stones. As I listened, I thought, ‘No, it’s more than that.’ John was just kicking ass. The riff was pretty powerful, so I finished up the music, and there it was.

“I was working with David Kershenbaum as my co-producer, and we talked about making a very live-sounding rock record. We recorded at a sound stage on the A&M lot. It was a blast cutting tracks. I had John Regan on bass, Arthur Stead on keys, and I had half of Toto: Steve Lukather on guitar and Jeff Porcaro on bass. We played like a real live band, and every time we did the song it kept getting better and better. Playing with Luke was scary. [laughs] He’s such a lovely, crazy man.

“I had lost my Les Paul by this time, so I used one of the very first Roland synth guitars. Actually, Luke had one too, so he showed me what it could do and what you could do with it. I didn’t demo the solo, as usual. It was all cut live, very spontaneous.

“It’s a pretty vicious song, and we felt like we needed strong lyrics, so I sent a cassette to Keith Reid. He was such a brilliant lyricist. We spoke on the phone and I told him what I was looking for, and he sent me back more than enough lyrics for a song – it was like a book. David Kershenbaum and I went through it and picked out all the lines that fit best. It was great. To think Keith and I did it all by mail. We didn’t have Zoom then!”

5. Dreamland – Peter Frampton (Frampton Forgets The Words, 2021)

“I watched a documentary on Jaco Pastorius and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t done a ‘thesis’ on him before; that’s what I call it when I go deep into somebody’s playing. I started to listen to everything he did, and I became so enamored of him. Sure, he could play fast, but his sense of melody was something else.

“I called my keyboard player and band leader, Rob Arthur, and I said we had to do Jaco’s Dreamland. We got together and put down a click while I played Jaco’s parts on guitar. I inhabited the melody, which I love to do. I didn’t even have to think about it. After we finished it, we did the blues album [2019’s All Blues], so once that was done I told Rob that we needed to revisit Dreamland. 

“We put the band on the track, but I didn’t change anything about my guitar. What you hear on the record is what I did on day one. I used my ’60 ’Burst on the neck pickup.

“I’ve spoken to Jaco’s son and brother, so I feel like I know the family a bit now. When I finished the album, I sent it to Andrew Brown. He’s been my buddy since I was 16, and he’s played in my band. After he listened to the album, he emailed me and wrote one word: Dreamland. It meant a lot to me that someone I respect so much would pick that one song.” 

• For live dates and goings-on in Frampton's world, visit the guitarist's website.

This interview originally appeared in the January 1974 issue of Guitar Player.

Since the age of 12, Peter Frampton, has been performing professionally. At 15, the British guitarist worked clubs such as the Flamingo on London’s Wardour Street, the site of the birth of nearly every major British rock group from the Rolling Stones to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Within a year, Frampton became lead guitarist with the Herd, who produced two Top 10 singles during the time he toured Europe with them, before forming the even more successful Humble Pie with Steve Marriott.

Breaking off on his own in the fall of 1971, Frampton, on his Wind of Change album, proved his musical independence by playing all instruments, and was additionally backed by an impressive lineup of studio and solo stars including Billy Preston, Ringo Starr, and Klaus Voormann. As a session man himself, Frampton has demonstrated his versatility in work with musicians as diverse as Rory Gallagher and Tim Hardin, Albert Lee, and Alvin Lee, not to mention country-western rocker Jerry Lee Lewis. 

Progressing from his early jazz and pop influences (ranging from Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery to Eddie Cochran and Cream) Peter Frampton has created a style of his own that combines both. His most recent album is Frampton’s Camel, which is also the name of his most recent group.

Do you come from a musical family?

“Yes. My grandmother was very musical. She used to appear playing a ukulele. My grandfather was a choir boy and into keyboards in one of the big abbeys in London. And, at the time of Django Reinhardt, my father played guitar in the college dance band. He showed me the C and G chords on this ukulele I got from my grandmother when I was about seven. That was it for about a year. I didn’t want to learn. But suddenly I wanted him to show me some more chords. So he got it down again.“

When did you finally get your own guitar?

“For Christmas, when I was eight. Four pounds ten it was – about 12 dollars. It was from an army and navy surplus store, just an ordinary steel-string guitar – very, very cheap, but really good for the time. I really doctored it and got the action down low. For the following birthday I got a pickup and, with the help of my father, put in a volume and tone control.“

What about your first performance?

“That would have been when I was in the Cub Scouts, and they had a 'gang' show. I appeared solo in that. I did Buddy Holly’s 'Peggy Sue' and a Cliff Richards number. Later, my father produced this end-of-term concert at Bromley Technical High School, where he’s an art teacher. He’s got half the school, everything from photography to typography to pottery to technical drawing to history of architecture. Anyway, he produced this concert, and that was the first time I appeared in a group. 

“The raven was the school mascot, and so it was the natural thing to call ourselves the Little Ravens [laughs]. Stupid, really. I used the doctored guitar for that one. I wish I still had it. I sold it so that I could afford my next guitar, a Hofner Club 60 Deluxe shaped like a Les Paul.“

How did you amplify it?

“Through our radio, one of those big old ones which had like a ten-inch speaker. I’ve still got that one, the Hofner. I think I’m going to be using it for steel [bottlenecking]. You’ve got to have a guitar that’s got a high action, so that it doesn’t buzz, and the Hofner has got the high action [laughs]. I’m just getting into steel. I’ve used it on record with Tim Hardin [Painted Head]. It was alien to me, but I really enjoyed it. Ever since then I’ve been trying to improve.“

What sort of slide have you been using?

“Bought metal, but I want to get a real bottleneck. I put it on my third finger, so that I can still chord.“

Are you entirely self-taught?

“I was until my father asked me if I’d like to go to classical guitar when I was nine or ten. I took lessons for four years from Susan Graham in Bromley. The main thing I learned was how to use the little finger on the left hand. It amazes me that more people don’t.“

Did you have a love of classical music?

“No, I loathed it. I really loathed it at the time. It was also that I hated discipline of any sort. We’d touch upon a new piece every week. I wouldn’t play it until the night or 20 minutes before I went to the next lesson. Of course, I couldn’t play it very well. I just wasn’t interested. There were too many electric guitars floating about. And that was exciting.“

So why did you stay with the lessons so long?

“It was just that I agreed with my father that I should have them. I knew that I was going to end up playing guitar for good, that it was going to be my life. My father used to say, 'Well, yes, and I thought I was going to be a train driver, but you change.' But I haven’t changed. It was the first thing I wanted to be, and here I am doing it. 

“At the time, hardly anybody played guitar. None of my friends did. I was the only person in school who played guitar. I used to take it to school and just sit around the playground and play it. The other fellows knew that when lunch time came that I would get it out. We used to sing all the Beatles’ songs, Buddy Holly songs, things like that.“

Installing pickups and plugging into radios at age nine was pretty sophisticated.

“I’m a gadget maniac. In the early days I used to have two tape recorders. Tape recorders are like second-nature to me. I love fiddling about with anything electronic. My love of gadgets and love of playing guitar went together beautifully. 

“I used to play from after school until bedtime, sometimes five or six hours a day. I used to put down a rhythm guitar track first, and then lay down a lead, and then record that as well on another recorder. There was never a, 'I’ll do this to make myself better.' It was just enjoyment of playing, really. I’ve kept quite a few of those tapes. They sound awful.“

Do you practice now?

“Only the practice I get while writing.“

What about bands after The Little Ravens?

“When I was about 12 I formed a group called the Truebeats. And unfortunately I did think of that awful name. We were like a cardboard copy of the Shadows and the Ventures. Later, I got into another group called the Preachers when I was going through my first major influences, and starting to look for a style.

“I listened to nothing but jazz. I couldn’t listen to any pop records at all. Kenny Burrell and Django Reinhardt are my favorites. Then there’s Wes Montgomery, the funkiest guitarist in the world, he was. George Benson and a little of Joe Pass, but not too much. He was a bit too fast for me. I’ve gone from being narrow-minded and liking only jazz to liking everything. But I wasn’t long with the Preachers, just while I was still at school.“

What were you studying?

“Music. Harmony was the main thing. I think it was sort of to teach you how to be the conductor of an orchestra, really. I’ve not yet had the opportunity or the need for using the theory I learned, because everything is just like a jam, really, these days. You just shout out the chords. Harmony does help when you’re doing backing vocals and learning which chords and what bass lines you can play and when it doesn’t work. But I can tell by ear, anyway. 

“The most frustrating thing in being taught the theory of music was the fact that they used to give you a bass line and say, 'Now what we want is a tenor line, an alto line, and a soprano line on top of that.' I’d sit with the guitar or the piano at home, work it out, and think, 'Wow, I’ve got really, really avant-garde harmonies.' 

“I would record it, and it would sound great. But when I’d hand it in the following day, the teacher would put a red line through all of it and say, 'The seventh doesn’t descend, it ascends.' Then in the same breath he’d say, 'Bach does this, but Bach is the exception.' I got really annoyed that Bach was allowed to do it, but I wasn’t. It was frustrating.“

What guitar are you using on stage now?

“About four years ago, I arrived in San Francisco to do the Fillmore with Humble Pie. I had a terrible guitar. I was almost in tears trying to play it. Lo and behold, this young man called Mark Mariana came up to me and said I could borrow his black Les Paul for the next night. Believe it or not, I still have it. It’s my pride and joy, and he gave it to me for nothing. Mark’s a fantastic guy. I really thought things like that only happened to people you read about. 

“The guitar has a ’54 body which Mark reworked. He shaved the neck himself. It’s so thin it’s like custom-made. It fits my hand perfectly. He fitted a third pickup on and put white around all three. It looks amazing on stage. I think the latest pickup is 1968. But the others must be very old, because one of them has 'patent pending' written on it, and Gibson has had their patent for years. 

“I don’t think the knobs are original, but they’re around 15 years old. Mark completely rewired it. I think that’s the secret of the sound for me. It’s out of phase. The two outside pickups are wired around the wrong way. It’s wired stereo so that if I had a stereo jack I would have the middle pickup coming through one amp and the outside two coming through another. But I don’t do that because it’s too much hassle.“

Are you using any other guitars now?

“A long-scale Melody Maker and an Ovation 12-string – which I use for recording, but not on stage. I have a Martin acoustic that I got when I left Humble Pie. All I was doing then was sessions, and thanks to Mark, I had the ultimate guitar for sessions. But I was writing a lot. And it’s so much nicer to write on acoustic than electric when you’re not in a band. So I got a D-45. The workmanship on it is just superb. I thought, if Johnny Cash can sling one behind his back on TV, I’ll buy one and play it. 

“It’s so beautiful. It has such a full sound and beautiful sustain. It’s perfectly in tune all the way up. It’s the best acoustic I’ve ever played, and it just gets better with age. It had pure white wood when I got it. In about 18 months it’ll be bright yellow. The sunlight just improves it. The wood gets more and more seasoned. 

“When we have time enough to do our whole show, I’ll be doing acoustic numbers on stage again, and then I shall use my Martin. The action is very close for an acoustic, but it doesn’t buzz. On the Les Paul it’s incredibly close, too, but the pickups won’t pick up the buzz.“

What sort of strings do you put on?

“In the jazz days I used flatwound, but now I always use wire-wound. Picato ultra-light gauge, round wire-wound. They come from Wales. On the Martin I use D’Angelico. If I’m recording, I always change the strings for every track. Performing, I use them for two shows.“

What set-up are you using on stage?

“I use Marshall amps, two 100-watt amps through three 4x12 cabinets. So one amp uses one speaker, and one amp uses two speakers. I have one speaker on Mick’s [Gallagher, keyboards] side, and a monitor so the others can hear me. I have two speakers on my side and two amps, and they have one cabinet their side. They’re both half up. The only time that I turn flat-out on the guitar is when I play a solo. With Gibson, especially, the sound of the guitar is at its peak in tone when you’ve got it flat-out. When you turn it anywhere down from full volume the tone goes bassier. 

“I think it’s cheating to use fuzz, but I use wah-wah for tone control. For recording, I use a Uni-Vibe, but they break up on stage. Then I use the Binson Echorec. I don’t use it that much for recording, because we have so many echo facilities in the studio of such high quality that there’s no point. But on stage I do like echo for a solo to lift it just that bit more. 

“Recording, I very rarely use big amps. There’s no point in playing at volume in studios. I usually use very small amps, one of them being the Fender Champ, the smallest amp they make. You can turn it flat-out and talk above it, and it sounds like a Marshall 100-watt. That’s why I like it.“

What sort of pick do you use?

“I use a Hofner. It’s very small and very thick, and it doesn’t bang at all. I hold it with my thumb and first finger just so the point sticks out. I use a new one each night. Mostly I pick with down strokes except when I go fast, then it’s up and down. Actually, I don’t give it much thought.“

What about your left-hand technique?

“It’s mainly a mixture of hammers and snaps [pull-offs] and full barres. I’m a great believer in jazz chords. I use as many as possible – 13ths, 9ths, suspended. The solos are improvised. Mostly I get the leads off the chords.“

Do you use other tunings?

“On the Wind of Change album I used the standard D tuning. I also use a C tuning which goes E, C, G, E, C, C, and a G tuning that is G, B, D, G, B, D.“

Any advice for people just starting out?

“Don’t give up. Sometimes I still feel like it when I see someone who is really good, like Leo Kottke. I’m a great fan of his. But Kottke once said to me, 'Give me your plectrum; if only I could use a plectrum.' You see, there are so many styles. I know there will always be people better than me. But then again, no one will ever play like me or like Clapton or like Django. We are all different.“

What do you think you’ll be doing ten years from now?

“I don’t think about it. But now I’m getting into keyboards more than I have ever done before. All I’m working for at the moment is enough money to be able to waste on my own studio. That’s really what I want. One of my ambitions is to write a complete score and hand it to an orchestra. I’d love to write a film score one day. Write everything and conduct the orchestra as well. But performing is the best thing for a musician. It keeps you from becoming stagnant. I’ll never be able to stop working on the road, I’m sure. Let’s face it, I’m a showoff.“

Since Jake Kiszka burst on the scene six years ago with his hard-rock band Greta Van Fleet, the 27-year-old guitarist has captured the imagination of six-string fans and fellow players like few of his contemporaries. His adventurous and sophisticated approach to the guitar, much of it based on the traditions of blues and classic rock honed decades before he was born, has made him the preeminent axe hero for his generation. He’s topped readers polls – Best New Guitarist, Best Rock Guitarist, Best Guitar Solo... You name it. It’s enough to make any young player’s head swell, but Kiszka seems to be taking the acclaim in stride. When asked to explain why so many guitarists are drawn to his style, he addresses the topic thoughtfully.

“I do seem to encounter a lot of people who admire my playing,” he says. “They tell me that my type of playing is a lost art form. It’s like I’m a relic – my approach to playing is something from the past.” He chuckles at his own words. “I think people appreciate the way I embraced that tradition and evolved it to the contemporary world. I think there’s a lot of soul in what I do. I mean, people have said that they can feel my soul when I play. They appreciate that I’m trying to communicate.”

From all appearances, Greta Van Fleet – which includes Kiszka’s brothers, lead singer Josh and bassist-keyboardist Sam, along with drummer Danny Wagner – has caught all the breaks any modern-day rock band could possibly desire. They went gold with their first album, 2018’s Anthem of the Peaceful Army, and their 2021 follow-up, The Battle at Garden’s Gate, hit the upper regions of music charts across the globe. Their live shows grew from small clubs to bigger clubs, and it wasn’t long before they were packing theaters and sheds. This year they’ve graduated to the league of bona fide arena headliners, so it would seem when it comes to rock and roll bucket lists, the group’s members just might check off every item before they reach the age of 30. It’s enough to make Kiszka’s head spin.

“I can’t explain the success we’ve had, to be honest,” he says. “I think people are responding to our authenticity, which stems from our influences and what we grew up with. The purity of it and the truth of it resonates with people.”

New York City’s Madison Square Garden is one of the venues on the group’s 2023 itinerary. Kiszka’s eyes light up and his face fills with a sense of wonder at the very mention of the hallowed concert arena. “I was thinking about it at breakfast the other day,” he says. “I remembered how, when I was a kid and I wanted to be a guitar player, it seemed like every big band played the Garden. Cream and Zeppelin, the Who – the endless list of rock royalty. Then I realized that I’ll be playing Madison Square Garden. I’ll be walking in the footsteps of all those who’ve influenced me.” He smiles. “Madison Square Garden… It’s like the Garden of Eden.”

Greta Van Fleet appear to have nailed yet another rock tradition: The bigger they get with the public, the more critics have it out for them. When they arrived out of Frankenmuth, Michigan, with their first recordings – a pair of swaggering singles, “Safari Song” and Highway Tune,” followed by an EP, From the Fires – they elicited comparisons to Led Zeppelin, and rightly so: Every element of that group’s sound– from Robert Plant’s siren-like wails to Jimmy Page’s blues-drenched solos and John Bonham’s thunderous drum attack – seemed to have been re-created with uncanny, reverent precision. But as Greta Van Fleet strove to expand their sound on subsequent releases with splashes of country-folk, psychedelia, progressive rock and even hints of world music, the critics came at them with sharpened knives. In its review of The Battle at Garden’s Gate, entertainment-trade mag Variety likened them to Spinal Tap.

For his part, Kiszka dismisses the barbs like he’s swatting away a pesky fly. “I don’t think criticism has ever affected us,” he says. “It’s ponderous and intriguing to presume that somebody has spent time and energy to say how they’re indifferent to us or don’t like us, while we’ve put zero energy into caring what they think.”

He gives hosannas as much attention. “The praise rolls off our shoulders,” he says. “We’re musicians and artists, and if we’re to achieve any kind of perfection, then we have to let go of any sense of ego. It destroys talent. We’re always striving to be better musicians, and I’m striving to be a better guitarist. If I allowed all of that praise to go to my head, I’d be stagnant.”

Greta Van Fleet’s new album, Starcatcher (Lava/Republic), doesn’t depart from the band’s classic rock-based style – if anything, the group turbo-charges each tried-and-true component and drives it home. The set’s first single, “Meeting the Master,” begins as a contemplative, acoustic-laced ballad that explodes into a frenzied rock monster.

Similarly, the band eases its way into high-minded, trippy mood pieces like “Waited All Your Life” and “Farewell for Now,” drizzling bits of pastoral folk and spacey prog flourishes, before Kiszka flips a switch and takes off with brawny, go-for-the-gusto solos. While nothing on the record comes close to the nine-minute “The Weight of Dreams” (from The Battle at Garden’s Gate), each song feels like an epic, and Kiszka makes crafty use of every passage, layering elegant, arpeggiated lines and swooning leads between the various big spotlight moments. Sometimes the band needs no time at all to land a punch: On the aptly named “Runaway Blues,” they temporarily ditch their mystical shtick and blaze through a delirious rave-up that’s over in but a minute and a half.

The band relocated to Nashville several years ago, and for Starcatcher they tapped that town’s resident hitmaker, Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, Rival Sons and Grace Potter, among others), to produce. “Dave’s name was always on our radar,” Kiszka says. “He’s come into the scene as a prominent producer of rock and roll groups. We were like, ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ Maybe it would be stereotypical, but it was something we wanted to explore, regardless.”

A meeting between Cobb and the band went well, but Kiszka reveals that the members decided to “date” a few other producers before giving Cobb the nod. “In the end, we decided to marry Dave,” he says with a laugh. “It became obvious that he was going to be the one to help us create this record. It’s very challenging for producers to work with such a tight-knit group as ours. We speak the same language, and producers have to pick up on that vernacular. With Dave, it was easy because he shares our influences. He fell in seamlessly.”

You’ve never tried to hide your affinity for rock music from the ’70s. And, of course, some of the criticism you’ve endured is that you simply rehash that music. How do you think you take that influence and try to update it?

I believe our evolution, as well as my own progression, has always been a product of a contemporary world. A lot of the music and guitar playing which I’ve studied comes from a bygone era – the golden age of rock and roll. I’ve taken that heavy, guitar-based music and attempted a new approach, by giving it a modern perspective.

Can you elaborate on what that “new approach” means?

In terms of technique, there are many styles of contemporary guitar playing that have been seamed into my matrix. It’s an evolution of time and music; as the genres have progressed, so has the guitar playing. The sonic approach is complex and dynamic, because over the passage of time and technology, especially in terms of the studio, it has also advanced. This includes utilizing different microphones and different pedals, as the world of pedals has evolved as well. Given that expansion, I think a lot of the usage of those technologies has brought an absolute new and modern sonic approach to my guitar playing and our music.

The way I tend to write is coming from a very modern perspective. There have been many songs written since the advent of rock and roll until 2023 that observe the form of writing and its development – it’s come a long way. Let’s say if you’re using a 12-string in DADGAD, as opposed to a parlor guitar in standard, you’re going to hear and see an extraordinarily different outcome.           

Obviously, you and your brothers share the same influences. Can you speak to the innate connections family musicians have when they play together and how they inform the music?

Yeah. I think we have this sense of reinforcement of what we’re doing. It’s a pretty complex undertaking to communicate in general, as human beings, but on an instrumental level it’s an even larger feat. I think the fact that we all grew up together has certainly solidified our communication as musicians. When we’re onstage and we’re playing our instruments next to one another, it’s a form of communication. We understand each other’s nuances. We don’t like to play songs the same way each night. We like to jam and improvise.

Let’s pick up on that. When you jam – that is, when you’re not writing songs – what do you like to play? What’s a typical night like in the Greta rehearsal room?

It’s great. It’s everybody getting together and pulling out a bottle of tequila. I’ll show up last. [laughs] We’ll just kick it out. Even at soundchecks, we’re always playing. It goes back to that form of communication. Somebody will start playing something, and then somebody else will walk in the room and start playing.

But what are you jamming to? Original tunes? Covers?

A little bit of both. Usually, it’s original jamming, but other times I’ll have learned something. “Rock ’n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” by AC/DC is something I just learned. I always liked the song and pulled it out. We all started playing it. You don’t have to rehearse for something like that. But it’s usually original stuff – that’s how it works in the studio.

Was the Starcatcher track “Runaway Blues” a jam? It sure sounds like it.

It was a jam in the studio. We were having a slow, sort of methodical day, and I just wanted to rip out something new. Nobody was around, so I started playing that riff. Danny and Sam came in, and we finished a take of another song. Then I kicked off with the riff. Dave Cobb started freaking out: “That song needs to be on the record!”

I have praise, and a complaint. I absolutely love the song, but I was bummed when you faded it so quickly.

Yeah. The reason why it’s so short is because Josh didn’t like it, and he wanted it to be brief. I think there’s an aspect to the song – you end up wanting more.

Van Halen used to do that. They would feature these awesome bits of rocking on their records that lasted only seconds.

Yeah. That song is part of the whole web of the record. It adds a lot of energy. It’s something that we may extend live. We like to do that sort of thing.

Not to belabor Led Zeppelin, but as you know, the critics do bring it up a lot. I wonder, is there something they’re not seeing? What influences are there that they don’t pick up on?

It’s pretty broad. The complexity of musical influence and the depth of that is extreme within the group. But it’s really everything – there’s not a lot of music that we dislike. We grew up with roots music. As for Led Zeppelin – we weren’t listening to rock music growing up; that happened in high school. So we’re talking about the originations of the genres that we now consider to be folk music, like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. We had Alan Lomax records laying around. It was roots of the Great American South and the Blue Hills – bluegrass music and banjo playing.

And it goes into blues music and Native American music. People don’t know that we grew up with some Native American music, which was informed by blues. So you’ve got Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, Albert King, John Lee Hooker and Son House – all of these collective blues influences. We saw our way into all kinds of stuff, even classical music like Frederic Chopin and Mussorgsky, Bach and Beethoven. We listened to Peruvian music growing up.

So the influences go beyond Zeppelin.

Yeah. Again, it’s pretty broad. And pretty extensive. Obviously, this could be a very complex answer, but these are just examples.

During the period when you were absorbing music and forming your style, was there a cut-off period for you? When you first heard what we call “shred,” did you say, “Not for me”?

I was never a big fan of shredding. It didn’t really interest me because I didn’t hear the soul and dynamics of an earlier style of guitar playing. When Jimi Hendrix played guitar, you could feel the soul coming out of his body. That moment right there probably defined my direction and approach. For me, shred music didn’t achieve that sort of thing.

We wouldn’t necessarily put Eddie Van Halen in that category.

Eddie Van Halen is an outlier. I like his approach – he inspired and created a type of music, but there was enough nuance in what he was doing that you could still hear a human element. Nowadays, the amps are so cranked and there’s so much gain and distortion. It’s less like painting and more like digital art. It’s like A.I. versus human art.

Moving forward, would I be right to assume that something like the djent movement didn’t hit you at all?

It does a little bit because, as a guitar player, I appreciate that it’s a duality of many different styles and genres and instruments. Even in, for instance, the eight-string guitar or something.

Would you even know what to do with an eight-string guitar?

I would have to figure it out. As a guitar player, it’s interesting to see the depth of complexity that people have brought in over time. Leo Kottke would be playing a 12-string steel guitar with a slide, so that’s three elements that are very interesting that you wouldn’t necessarily combine. But he did it, so we have that.

On this new record I toyed with new techniques and tunings. I used a B-Bender on “Fate of the Faithful.” “Falling Skies” is in DADGAD, “The Archer” is in open C, and “Meeting the Master” is in some strange tuning I made up – it’s a full step down, and then you drop the bottom D one more step. It’s crazy. And I was using a Taylor baritone that had two B strings. I tried toying with different sounds.

Did you try soloing outside of the minor pentatonic scale at all?

Sure. There are blues boxes, which are extremely helpful to me. It’s just a variation of the pentatonic scale from the base of the neck all the way up to the top. There are other phrases and movements inside of that, and you can configure them all the way up and get into Dorian-like scales. If you’re soloing in an open tuning, that’s completely instinctual. You just find what feels good and play those notes. It’s good to try open tunings.

A few years ago, you told me that you don’t really practice. Is that still true?

I still don’t practice. My practice is on the stage or when I’m writing songs on a guitar. In that sense, it keeps things frustrating. If I practiced all the time, it would be, for me, probably a moot point being that it’s not really my form of expression.

Back to your record. During the planning stages, did the band sit down and map out an objective, or did the album just evolve as a natural outgrowth of the songs?

There was a certain set of objectives that we had. We came out of our last record thinking we created this cinematic, almost orchestral record. On this one, I wanted to do something fairly aggressive.

In what way?

In terms of the emotional approach. Many of these songs are intense both emotionally and sonically. We also wanted to have a lot of dimension within the dynamics of our performances. Between “Meeting the Master” to “The Falling Sky” to “Farewell for Now,” the range is pretty diverse. Once we had those concepts in mind, it was really just going out and isolating ourselves in the country and writing these songs in two weeks. Then we went to RCA’s Studio A and recorded them.

Where exactly did you go to isolate yourselves?

We went to a cabin just south of Franklin [a city south of Nashville]. We brought all of our gear and set up – that’s how we like to operate. We like to get out of any city and be in the middle of nowhere, and live and breathe what we’re doing every day.

Was there anything significant in Dave Cobb’s method of recording that had a real impact on you?

It was a maximum impact. Most people set a mic right next to an amplifier and go, “There’s your sound.” But you and I know that the technique is to pull that mic away and get the ambience and the live sound. Dave would set the mic 10 feet away, but then he’d listen back and go, “Nah, it just doesn’t sound right.” It would sound bigger at 12 feet. We did a lot of stuff with delays and things like that.

Dave got things sounding so good that I didn’t have to worry about it. That was a big part of his impact. We didn’t have to worry about the sound; we only had to think about the music we were writing and how we were going to perform it. Our attention was right where it needed to be.

This record is like your others in that you didn’t use generic, dialed-in distortion. Your sound is big and powerful, but there’s a natural element to it.

Yeah, again, that’s a huge thing. Most players tell me that I play very clean. I do, I think, but I like the nuance of that style. You can hear the detail of my playing; you can hear the complexities of it. I can whisper something or I can profess it loudly from the top of a mountain. I have the ability to work with dynamics in terms of tonality and approach, and I like that.

What was Dave like as a guitar coach? I don’t assume everything you come up with is awesome right off the bat. When you played a part and it wasn’t quite right, how would he guide you?

It’s interesting: If I had a pre-chorus or something, he’d go, “That’s cool.” Luckily, he likes everything I do. But sometimes he’d say, “That pre-chorus is great and I like it, but it sounds really complicated. What if you simplified it?” And I’d say, “Okay, I can do that.” That’s the thing – he’d be into what I was doing, but he’d want to go more in this direction or that. I would just revise it.

Do you ever get bruised feelings in the studio? What happens if you play a part that you think is awesome, but you get criticism?

It has a lot to do with the producer. I’ve been hurt by constructive criticism in the past, but Dave works in a way that isn’t offensive. It’s not like, “Go rewrite that part. It’s shit.” Because I’ve had that way back, which was fine – I needed it then. Dave never changed anything that I wrote, but he made me utilize those notes and make a variation of it.

Beyond some of the new tunings and techniques that you’ve mentioned, do you feel like your overall guitar approach has changed in recent years?

I don’t think so. I’ll put it this way: I believe that every season changes who I am as a person, and that influences the way that I approach the guitar. I’ve played a lot of shows, and I’ve taken different approaches to the guitar both consciously and unconsciously. It’s like a personality or a spirit – it evolves with time. It’s difficult for us as human beings to identify our growth within ourselves. It’s the same thing with my guitar playing. I’m not sure how it’s evolved, but I feel like it grows as I grow.

One of my favorite solos is on “Frozen Light,” where you go absolutely bonkers. Was that done in one take? It doesn’t sound like something you played to death.

Yeah, that was another thing Dave brought to the table. I was like, “I want to take that solo again.” And he said, “No, you can’t take that solo again. That’s the solo.” The “Frozen Light” solo is probably a second take, I think. I don’t think I played any solos or improvisations more than five times.

You favor your ’61 Gibson SG, but what were some of the other guitars you used on the album?

I used that ’61 SG number one for the majority of some basic structures, but I used more guitars on this record than on anything else in the past. The RCA studio room is really big, so we took all these guitars off the wall. A friend of mine who owns the Chicago Music Exchange brought a bunch of guitars down. We laid them out on the floor, opened them up, and with every song I’d walk over and get another one to see how it sounded.

What were some of the guitars that made the cut?

There was the third ES-335 ever made – it had some country stars names on it. That one outshot all the other ones for a lot of things. It was amazing. There was a ’60s Telecaster. It’s challenging to remember all of them. Dave has his ’58 gold-top – I used that. There was a Stratocaster that I used for dive bomb– type sounds and stereo things. The acoustic world was crazy, too. We’d use old Martins and a lot of things like that.

Did Dave break out his nylon-string acoustic? I was talking to Grace Potter, who told me that she played that guitar and didn’t want to give it back.

Yeah, I wanted to steal it, too. Actually, I used one of his Princeton amps and fell in love with it. I was looking for one at some guitar function in Nashville, and I bumped into Dave. I told him what I was looking for, and he said, “Oh, man, you can have it.” Just like that, he gave it to me.

Have you decided on which guitars to use live?

I’m going to need a few more. I’m looking for some to replicate the parts on the record because of all the alternate tunings. I found this old Frankenstein Telecaster and I brought it to [guitar luthier] Joe Glaser. He put a B-Bender in it. So I’ve got that little creation to help me play “Fate of the Faithful.” I’ve still got to find some more guitars.

You mention the B-Bender. Did it take you a while to get used to playing with one? How did you approach it?

To be honest, it came rather immediately. I understood what was going on, and I didn’t really have to think about it. It came pretty naturally to me. Using it inside the solo of that song, as a technique within the soloing, was something I’d never heard before. I had to do it because it was totally weird and different. It’s a dance, the way you have to use it.

What about your live rig? Any changes to that?

I certainly might use the Princeton amp. I’m working out a wet/dry system right now. We’re playing these really big rooms, so I don’t need the reverb stuff that I’ve always had. I need to be clearer to cut through these arenas. I was put in touch with Peter Frampton, and I talked to him about his wet/dry rig. He’s really well versed in that system and how it works. He gave me some tips, and I think he’ll probably come by production rehearsals and help me get this wet/dry thing going.

Peter is a lovely guy.

He really is. He’s the kindest soul.

We started out this conversation by talking about how your fellow guitarists have responded to your playing. You’re now being called a guitar hero. How does that sit with you? How do you feel about it, and in your view, who is a guitar hero?

That’s kind of a broad concept. It seems to be a tradition, doesn’t it? There are generations of players who become icons of their times. You can go back to the British Invasion and people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page... And then there’s Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Rory Gallagher – these people became figureheads. Move it further and you’ve got Stevie Ray Vaughan and Slash. They all inspired me. To be considered a guitar hero for my generation is a lifetime achievement.

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After several well-received U.S. tours, a striking self-titled A&M debut in 1970 and the critically acclaimed Rock On album in early 1971, British quartet Humble Pie were still largely an opening band in the U.S., with only a relatively modest following back in their native England in fall 1971.

Still, expectations – and record company advances – were high. But despite being among the first bands ever dubbed a “supergroup” by the British press – owing to a lineup that included both the great singer/guitarist Steve Marriott of the Small Faces and a young phenom guitarist named Peter Frampton from a band called the Herd – Humble Pie were commercial underachievers.

That all changed with a concert they recorded with engineer Eddie Kramer at the Fillmore East in New York City.

The resulting album, 1971’s Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore – with its titanic highlights, including the proto-punk of “I Don’t Need No Doctor” and the OG stoner anthem “Stone Cold Fever” – catapulted Humble Pie into what the band’s friend David Gilmour once described as “the superleagues.”

Lengthy cuts like “Four-Day Creep” and a cover of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” featured Frampton’s flights of futuristic modal-blues soloing, Marriott’s braying, stratospheric voice, and the R&B-informed rock rhythm section of drummer Jerry Shirley and ex-Spooky Tooth bassist Greg Ridley.

Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore was quickly certified Gold and acted as an instant coronation. Then came the beheading. Before Performance was even released, Frampton quit the band to pursue a solo career.

Meanwhile, guitarist David “Clem” Clempson, who already had an enviable career under his belt with the brash, youthful British blues-rock band Bakerloo, was having doubts about his current band, British jazz-rock juggernaut Colosseum, an artful and innovative quintet that featured notable names like singer Chris Farlowe, drummer Jon Hiseman, bassist Mark Clarke and a gifted saxophone player (soon to be a prog legend) with the rather Dickensian name of Dick Heckstall-Smith.

Receiving a call from Steve Marriott to “come down to Olympic Studios and audition for the band,” Clempson arrived only to find himself at a full-on press conference to announce that he would be joining Humble Pie as their new lead guitarist.

“It was rather sudden, but very welcome,” Clempson, now 73, says with a laugh. Although he would later continue to work with Colosseum, as well as with Jack Bruce, B.B. King, Jeff Beck, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and others, “the last few months of Colosseum had been somewhat frustrating and sort of restrictive for me,” he says.

“We would work for literally days on just a vocal harmony part, or a particular unison line. It got to a point where I really couldn’t take it anymore. So when I got the call from Steve Marriott to audition for Humble Pie, I was quite eager.

“That was the most refreshing thing about Humble Pie, that it was all so much more immediate. I was set free in a way. I could finally just wail. And that’s all I wanted to do!”

Clempson’s approach to the guitar had an immediate and significant effect on Humble Pie’s music. “We didn’t see Peter quitting the band coming at all,” Jerry Shirley recalls. “But after Peter left, Humble Pie made a conscious decision to sort of rein in the longer solos, partly because that was very much Peter’s signature. So mostly the live solos became much more compact.”

The main difference between Frampton’s and Clempson’s styles, Shirley says, is that “Peter leaned a bit toward chromaticism, because of his jazz background, and Clem leaned more toward the blues vocabulary. But they’re very similar in that they’re both such devoted players. The guitar is everything to both of them.”

“Peter obviously loved Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell, and players like that,” Clempson notes, “but still, I always figured he learned like I did, like we all did back then: by copying the things that he liked and absorbing those into his own choices.

“I think Peter just finds nice notes to play over any given chord that he’s playing over, though his note choices are slightly different from the sorts of things that I like to do. I never actually learned the major or minor pentatonic scale on guitar.

“This is partly due to the fact that I’d already had a whole education in classical piano. So when I took up the guitar, I knew all my scales and chords on the piano, and I just sort of discovered where those same notes and chords were on the fretboard, but without ever even looking at a scale diagram or anything like that.

“I learned the chord shapes, of course, but it was years before I ever practiced a scale or an arpeggio.”

Jumping straight into Olympic Studios’ Studio One, the revitalized quartet quickly knocked out Fillmore’s funky and fantastic follow-up – and eventually the band’s biggest-selling album: 1972’s Smokin’, which, 50 years on, forms the thematic centerpiece of the just-released, freshly remastered, and royally rocking eight-CD collection Humble Pie: The A&M 1970–1975 Limited Edition Boxset.

The long-player was recorded and mixed by lauded producer Alan O’Duffy, who’d just stunned the world of both rock and musical theater with his pioneering work on the Jesus Christ Superstar cast album.

“Humble Pie was so competent and powerful at that time,” recalls O’Duffy, who enjoyed the able engineering assistance of the late Keith Harwood, of Led Zeppelin, Bowie and Rolling Stones fame.

“There was never more than one or two takes of anything. There was never that thing of, ‘I want to replace my guitar part,’ or ‘I didn’t like the hi-hat feel on that. Can I replace the hi-hat?’ It was just knock it out, no bullshit, end of story.”

From the first session, the band’s fresh alchemy completely clicked. Performed with a white, three-pickup Gibson SG Custom and his favorite 1958 Gibson Les Paul goldtop, Clempson’s wicked wah-wah tones and adroitly musical, progressive blues filigrees and solos slotted in perfectly with multitasker Marriott’s dynamic Hammond organ chords, rocking Epiphone Dwight and Coronet rhythms, and sky-searing vocal bursts.

With the more stripped-down Ridley/Shirley rhythm axis heating up the grooves, tracks like “Hot & Nasty,” “The Fixer” and the perennial “30 Days in the Hole” still positively smoke with a pungent whiff of the fiery, fun, funky fumes emanating from Olympic’s storied tracking room.

“The great thing for me, as well, is that no one ever suggested anything about what I should play,” Clempson remembers. “When I came into the band, they were already rehearsing quite a bit of the new material – all the things that would end up on Smokin’, like ‘The Fixer,’ ‘30 Days in the Hole,’ ‘Sweet Peace and Time,’ ‘C’mon Everybody’ – all these great riffs and ideas, with an eye to getting into the studio as soon as possible to record them.

“So all I really had to do was to find parts that would fit well over what they were already doing. Sometimes I’d play the main riff in unison with Steve; other times I’d play a harmony part, or take a lead.

“When it came time to tour and approach the material they had already done – the fan favorites like ‘I Don’t Need No Doctor’ and ‘Four-Day Creep,’ – I approached them in the same way: try to understand what Steve was doing with the riffs and lines, and decide what I’d like to do over it.

“Now, I had, of course, heard the Rockin’ the Fillmore album, and I knew there were certain things I should definitely nail as is – Peter’s harmony line over the opening riff to ‘Four-Day Creep,’ for instance. I had to do that verbatim, of course.

“In fact, there were plenty of Pete’s great lines and parts that I wanted to cop. But when it came to the soloing and improvised parts, I just wanted to do it my way, which felt more honest.”

As O’Duffy recalls, the band set up in Olympic’s Studio One main room very close together, with only four-foot-high baffles to separate their equipment. “Basically, Jerry’s drums were in the middle of the floor, and then Greg Ridley’s bass amps would be to the right and nearest to the drums.

“There’d be Clem on the right, and Steve on the left. The guys would all have headphones on, and Steve would maybe have a mic if he wanted to do some scratch vocals. And while we did use baffles, we didn’t get too hung up about a bit of bleed. A bit of Clem’s guitar in the drum mics? Big deal.”

O’Duffy – who when mixing panned Clempson’s Marshall JMP Super Lead 100 to the right and Marriott’s Marshall JMP Super PA 100-watt tube amps to the left – recalls using Neumann KM56 and AKG C451 mics on Clempson’s Marshall cabs, with an attenuation of about -20dB, as the amps were run “quite hot.”

“None of those solos were more than two takes,” Clempson says. “I especially remember the recording of ‘Hot & Nasty.’ That was just such a special evening. We started with this jam, just having fun, but it had a great groove.

“We played it through, and then Steve knocked out a few lyrics and put a vocal on it. Done. But then Stephen Stills suddenly appeared from nowhere and came up with this great backing vocal line to put over it: ‘Do you get the message?’ He said, ‘Do you mind if I put it on the track?’ So off he went to the live room and put that down, and it was amazing.

“This is what being in the studio is supposed to be like, really,” Clempson continues. “And it led to one of the best recordings I’ve ever been a part of. That’s as good an example of the camaraderie in the band as anything I can think of.

“We were very close then, having a lot of fun, really giving it one, and I think that really comes through on the record. We weren’t trying to conquer the world or anything. It was just about the joy of doing it.

“Look, it’s a well-known story how things started to go downhill after a while, but for those first 18 months or so that I was in the band, we loved being together, and there was such a great feeling among us all.

“I suppose that’s the most heartbreaking thing about what happened later: knowing what we’d lost.”

While both Clempson’s and Marriott’s interlocking leads are utterly wicked throughout, the jagged, righteous rhythms on album tracks like “Road Runner’s ‘G’ Jam” and “Sweet Peace and Time” equally run the show – big, fat Marshall tones that burst with mojo.

“My rhythm playing improved quite a lot by joining Humble Pie and working with Steve,” Clempson maintains. “He was an absolutely fantastic rhythm player. Even apart from his big power chords, which were magnificent, even playing a Strat through a clean amp, he would find so many lovely little licks.

“One Humble Pie song I enjoy listening back to is ‘Black Coffee’ [from 1973’s Eat It, the follow-up to Smokin’]. 

"I’m playing that sort of boogie figure on the bottom two strings, and the slide guitar as well, but Steve came up with these little clean soul music licks over that on the top three strings that are just so tasteful and have so much personality.”

Marriott, as Jerry Shirley explains, continued to be an ardent student of the guitar throughout his life, which was cut short in 1991 in a tragic house fire. (Watch this stunning version of “Five Long Years” for a taste of his Chicago Blues prowess.)

“There was this fascinating guy out of Chicago,” Shirley explains, “an amazing artist and a guitar player named Bob Novak. They called him Bumble Bee Bob. [Novak died in 2015 at the age of 83.] Bob had learned blues guitar and harmonica straight from a lot of the great bluesmen in Chicago – Otis Rush, Albert King, Muddy Waters… guys like that.

“He knew exactly how they played all those licks. He was a friend of the band from the very early days, and he used to come over to England and stay with Steve for weeks at a time, and the two of them would sit down with their guitars and Bob would show Steve exactly how those guys fretted and nuanced all those licks.

“Steve was in awe of Bob, and as Steve already had great vibrato and was a great player to begin with, it took his playing to a whole new level. And this was eight years after Humble Pie.”

Marriott’s influence on Clempson didn’t stop with blues-and-rhythm licks. “Steve turned me on to so much music that I never knew existed, like the Staples Singers,” Clempson says. “Ever since I met him, Mavis Staples has been my all-time favorite female singer.

“And when he turned me on to [acoustic guitar giant] Leo Kottke, I thought, How can one person possibly be doing all that? Because of him, I had to buy a Martin and begin learning how to fingerpick properly.”

Likewise, it was when Marriott asked Clempson to play slide on Smokin’ that bottleneck became an integral part of his palette.

“All these things are what allowed me to have a really successful career in the session world when I decided I didn’t want to be on the road quite so much anymore,” Clempson insists. “I had built quite an extensive vocabulary by then, and a lot of that came from joining Humble Pie.”

In fact, if there’s any advice Clempson says he would offer to young players who want to improve their vocabularies and up their game, it’s that same open-minded approach.

“Explore more styles of music than just the one you mostly gravitate to, and do more than just play solos,” he stresses. “Early on, I missed out on a lot of great rhythm playing that I didn’t ever think to listen to carefully.

“I only wanted to listen to B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck and Peter Green. I wanted to hear the great soloists, and that’s what I wanted to do myself. Sure, I was aware of people like [Howlin’ Wolf ’s] Hubert Sumlin, but I never really took close notice of exactly what he was doing.

“If I listened to a Buddy Guy record, I’d really only focus on the lead guitar and not on the rest of the instruments, especially the rhythm players. Go listen to all those fantastic Tamla/Motown rhythm guitarists, for example. How the hell did I not notice how great that was?”

Listening back to Smokin’ after 50 years, engineer/mixer O’Duffy knows exactly how great Humble Pie were, and he’s not afraid to put a bow on it. “The Humble Pie guys were the genuine article,” he says.

“Humble Pie were playing with their hearts. They weren’t playing ‘Let’s pretend we’re a rock band’ or ‘Let’s pretend we’re a soul band.’ There are other bands that I can name who would’ve been equally clever playing a bossa nova or a samba or a pop record. Humble Pie were playing the thing itself, not a version of that thing.

“I feel privileged to have lived at a time when these people were on earth and were in our circle, and we had the pleasure of working together and making something truly beautiful.

“I’m still proud. It’s 50 years ago, and I’m a proud man listening back to ‘The Fixer’ and ‘Hot N’ Nasty’ and ‘Sweet Peace and Time.’ It all still sounds spectacular.”

Browse the Humble Pie catalog here.

Last week (November 16), electric guitar titan Peter Frampton played a show at the Mitsubishi Electric Halle in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The concert was the last scheduled date on Frampton's Finale: The Farewell Tour, which was announced way back in 2019, but partially (the UK/European leg, at least) postponed until this fall due to COVID-19.

Frampton performed the long-delayed European shows seated, due to his ongoing battle with inclusion body myositis (IBM), a progressive muscle disorder that he was first diagnosed with in 2015.

Even still, though, the guitarist gave fans a show to remember, tearing through a 15-song set packed with hits ("Show Me the Way," "Baby, I Love Your Way," "Do You Feel Like We Do") and covers (among them spirited versions of Nickolas Ashford's "I Don't Need No Doctor" and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun.")

For the grand finale though, Frampton tipped his cap to an old friend, George Harrison, with a gorgeous extended take on The Beatles’ "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." You can see fan-filmed footage of the performance below.

Frampton and Harrison first met at a late 1969 session for Doris Troy's self-titled album, which the latter was producing. Frampton would go on to play acoustic guitar on Harrison's seminal 1970 album, All Things Must Pass.

He was also the quiet Beatle's first call to stand in for an ailing Eric Clapton at the all-star 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, though Clapton did eventually pull through.

Following the "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" performance, and after taking a final bow with his band, Frampton returned to the front of the stage and told the crowd, “I want to let you know I’m going to keep fighting this, so let’s never say never."

He subsequently returned to the stage once more to offer his thanks to "the people you don’t see but make us sound good and look good. 

“I have to thank my entire crew," he said, "from the bus driver all the way to lighting and sound… everything. They have done an incredible job and make everything work every night.”

Frampton announced in September that he would perform the European Finale: The Farewell Tour shows seated, telling Classic Rock, “My legs are not good. I can’t stand. That would be dangerous for me now, because I get so carried away when I’m playing that I’m liable to fall over.”

Now on his tenth album – aptly titled Ten – Albert Cummings' highly charged live shows have seen the blues guitar master picking up legions of new fans up and down the country.

Right now, he’s out on the road with a succession of dates lined up ranging from Canada to Texas and will be lighting up Knoxville and Nashville in Tennessee this week.

“I rarely use a set list. I just let the music take me where it’s going to go,” he told Guitar Player. “My style of music is completely off the cuff.”

Released last month via Ivy Music, Ten was recorded in Peter Frampton’s Phenix Studios in Nashville with legendary engineer/producer Chuck Ainlay (Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler, Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton.)

Right out of the gate, Ten proved something of a hit, reigning at number one on the iTunes Blues Chart while debuting at number two on the Billboard Blues Albums chart.

Testament to its broad appeal, Ten also managed to reach the top 20 on the Americana/Folk Album Chart, while gaining entry into the Top New Artist, Record Label Independent Current Albums, and Current Digital Albums charts.

Following up the release of the album’s first single – “Need Somebody” – Cummings has dropped another standout track, “Meet the Man.”

Accompanying the new single is an intimate video featuring Cummings, trusty Stratocaster in hand, performing the song alone from beginning to end.

Framed as a farewell from someone facing their own mortality, Cummings says, “It is a song that has deep personal meaning to me, but I think it’s universal and an inspirational song too, and I hope people take it that way.”

Order Ten by Albert Cummings here.

While the talk box achieved its greatest popularity in the early part of the ‘70s thanks to Bob Heil, the concept existed in a variety of forms long before he brought his device to market.

It was Alvino Rey who first popularized, if not invented, the effect in the late 1930s, using a throat contact mic to make his steel guitar speak. Rey had the mic wired in reverse to act as a speaker and fed his amplified signal into it. As he performed, his wife, Luise, stood offstage, wearing the device and mouthing the words to the song as Rey’s steel guitar tones emerged from her lips.

The same concept was behind the Sonovox, developed by Gilbert Wright in 1939 and demonstrated by a young Lucille Ball in a newsreel.

Rey’s bit of ventriloquism was put to use as the voice of Stringy the Talking Steel Guitar, a freakish-looking puppet that sang “St. Louis Blues” in the 1944 film Jam Session.

The talk box as we know it today was created by Nashville steel guitarist Bill West by sealing an eight-inch speaker in a box, from which extended a length of tubing for the player’s mouth. Steel guitarist Pete Drake put West’s device to use on his 1964 cut “Forever,” and the novelty quickly caught on.

Drake began selling the device himself, marketing it as the Talking Music Actuator. West’s talk box eventually found its way into the rig of Joe Walsh, who would go on to use it on his 1973 hit, “Rocky Mountain Way,” the first record on which most people in the classic-rock era heard the effect.

By then, Kustom Electronics had gotten into the act with the Bag, a shoulder-slung device introduced in 1969 and used by Joe Perry on Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” in 1975 and by Jeff Beck that same year on “She’s a Woman” from Blow by Blow.

But all those devices were relatively low wattage. It took Heil’s high-powered Talk Box to make the effect viable for use on stadium and arena stages. He and Walsh made their prototype together on a Sunday afternoon.

“We grabbed a 250-watt JBL, built a low-pass filter, got all the plumbing together, and voilà – the Talk Box,” Heil recalled.

Enter Peter Frampton, who had first heard the effect when Drake played on sessions for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, on which Frampton also performed.

Frampton – who knew Heil from his days as soundman for Humble Pie – used his Talk Box on 1975’s “Show Me the Way” but made his biggest impression with it on “Do You Feel Like We Do,” from his 1976 smash live album, Frampton Comes Alive!

“People went nuts when I went to use the talk box,” he told Guitar Player. “Hey, everybody needs a gimmick, and this was mine.”

Since then it’s become a useful tool in the mouths of guitarists ranging from Richie Sambora to Jerry Cantrell.

Check out the MXR M222 Talk Box here.

Bryan Adams has released a fourth single – “Never Gonna Rain” – from his highly anticipated album So Happy It Hurts. Due for release on March 11, the new long-player is the Canadian maestro’s 15th studio effort to date and will be available in the form of various bundles comprising CDs, regular vinyl, colored vinyl, and t-shirts.

A limited-edition box set features the Deluxe CD, the vinyl album, a signed photo, and a 48-page hardbound book.

With an accompanying music video shot in the loading bay of a Las Vegas hotel, Adams says the optimistically titled “Never Gonna Rain” is based around the idea of, “Living in the moment, instead of in fear. Turning the negatives into positives. Taking the rain and turning it into a gift."

Adams is one of the best-selling artists of all time with dozens of top ten singles to his name, including the international smash hit “Summer of '69” – an anthemic fist-pumper with lyrics that resonate with many a fellow ‘lifer’ guitarist.

But what exactly was that “first real six-string” Adams sings about with such bittersweet nostalgia? And was it really bought “at the five and dime?” It appears our sibling magazine across the pond, Guitarist, may have found the answer in a recent interview with the man himself.

"I bought an imitation Les Paul at a 'five and dime' store in Ottawa, Canada in 1971,” reveals Adams. “Before that, I had an imitation Strat which I bought in Reading, England in 1970.

“It felt real at the time to have a Les Paul, even though I'm a massive Ritchie Blackmore fan – still am. I was heavily into Humble Pie's Rockin’ the Fillmore album at the time, and both Peter Frampton and Steve Marriott were on Les Pauls. It's rock guitar heaven, that album."

Stream the Bryan Adams single “Never Gonna Rain” here.

Pre-order the album So Happy It Hurts here.

As Peter Frampton noted, there was no shortage of guitarists at the Concert for Bangladesh. And while some of the electric guitars that were played at one or both shows are famous – consider Eric Clapton’s “Brownie” Strat, which he used for the second show after abandoning the Gibson Byrdland he played in the first set – others remain mired in mystery. 

Here’s a guide to the main examples wielded at the concerts.

1. George Harrison’s Mystery Strat

Harrison spent much of the show playing a stripped Fender Strat with a ’50s maple neck, a guitar whose background has baffled many. Its only known appearances were at the Concert for Bangladesh and on The Dick Cavett Show two months later, when Harrison sat in on slide guitar with Gary Wright and the Wonder Wheel. 

Some believe he rented it from Manny’s Music in Manhattan, but it’s unlikely he would have had the same guitar twice. And as Molland says, “I don’t think he would’ve rented a guitar for a show like that.” 

Perhaps it was a gift from Clapton, who had purchased six mid-’50s Strats for a bargain price at the Sho-Bud guitar shop in Nashville, and given three of them to Pete Townshend, Steve Winwood and Harrison. 

Another theory is that the Bangladesh Strat is a late ’50s-early ’60s transitional model that featured a maple neck and three-ply pickguard, and that Harrison had simply stripped it of its finish, just as he and Lennon had done with their Epiphone Casinos around the time of the White Album. 

“There was a phase in England, where everybody wanted their Fender guitars stripped,” Frampton says, “including me, [Humble Pie bassist] Greg Ridley and [Small Faces/Faces multi-instrumentalist] Ian McLagan. Ian and I were pretty handy, so we got a paint stripper, got all the paint off and put polyurethane varnish on. None of us realized at the time how we were destroying the value of those guitars.” 

Of course, many players of the time simply gave their now-priceless guitars – like Harrison’s rosewood Telecaster – away to friends. Harrison related the story of how he gave this particular Strat to Spike Milligan: “He was at my house one day with Peter Sellers.  

Peter was playing the drums, Spike was playing the piano, and I was playing guitar. Then Spike got off the piano and wanted to play the guitar, so I plugged him in to this Strat through a little Champ amplifier. 

He said, ‘Oh, I haven’t played for 30 years,’ but he just picked it up and it sounded like Django Reinhardt or something. And I thought, Well, that’s good. So when he left, I put it in the case, and put it and the Champ in Peter Sellers’ boot and told him, ‘When you drop Spike off give him this. It’s the Strat from the Concert for Bangladesh.’” 

2. 1963 Martin D-28 

Bob Dylan bought this Martin in the late ’60s and used it for 10 years, according to his repairman, Larry Cragg, who bought the guitar from him in 1977 for $500. Cragg, who nicknamed it Bob, kept the guitar unplayed in its original case and in a humidity- and temperature-controlled environment until he sold it at auction in 2017 for $396,500.

3. Harptone L-6NC

This six-string acoustic guitar, with its zero-fret design and unique headstock shape and double-neck truss rod, is currently on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York City. It’s said to have been a gift to Harrison from Peter Drake, the pedal-steel master who played on All Things Must Pass. 

Harptone asked Drake to give a few guitars to the Beatles to try out, and Ringo Starr liked his so much that the company made him a signature model. Harrison owned and used at least four, including this guitar and an L-12NC 12-string that he purchased for approximately $150 prior to recording the White Album. 

Badfinger members used the 12-string on the sessions for All Things Must Pass and Badfinger bassist Tom Evans played it at the Concert for Bangladesh. Harrison played the L-12 when he guested on Splinter’s 1974 debut album, The Place I Love, and gave it to member Bobby Purvis. The guitar was auctioned in 2005 and sold to a private collector. It appeared at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum’s Concert for Bangladesh exhibit in 2005–2006.

4. 1958 Gibson Explorer

This is the Explorer on which Don Preston delivered his fiery solo on “Jumpin Jack Flash,” inspiring Eric Clapton to get one of his own. The Explorer was among the 'Modernistic' solidbody designs Gibson developed alongside the Flying V and Moderna in the late '50s (although it is believed no Moderna guitars ever made it into production.) Preston’s guitar is from the model’s first year, when Gibson shipped just 19 instruments, making it one of the most valued guitars on the vintage market.  

5. Gibson Byrdland 

A rental or a guitar that he owned? Nobody seems to know when Clapton picked up the Byrdland he played at the early show on August 1, but his choice of the guitar continues to be a source for discussion among guitarists.

Some believe it was a 1950s model, pointing to the rounded cutaway, which was sharper on 1960s models. Others point to the double parallelogram inlays and black pickguard, which are typical for the 1960s ES-350T thinline model. Some claim that the body looks deeper than a Byrdland or 350T, suggesting that it’s an L-5 CES. But other features – including the headstock’s “torch” inlay, white-outlined truss-rod cover, gold-plated tuners, f-hole bindings, multi-ply body binding and the tailpiece – strongly suggest it’s a Byrdland. Even Clapton said so.

Buy the Concert for Bangladesh on CD and vinyl here.

Fifty years ago, Bangladesh was in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Millions of refugees in what was formerly East Pakistan were fleeing genocidal massacres and rape in the Bangladesh War of Independence, as well as lingering devastation from the 1970 Bhola cyclone, the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, that left at least half a million dead in its wake. 

The people were starving, but their plight was largely unknown in the West. Ravi Shankar knew he had to do something to bring attention and aid to the country. The famed Indian sitarist reached out to his friend George Harrison and asked him to do what only a famous former Beatle could do: Bring musicians and fans together to help end the disaster.

What Harrison and Shankar achieved was a massive benefit concert that was the first of its kind. Held 50 years ago this summer, on August 1, the Concert for Bangladesh gathered rock and roll’s royalty in New York City for a pair of shows to raise money for – and awareness of – the humanitarian crisis unfolding halfway around the globe. 

In a matter of weeks, Harrison managed to secure participation from such luminaries as his fellow former Beatle Ringo Starr, keyboardist Billy Preston, pianist and guitarist Leon Russell, bassist and longtime Beatle friend Klaus Voormann, studio guitar ace Jesse Ed Davis, Zappa collaborator Don Preston, the up-and-coming band Badfinger, and a number of other musicians and singers. 

Together with Shankar and his fellow musicians, they performed a pair of sold-out concerts at Madison Square Garden, including a 2:30 p.m. matinee and 8:00 p.m. show.

The concerts drew 40,000 people and raised $250,000 for UNICEF, while the 1971 triple live album and 1972 documentary of the show eventually raised millions more. Even before the concert took place, Harrison had released his single “Bangla Desh” on the Beatles’ Apple label. The track, which detailed the plight of the Bangladeshi people, was put into heavy rotation in the lead-up to the shows, bringing the single to number 23 on the Billboard charts. 

Harrison’s achievement would prove nothing short of a miracle. No rock and roll musician had attempted anything like it before, and no template existed for a show of this size and with guests of such stature. 

The Concert for Bangladesh would cement the notion of a moral imperative for rock and rollers to do their part for those in need, as it laid the groundwork for the charity concerts that followed in the 1980s and beyond, including Live Aid and Farm Aid. 

Yet in the days before the show, Harrison was filled with doubt and insecurity. He hadn’t performed in front of a large crowd since the Beatles’ final tour, in 1966. But those wild shows were scripted affairs lasting roughly 30 minutes, with the band’s performance entirely secondary to the sight of the four mop tops shaking their bodies onstage. 

Concerts had grown up in the intervening years and become listening experiences. And this particularly lengthy two-show stint – from the planning to the staging to the musicians, many of whom were flying in from the U.K., India, and various parts of the U.S. – was all on Harrison’s shoulders. Many performers, like Leon Russell, had canceled other appearances, at great expense, to participate. 

As Harrison noted, “Nobody’s getting paid.” He was so focused on the concert’s purpose that he seemed to forget its sheer star power, and openly fretted that nobody would care enough to buy tickets.

Remarkably, among all his friends in the show, Harrison would be kept waiting, wondering and worrying over the attendance of two who were his closest: Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. At the time, Clapton was deep into the throes of heroin addiction and uncertain of his ability to perform. Dylan, meanwhile, was a recluse, having given his last live performance in 1969, at the Isle of Wight. 

But Harrison was among the best-connected people in rock at the time. As the August 1 concert date approached and Clapton increasingly looked like a no-show, he turned for help to another friend: Peter Frampton. 

Harrison had known the guitarist, then in Humble Pie, for a couple of years. Frampton tracked guitars on singer Doris Troy’s self-titled album, produced by Harrison for the Beatles’ Apple Records, and he played acoustic guitar on All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s third solo record. 

As it happened, Frampton and Humble Pie were touring in the U.S. that summer and spending time in New York City, where they were mixing their 1971 live breakthrough, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, recorded the previous May 28 and 29.

“On the weekends, we’d fly off to perform, opening the bill for many different artists, and on weekdays we’d be at Electric Lady Studios in New York with Eddie Kramer, mixing the Rockin’ the Fillmore album,” Frampton recalled to Guitar Player. 

“I knew I was going to see George’s shows, and I asked if he needed me to play guitar, but they were overbooked with guitarists. So I wished him all the best with the show and told him I’d come see it.” 

Unexpectedly, Frampton found himself invited to dine with Harrison and his wife, Patti, while they were in Manhattan. “Afterwards, we went back to the Pierre [Hotel], and he invited me up to their suite,” Frampton explains. 

“There were two electrics sitting by the window, and maybe one or two little amps. George asked if I wanted to play some guitar, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ trying to keep my excitement under control. 

“And without a word, he just started running through the songs they were going to do. My mind started going 14,000 miles an hour. I couldn’t understand why we were doing this if the guitar positions for the concert were filled. We must’ve played six to 10 songs, and he was checking me out to see if I was up to speed, which, of course, I was. How can you not be when it comes to the Beatles’ songs?” 

In the days afterward, Frampton flew south to play a couple of shows with Humble Pie. Back in New York City, the behind-the-scenes drama escalated as the August 1 concert date arrived. Frampton returned on the day of the show. 

“I’d missed the first one, but I planned to go to the second, and so I picked up my tickets and backstage pass,” he says. “I watched the entire show, and at the end, I made my way to the side of the stage. Terry Doran [Harrison’s personal assistant] saw me, and his eyes got really big. He said, ‘Where have you been?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’ve been on the road.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but we had no way of getting hold of you!’”

Confused, Frampton explained that no one had asked for his number, adding that Harrison knew he would see him following the show. “And Terry says, ‘Well, George wants to speak to you!’ So as he takes me backstage, he pulls me right into Bob Dylan, who gives me the ‘I could slice your head off with the back of my hand’ kind of look.”

Meeting up with Harrison, Frampton says he learned that Clapton had been bedridden while in New York City and unable to make any rehearsals. 

“This was during his heavy drug phase,” Frampton says. “Whether he had some or was trying to give them up, I don’t know. But when he wasn’t able to rehearse, they tried to get hold of me, because they wanted me there – just in case. I asked George and Terry, ‘You mean you wanted me to play?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’”

In the end, a cameraman from the film crew provided Clapton with methadone, making him well enough to perform both shows. “I’m glad that Eric was able to play somehow, since a lot of people would’ve been very disappointed if he didn’t, especially George,” Frampton says. 

“The last thing I wanted to be was a stand-in for Eric Clapton. I would’ve done it if George had gotten hold of me and the situation was more dire. But I’ll never know how dire it actually was.” 

According to Joey Molland, it was a closer call than Frampton knew. At the time, Molland was a member of the Welsh rock group Badfinger, one of Apple Records’ most prominent signings, thanks to their early hit “Come and Get It,” written and produced by Paul McCartney. 

The group had performed on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and Harrison had taken over producing the group for their 1971 album, Straight Up, in late May 1971. But as he found himself sidelined by the Bangladesh benefit, the sessions stalled and he invited the group to perform at the concerts. 

Molland, bassist Tom Evans, and guitarist Pete Ham performed on acoustic guitars, while Badfinger drummer Mike Gibbins played percussion. In addition, Ham assisted Harrison on his captivating performance of “Here Comes the Sun.” 

“We went to New York 10 days before the concerts,” Molland explains. “George had arranged for rhythm section rehearsals at the Steinway store in downtown Manhattan, where they had a big room upstairs. 

"It was a lot of fun, going over the intros, outros, and the sequencing of events within songs. I think we rehearsed Monday through Friday, and on the Saturday we went to the Garden to do a couple of hours of dress rehearsal.”

Molland confirms Clapton had been a no-show. But while Frampton believes the guitarist was already in New York City, Molland contends he was still in England. 

“I believe George sent a car for Clapton, and each day he stayed in his house,” he says. 

“I wasn’t privy to what was happening to him, and I don’t like to speculate, but he was going through something. But on Friday night, two nights before the show, he got on the plane in London, was in New York Saturday morning and was at the rehearsal in the afternoon. He had his parts together. I didn’t see him screw up, but mind you, I was really concerned about my own guitar parts.”

The dress rehearsal was the first time the members of the main band played together, though second drummer Jim Keltner had yet to show up. “Otherwise, the whole band was there, including Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, the Hollywood Horns and Jim Horn, and the backup singers with Don Nix,” Molland says. 

Given that Clapton played a Fender Stratocaster on All Things Must Pass the previous year, Molland expected him to show up with one or two. “But yes, Eric Clapton showed up, and he was playing a Gibson Byrdland, one of those beautiful, blonde Chuck Berry guitars, which we thought was a bit odd,” he says. “But everybody was enjoying it.” 

Just as the dress rehearsal wrapped up, Bob Dylan made his appearance, much to everyone’s surprise. “There had been rumors that ‘someone’ might come up, and we thought it’d be John [Lennon],” Molland explains. “But we had finished the rehearsal and were sitting in the auditorium, waiting for our cars, when Bob Dylan walked onstage with his harmonica stand and a small acoustic guitar, and started singing his songs for about 40 minutes. 

“George, Ringo, and Leon ran down to the stage, and they played a few songs all together before they put together that part of the set for the show. It was great to see them working through vocal harmonies.”

Reportedly, Dylan was still harboring doubts about performing at such a large event, much to Harrison’s frustration. ”Look, it’s not my scene, either,” Harrison told him. “At least you’ve played on your own in front of a crowd before. I’ve never done that.” Even after the dress rehearsal, Dylan remained noncommittal, giving Harrison one more thing to worry about. 

“I’m sure George was nervous,” Molland says. “He hadn’t played in front of an audience for a few years, and he had never played these songs live. Plus, the whole event was on his shoulders. He wasn’t sure if anybody was going to come.” 

But of course they did. Fans descended on Madison Square Garden to buy up tickets, and the two shows quickly sold out. Given the number of guitarists in the show, it’s difficult to track every guitar used over the two concerts. Harrison played a stripped Fender Stratocaster of unknown provenance, as well as a pair of Harptone acoustics: an L-6NC and an L-12NC. 

While Clapton played the Byrdland for the first show, he switched to his “Brownie” Stratocaster for the second concert. Don Preston arrived with his Gibson ’58 Explorer, a model that particularly excited Molland. “It’s just an incredible guitar,” he enthuses. “It always astounded me how good they sound, and how light they were.” 

Molland has a clear recollection of the acoustics he and his Badfinger bandmates played. “All of them were late-’60’s models, and they were used when we got them. I played a Gibson J-50, as I enjoyed the smoother tone.

"Tommy had brought his D-41, but he never played it; George had his Harptones and said he might be able to get some for us, but that never came together, so Tommy borrowed George’s 12-string. Pete played a Martin D-28. And there were no acoustic amps or pickups back then, so we were all mic’d up, and we sat next to the horn section. I was worried people wouldn’t be able to hear the acoustic guitars. But it turned out okay, because you can hear us on the record.

“We were a little bit nervous about playing right and doing the job well, so it wasn’t fun for us, but it was really exciting: the place being sold out, people losing their minds and doing something for the good of it all.” 

For Molland, one of the show’s highlights was organist Billy Preston’s impromptu dance during the band’s performance of his hit “That’s the Way God Planned It.” 

“He started to dance across the stage toward us, rolling his arms and skittling his legs,” the guitarist recalls. “And we were sitting on stools playing acoustic guitars, thinking, My God, he’s gonna run into us! But both shows went off as planned.”

In the end, Dylan showed up. Following his performance of “Here Comes the Sun” with Pete Ham, Harrison picked up his Fender Stratocaster and reviewed the set list taped to its body to see what was next: “Bob?” it read. Harrison looked around anxiously. To his relief, Dylan was making his way to the stage, his 1963 Martin D-28 strapped on and a harmonica in the holder around his neck.

“He had his guitar on and his shades,” Harrison recalled. “He was sort of coming on, coming [pumps his arms and shoulders]… It was only at that moment that I knew for sure he was going to do it.” Harrison turned to the microphone to deliver the biggest applause line of the show: “I’d like to bring on a friend of us all, Mr. Bob Dylan!”

The Concert for Bangladesh was a triumph of ingenuity and musical talent, a spur-of-the-moment project that launched a new concept in concerts. Its benefits, however, would take years to reach the afflicted country. Those involved in the concert’s planning, including Apple manager Allen Klein, neglected to register the event for tax-exempt status in the U.S. and U.K., with the result that millions in tax dollars were held up for years. 

But ultimately, the album and film would raise and deliver an estimated $45 million, and Harrison would pass along the wisdom he gained from the experience to Bob Geldof when he launched Live Aid, ensuring that event’s estimated £50 million found its way to victims of the Ethiopian famine. Harrison’s groundbreaking humanitarian work continues to inspire musicians around the world.

The ’70s was a bountiful time for analog effects pedals. Among the great fuzz boxes of the era, the Foxx Tone Machine stands proudly as one of the most expressive and more extreme. The pedal was the flagship of Foxx’s lineup, which ran for a few years before vanishing in the latter part of the decade.

Appropriately for a fuzz pedal, its metal case was covered in tightly cropped red or blue flocking that made it feel as velvety as it sounded. And while the pedals are hard enough to come by, the Stars & Stripes unit from 1972, shown here, is among the rarest.

According to the Tone Machine’s inventor, Steve Ridinger, very few of these red-white-and-blue beauties were made. “My memory is just a few, not 50 pieces,” he says. “It was very laborious masking all the areas to get the different flocking colors.”

Ridinger created the Tone Machine in Los Angeles in 1971, when he was just 19 years old. The circuit within it (which would be used in other Foxx products) was a relatively complex affair that offered more control than the average Fuzz Face or Maestro clone, the likes of which constituted a large proportion of the fuzz boxes available at the time.

The Tone Machine used four transistors and had a very effective octave-up sound (misspelled Octive on the control panel, though corrected in the brochures) that was activated by the toggle switch on the pedal’s side. This was itself a major bonus that performed better than many other octave and octave-fuzz units on the market, underscoring the veracity of the Tone Machine’s name.

The core sound is a thick, textured, gnarly fuzz, but the versatile Mellow-Brite tone control takes it from warm and gooey to bright and razor-like. This knob gives the Tone Machine much more range than most two-knob fuzzes, and even outperforms many others with tone knobs.

While many other lesser-known and also-ran fuzz efforts often failed to hold their own alongside the established classics, the Tone Machine quickly found an enthusiastic following and remained a highly regarded variation on the fuzz theme for decades to come.

Unlike the traditional stompbox-style Tone Machine and its partner, the Phase III, which arrived a little later, the majority of Foxx’s notable products came in rocker pedals that better served their bonus features and put even more control right at the player’s feet.

Among them were the Wa & Volume, Fuzz & Wa & Volume, O.D. Machine, Down Machine (a bass wah-wah), Loud Machine (a passive volume pedal), and Clean Machine, which offered both mellow and fuzzy sustain.

The top dog was arguably the Fuzz & Wa & Volume, often considered the catch of the lineup. In addition to its three obvious functions, it had the useful Foxx octave-up effect and four voicing modes for the wah.

The pedal packed plenty of sonic sculpting power, but it exhibited a few drawbacks. The volume pedal didn’t work quite as it should, while further problems were occasionally caused by the pedal’s inherently original looks. The fuzzy flocking that covered the metal enclosures often worked its way loose and ended up inside the box, where it gummed up the workings of the wah-wah potentiometer and gear.

But of all the Foxx company’s pedals, the Tone Machine remains the one many players loved best, and it grabbed the attention of several star users during its run and after. To hear some of its more extreme sounds, check out much of Adrian Belew’s work, particularly the song “Big Electric Cat” from his 1982 solo album, Lone Rhino.

The pedal’s thick fuzz and octave sounds were also creatively exploited by countless other electric guitar players including the likes of Parliament-Funkadelic’s Michael Hampton, Peter Frampton, Trent Reznor, and Billy Gibbons.

Having created such a legend in just a few years, and at such a young age, Ridinger continued to excel in the industry. In the 1990s, he rose to become head of the Evets Corporation, which purchased the Danelectro trademark in 1995 primarily to use the brand on a range of budget-friendly, retro-minded effects pedals. (Remarkably, Danelectro’s reissue guitars only came along later, after much demand from customers.)

Given Ridinger’s experience in the pedal world, the fact that so many of these colorful and affordable early Danelectro stompboxes also sounded good becomes far less surprising. Among them, the French Toast was based on the original Tone Machine.

Several popular homages to the Foxx Tone Machine have hit the market over the years, including a Foxx-branded reissue in the 2000s. Unsurprisingly, given Ridinger’s history, the more recent Danelectro 3699 Fuzz has received high marks from many players (and an Editors’ Pick Award from GP in 2019).

It includes the bonus of a Mid Boost switch and a second foot switch to kick in the octave effect.

Incidentally, 3699 was the last four digits of the Foxx company’s randomly assigned phone number in the early ’70s (and it spells out “FOXX” on a traditional telephone keypad).

Other options include Warm Audio’s Foxy Tone Box, which goes for the vintage-correct format but in orange flocking, and the Fulltone Ultimate Octave and Stomp Under Foot Silver Foxx, both of which also add a foot-switchable octave.

Wherever you get it, the Foxx Tone Machine is undoubtedly a mighty shape shifter of a circuit.

Essential Ingredients

• Fuzzy flocked covering in red and blue or Stars & Stripes (very rare)
• Controls for volume, sustain (fuzz), and Mellow-Brite (tone), plus Octive (octave) switch
• Original four-transistor fuzz and octave circuit
• Thick, evocative fuzz sound with useful octave-up option

Bag a Danelectro 3699 Fuzz at Sweetwater here.

Thanks to Southside Guitars for showing us these awesome vintage pedals.

“Out of the hits that I’ve had, I can’t underestimate its importance,” Peter Frampton says of “Do You Feel Like We Do.” Originally released as a six-minute studio cut on the guitarist’s second solo album, 1973’s Frampton’s Camel, the song became an instant classic thanks to the epic 14-minute version on his epochal 1976 live album, Frampton Comes Alive!

“That’s the version that helped break things wide open,” he says. “It sort of worked as the trailer for both the album and my concerts. ‘You want to know what Peter Frampton sounds like live? Listen to this!’”

"Woke up this morning..."

In preparation for Frampton’s Camel, Frampton assembled a band consisting of keyboardist Mick Gallagher, bassist Rick Wills and drummer John Siomos. “We did a lot of jamming back then,” he recalls. “We were a new band, and jamming was our way of figuring out our sound.”

One day, the guitarist came to rehearsal with his reel-to-reel tape machine, on which he’d recorded chord ideas and a melody for a new song. “I didn’t have much else to it,” he says. “We jammed a bit, and at one point somebody said, ‘Wind the tape back to three or four minutes in. You played a line that’s really cool.’ “That line turned out to be what I then used for the main hook riff. Then Mick started to play harmonies of the line on the keyboard.”

Stuck for a chorus, Frampton improvised what he considered to be a dummy lyric: “Do you feel like I do?” “It didn’t sound right, so I told the guys, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll come up with something better,’” he says. “Of course, I never did.”

After coming up with an A-to-E chord pattern for the verse, he wrote lyrics that summed up how he felt after a night of overindulgence: “Woke up this morning with a wine glass in my hand.” “They came right out,” he explains, “and they’re probably the most iconic lyrics I’ve ever written.”

Something's happening...

The band previewed the song at a few shows before recording it at New York City’s Electric Lady Studios. Frampton used his now famous 1954 Les Paul Custom electric guitar that he paired with a late-’50s Ampeg Echo Twin ampifier.

“That amp wasn’t designed for distortion, but it broke up beautifully and gave me a great sound,” he says. Getting the song on tape was relatively straightforward, but the band recorded two versions: one slower, one faster. “We thought the slower one was best, so that wound up on the album.”

Nobody in the guitarist’s camp or at his label thought the song was a hit. “It was a good FM deep track, and it got some play in various spots of the U.S.,” Frampton remembers. But over the next two years, during which time he released two more studio albums – 1974’s Somethin’s Happening and 1975’s Frampton – “Do You Feel Like We Do” began to stand out as an audience favorite.

“We closed the show with it, and we really started to draw it out and play with its dynamics,” he says. “The crowds seemed to love it more and more.” Adding to the excitement was his introduction of a talk box during one of the extended solo sections.

He first used the effects unit for the studio recording of “Show Me the Way,” but during his 1975 concerts he fully embraced the device. “People went nuts when I went to use the talk box,” Frampton says. “Hey, everybody needs a gimmick, and this was mine.”

Frampton is everywhere...

The release of Frampton Comes Alive! was a seismic cultural moment, and within months of the record’s appearance, Frampton went from playing theaters to selling out arenas. The double album sold in the millions, his posters adorned millions of teenagers’ bedrooms, and his presence on both AM and FM stations was a lock.

“I was everywhere,” he recalls. “It got to the point where I was sick of myself. I’d turn on the radio and hear myself. I’d change the station and land on myself again.”

Over the course of his career, Frampton never played a gig that didn’t include “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

“It’s my show closer, the ultimate capper to a concert,” he says. “What was really remarkable was when I would play with Lynyrd Skynyrd, I’d play ‘Do You Feel’ and they’d play ‘Free Bird,’ so you’d get the two longest FM songs in one night.”

Check out the awesome Gibson Custom Shop Peter Frampton "Phenix" Les Paul Custom at Guitar Center here.

We’ve all heard of guitar players “making the instrument talk,” but the unique effect known as a ‘talk box’ actually combines the sound of the human voice with a guitar signal.

One of the earliest forms of electric guitar effects, the genesis of this sound can be traced back to the 1930s when jazz guitarist Alvino Rey combined his electric steel guitar with his wife Luise’s voice using a military throat mic.

As eloquently explained here by Stringy the Talking Guitar...

Amazing, considering LSD had only just been invented.

In more recent times, well-known examples of the talk box effect include Richie Sambora’s electric guitar hooks on the Bon Jovi anthem “Livin’ On a Prayer” and Joe Walsh’s Heil Talk Box licks on “Rocky Mountain Way” from 1973.

Peter Frampton is also famous for using a Heil Talk Box in the 1970s. In fact, the guitarist became so closely associated with the effect he later launched his own brand, the Framptone Talkbox.

Some of Frampton’s best-known songs where the Heil Talk Box can be heard include the tracks “Do You Feel Like We Do" and "Show Me the Way" from his classic 1976 album Frampton Comes Alive!

But where did Frampton get the idea from? It seems the British guitarist first came across this unique sound in 1970 at Abbey Road Studios during a recording session for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album.

The session was attended by Nashville A-Team steel guitar player Pete Drake who showed Frampton the device that he used to outstanding effect (literally) on his 1964 Pete Drake And His Talking Steel Guitar hit, “Forever.”

Recounting a scene that sounds like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland Frampton told the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in 2007: “In some moment when nothing was going on [Drake] plugged up his little talk box... He put the little, tiny pipe in his mouth and all of a sudden he started singing to me (or the pedal steel did!)”

The novel tones of Drake’s ‘singing guitar’ brought to mind a sound that Frampton had previously heard on Radio Luxembourg. “It was like so many bells went off in my head,” he recalled. “My jaw dropped to the floor.”

“I invented this thing in 1959,“ claimed Drake during an interview in 1982 (though the device he used in 1964 to record "Forever" with has also been credited to pedal steel player Bill West.) “I made a station break for WSM [Radio station in Nashville] and then every radio station in the world called me the next day. I’ve done over 3,000 radio stations.

“Peter Frampton: when he was 18 years old, I was in England and he says, “How do you make the guitar talk?” I showed him, and he said, “Boy, I wish I could do that,” so I gave him one of my talk boxes. And he got rich off of it.” [laughs]

Frampton denies he ever took possession of Drake’s talk box. However, it wasn't very long after his initial encounter with Drake that Humble Pie engineer and creator of the Heil Talk Box – Bob Heil – gave him one.

Though the Dunlop HT1 Heil Talk Box is no longer in production, similar results can be achieved using the MXR Talk Box and Boss VO-1 Vocoder.

After starting out in 1965 at age 16 with the British pop rock group the Herd, Peter Frampton joined Humble Pie, where he established himself as one of rock’s premier guitarists.

He launched his solo career in 1972 with the band Frampton’s Camel before achieving superstar status in 1976 with his multi-Platinum breakthrough album, Frampton Comes Alive!

Blues guitar was huge in England when he was coming up. But how did Frampton manage to evolve his playing into something noticeably different from what other electric guitar greats of the day were doing, such as Peter Green, Mick Taylor and Eric Clapton?

“When I started to go see John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton up in London and other places, I suddenly realized that everybody was trying to be Eric,” Frampton told GP. “They were trying to look like him, play like him and use the same stuff he used.

“I loved Eric’s playing, always have. He’s been a major influence on everyone, including me, because his licks are masterful and it’s such a beautiful clean blues style.

“But I felt that everyone was going to end up sounding like Eric Clapton. It’s just too seductive, and I’ll go there too. However, because of my parents having brought me up on Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, I had this sort of inbred jazzy side to me from a very early age.

“When I was about 13 or 14, I started listening to Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Joe Pass, and then, later on, a very young George Benson with the Jack McDuff trio. So before and during the Herd was when I was really burying myself in those guys.”

Would you say your jazz-informed blues-rock style fully came to fruition in Humble Pie?

“Yes. When Steve Marriott and I formed Humble Pie and we were jamming together, he was hard blues and I was more lyrical jazz rock. I’m putting myself in my own box there, but that’s the only way I can describe it.

“The combination of the two styles pushed me into the first couple of albums of Humble Pie where I found that I had a style of my own. It wasn’t blues and it wasn’t jazz, but it was everything I’d got in my library of licks in my head, and now it’s just coming out sounding like me.”

Purchase the Frampton Comes Alive! (Deluxe Edition) here.

We were always very forward-thinking about the music we made together,” Reeves Gabrels says of his 10-year creative partnership with David Bowie. Beginning in 1989 with metallic hard-rock band Tin Machine, their alliance continued into the ’90s, when Gabrels co-produced a number of Bowie’s solo albums.

“Our whole thing was very much rooted in being in the moment. There wasn’t a lot of looking back going on between us.” Even so, Bowie told Gabrels he’d like to return to the studio and redo some songs from his 1987 album, Never Let Me Down. “The record seemed to gnaw at David a bit,” Gabrels recalls. “He’d had such a big hit with ‘Let’s Dance,’ and I think he felt obliged to follow up that success on Tonight and Never Let Me Down, but I think he did so half-heartedly. He told me that he’d kind of checked out mentally during the recording of Never Let Me Down, and he wanted a chance to take a mulligan. He would always say, ‘I just know there’s some good songs on it. I wouldn’t mind redoing some of them.’”

Gabrels knew what he meant. When he first heard the album, before working with Bowie, he and his “smart-ass musician friends” compared notes on the record. “We were like, ‘Gee, it’s 1987, but this seems a little 1985,’” he says. “It was very synthy, a little too Duran Duran-ish, if you will. But when I saw David perform tracks from the album on the [1987] Glass Spider tour, the music came off more muscular live than on record. It had grit to it. So I could see where he was coming from about revisiting those songs. It just wasn’t something I thought I should be a part of, and I always shot it down.”

Much to his surprise, and delight, Gabrels later took part in reworking not just a few songs from Never Let Me Down but the entire album. Titled Never Let Me Down 2018, the disc is part of the elaborately packaged box set David Bowie: Loving the Alien (1983–1988), the fourth in a series of retrospectives spanning the singer’s career from 1969 forward.

Guided by producer/engineer Mario McNulty, who had collaborated with Bowie in 2008 on a remix of the album track “Time Will Crawl,” Gabrels joined guitarist David Torn, drummer Sterling Campbell and bassist Tim Lefebvre – all selected by Bowie, in notes written before his passing in January 2016 – to breathe new life into the tracks that had plagued the singer over the years.

Recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, the resulting album is a punchier, far more guitar-heavy affair than its synth-laden original. Gabrels feels that Bowie would approve. “We absolutely tried to respect David’s wishes with this new version of the album,” he says. “What’s kind of funny is, we sort of went into this process with a veil of secrecy about what we were up to. I think the label people believed we were doing more of a remix than a whole re-imaging of the album, and we totally blew their minds when they heard it. David would be pleased by that, I think.”

So how did this project come about, and what led to you finally saying yes?

According to everyone involved in the Bowie estate trust, when David knew that he was dying, he left a five-year plan behind of what he wanted done with his music. From what I understand from Mario, he wrote out instructions to remake this record, and there was a list of musicians that he wanted. All of the people are post-1987 musicians. They’re the next gen.

Mario explained this to me. We met at Dean & DeLuca and talked for five hours about it. At first, I still felt like it wasn’t my place to get involved with stuff I hadn’t been a part of. Now, there is some precedent for this: The first thing I did with David was a remake of “Look Back in Anger,” but that wasn’t supposed to appear on a record, though it has subsequently appeared on [the 1991 reissue of] Lodger. My rearrangement of it was for a dance company presentation that David did.

So when this idea was presented to me, my reaction was, ‘Ah, this is rich! This is David’s final practical joke on me for all the times I said no. He knows I’m not going to say no to a dead man.’” [laughs] But then Mario played me the remix of “Time Will Crawl,” and I saw what the approach was – stripping it back, recording brand-new guitars, bass and real drums, and then getting rid of everything except what David played. So I came around and said, “I’m in.”

How did you and David Torn divvy up your guitar duties? You two had never worked together before, right?

No. We tried to recognize each other’s strengths and not get into any overlap. Torn was more the “clouds of frozen remorse” guy, whereas I was the “bull in the China shop, foot on the monitor” kind of guy. We did a lot of stuff independently, but there was one day we both recorded together at Electric Lady. We improvised textures simultaneously, trying to wrap ourselves around each other. I think I did more of a metallic kind of groove, and Torn did a sort of reverbed, tape-manipulated texture.

Did you keep any of the original guitar tracks by Carlos Alomar and Peter Frampton?

On "Zeroes" we kept Peter’s sitar, because to me that part was so ingrained in the song. If I had played it, I would have done something pretty much the same. And Carlos played a gated rhythm part on “Never Let Me Down” that just moved the song in the same way that Johnny Marr’s part on [the Smiths’] “How Soon Is Now?” does for that song, so it made sense to keep it. We weren’t trying to be cruel or destroy the original document, but this was David’s wish, so that absolved us from any guilt we might have had.

The synths are de-emphasized on “Day-In Day-Out,” but there are some parts that sound like keyboards – although they could be electric guitars.

Yeah, I know what you mean. We didn’t really keep any of the original synth stuff from the album. A lot of those textures are guitar-played or stuff that Mario did after the fact. The part you’re talking about – it sounds like a baritone sax or a synth – that’s actually an Alexander Syntax Error pedal. That just came to me, and it sounded right. You see, I didn’t listen to the original album before I went in the studio; I wanted to treat the whole thing like a demo. I didn’t want to be too married to what had been done before, because then I’d just try to re-create new versions of what had been done.

How did you approach “New York’s in Love”?

That one was interesting. Peter Frampton’s playing on the track had a certain pentatonic blues foundation. Now, I love Frampton. His live album with Humble Pie is one of my all-time favorites. But when I listened to what he did with the song, it got me thinking about how New York isn’t really about the blues anymore. It’s more multicultural, and there’s a definite Asian and Middle Eastern thing going on. You walk down the street on a Saturday night, and you see this new wave of immigrants, and you hear sirens going by.

I wanted to reflect that change with what I did. I wanted police sirens to come out of the guitar. I told Mario, “Put up that song and let me see what happens.” I figured out where the harmony was, and I just stretched it. I soloed through the whole song and tried different things, and I reacted to what was going on. When the song ended, Mario looked at me and said, “Well, that one’s done then.” [laughs]

Bowie’s big acoustic guitar sound that was featured on the remix of “Time Will Crawl” is still way up in this new version.

That was David’s thing at the time – an Ovation Adamas through a [Scholz] Rockman into a Fender Twin. You notice how gloriously ratty the acoustic is, which is exactly the same tone you hear on the first Tin Machine record. That was his sound for that album, which also points to the fact that, in lots of ways, it was a transitional record.

You added quite a lot of guitar to “Zeroes.” Toward the end, it’s a veritable guitar symphony.

Yeah, I built that up in the end. That song kind of took me by surprise. It was the first track that I worked on at Electric Lady. Mario and I listened to it, and we figured out what sounded really good and what could be different. The first thing we did was strengthen the acoustic guitar. We miked up my Breedlove acoustic, and I got the headphones on, and I realized that I had the same separation in my head that I used to have with David. His guitar would be in one ear, and my guitar would be in the other.

We used to cut acoustic guitars together like that. Often he’d play 12-string, and we would sit facing each other – two mics, headphones on. David felt things on the one and three, and I kind of sat more in the two and four, so we had a little push-pull thing going on. He would move his shoulders a certain way. He would look at me, but it was like he wasn’t there – he was somewhere else. He would cross his legs and one of his feet would bounce. I would take cues from his body language.

Anyway, at Electric Lady, I played the track with my eyes closed, and I would see him. But then when the track was done, I opened my eyes and he wasn’t there. [sighs] I was glad that I was in the live room all by myself. I had about 30 seconds to wipe the tears away before anybody came in. [pauses] It wasn’t always like that. Most of the time, it was like when we were working together, meaning he wasn’t always in the studio. He would say things like, “I’ll see you Friday. You know what to do.”

What was your guitar and gear setup for the sessions?

I have three signature models with Reverend, so I brought what I consider to be my “desert island” guitar, the Spacehawk. It works so well in most any situation but particularly when I’m playing at high volumes. I also had my original RG model, which has a Sustainiac in it, and a Trussart Steelcaster. During the sessions, I bought an R7 Les Paul, which ended up on “Beat of Your Drum.” So it was those four electrics and the Breedlove acoustic.

I’m always hesitant to discuss non-tube amps, but I really like the Yamaha THR100H [modeling amp], and I’ve found that I can use it in a number of ways. And it weighs about 10 pounds, which is always handy. I ran one side of it like it was a Fender Deluxe, and the other side like it was a Hiwatt.

My effects chain was basically what I use live with my band, the Imaginary Friends: an Ibanez Weeping Demon Wah, a Source Audio Multiwave Distortion, a modified Boss GE-7 EQ, an MXR Phase 90, an SIB Varidrive, a Line 6 M9, and then a Barefoot Pale Green Compressor and a Meris Ottobit Jr. pedal. Oh, and there was also the Alexander Syntax Error and a Korg Kaoss Pad. That’s it for pedals on the floor, but I also used the Line 6 Helix for recording direct.

You mentioned cutting acoustic guitars with David before. Nobody really talks about him as a guitarist. What kind of player was he?

David never identified himself as a guitarist, but he was quite good. For him, the guitar was a tool. I always liked for him to track an acoustic rhythm part, because he had a certain feel and a lope to his playing. When you see old pictures of him as David Jones the folk singer, or when he did “Space Oddity,” he was a 12-string guy. He’s one of the few people I ever knew who could tune a 12-string. [laughs]

Barre chords weren’t his thing. When you think about the chord voicings on “Space Oddity,” where he’s playing a sliding E form but he’s letting the open E and B strings ring out, that’s a byproduct of discomfort with playing barre chords. But it became a stylistic thing that worked for him.

David always picked such distinctive guitarists to work with. Did he ever tell you what he liked about your playing and why he chose you?

This is interesting. I met David during his Glass Spider tour. My ex-wife, Sara, was doing press for the tour, so I hung around backstage a lot and talked to him. He didn’t even know I played guitar, and I never told him. He just thought that I knew a lot about music and art. But Sara gave him a tape of my band, and he listened to it. So one day I’m at home and he called me. I thought it was a practical joke, and I said, “All right, who the fuck is this?” And he goes, “It’s David. Sara gave me the tape, and you sound like the guy I’ve been looking for. Why didn’t you tell me you play guitar?”

So I flew to Switzerland and went right to the studio with him. The first thing we did was work on the remake of “Look Back in Anger.” He said, “I need you to do stuff on the beginning and end, and then play guitar through the song.” And I said, “Well, what are you thinking?” And he goes, “This should be like German gothic cathedrals.” And I said, “All right…”

So I guess that was my audition with him. I went to stay at his house in Switzerland. I ended up being there for a month, but I remember at the end of the first week, I said, “Why am I here?” Because it wasn’t really clear what we were doing. And he laughed and said, “Basically, I need somebody that can do a combination of Beck, Hendrix, Belew and Fripp, with a little Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King thrown in. Then, when I’m not singing, you take the ball and do something with it, and when you hand the ball back to me, it might not even be the same ball.”

And you were like, “I can do that.”

More or less. [laughs] That was the start of it.

Buy David Bowie: Loving the Alien (1983–1988) here.

If ever a guitar maker qualified for the prize of having the most guitars in the hands of world-dominating rock stars while remaining unrecognized as a brand name, it would be Tony Zemaitis. His custom-made guitars have been played by artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Marc Bolan, Donovan, Bob Dylan, David Gilmour, Peter Frampton, Ronnie Wood, Ronnie Lane, James Honeyman-Scott…

And yet, outside of enthusiast and collector’s circles, if you had mentioned the name Zemaitis in the U.S.A. in the pre-Internet days, most music fans and guitarists alike would have drawn a blank. On the other hand, describe “one of those fancy, engraved metal-front electric guitars shaped like a Les Paul,” and suddenly many of those same people would know exactly what you were talking about.

The guitar maker was born Antanus Casimere Zemaitis in London, in 1935, to Lithuanian-born parents. He became serious about luthiery in the 1960s after making a few guitars for his own use while playing in blues clubs around the city. Zemaitis first became known for crafting finely wrought acoustic guitars, which found their way to Hendrix, Clapton and Donovan, among others. But he began to concentrate on making electric guitars in the ’70s and into the ’80s, and those instruments garnered more attention.

Zemaitis’s concept of a metal-fronted guitar came from discussions with Clapton in 1969, who had wondered what a silver guitar would sound like. The notion stuck with the luthier, and sometime later he added a plain aluminum metal front to an early electric test guitar and found it helped eliminate feedback, and even seemed to improve tuning and intonation.

He built his first such instrument for Groundhogs guitarist Tony McPhee in 1971 and made another one later that year for Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood. The latter instrument’s metal plate was tooled by shotgun engraver Danny O’Brien, whose handiwork became an essential part of the Zemaitis look.

Wood’s use of his Zemaitis with the Faces on the popular TV show Top of the Pops helped launch a craze for the distinctive-looking guitars, and a year later he commissioned a second, slightly different Zemaitis with a black body and a round, more centralized metal plate, a style now known as a “disc front.”

Devoid of their ornate metal plates, the instruments themselves are relatively straightforward, albeit high-quality custom-made guitars. Zemaitis used his own in-house bridge and tailpiece designs, which usually displayed further engraving, and sometimes even carried the model name, as in the rare left-handed example from 1983 pictured here.

He favored the 24-fret necks that were often seen as an upgrade in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and toward the latter part of that era he sometimes added elaborate switching options to the electronics, as seen below.

Seeking a new original look to rival that of his metal-front guitars, Zemaitis also built several examples with elaborately “tiled” mother-of-pearl tops, which both Wood (below) and Honeyman-Scott would also own.

In the latter part of his career, the luthier made only some eight or 10 guitars per year, and his production was never much higher than that during the peak years of the ’70s and ’80s. He retired in 2000 and passed away in 2002. He had been in discussions to license his designs to another manufacturer at the time of his death, and the Zemaitis brand was reborn with the blessing of his wife, Ann, and son, Tony Junior, in the Japanese-made guitars of Zemaitis International.

The most desirable of the guitars are still engraved by Danny O’Brien. Meanwhile, original Zemaitis guitars made by Tony himself are more desirable than ever on the collector’s market.

Essential Ingredients

• Solid mahogany body with ornately etched metal top
• Glued-in mahogany neck
• Ebony fingerboard with 24 frets
• Dual humbucking pickups with elaborate switching
• Zemaitis in-house bridge and tailpiece

Visit the Zemaitis website to check out their current line-up of guitars.

GP would like to thank Rumble Seat Music for showing us this incredible 1983 Zemaitis Custom De Luxe.

Peter Frampton's final recording with Humble Pie was, by some irony, the band’s most successful, and is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential live albums of the decade. 

Culled from four sets recorded on May 28 and 29, 1971, at New York City’s Fillmore East, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore was released that November as a double-album set. Humble Pie were second on the bill, after Fanny and before headliner Lee Michaels, a fact hardly anyone seems to remember, so great was the album’s impact on rock history. 

Among the artists who have felt its influence were the Van Halen brothers, Aerosmith, Kiss, Quiet Riot, Skid Row, and other acts ranging from Tesla to the Black Crowes to Rival Sons, and beyond. 

There were several reasons for that explosive impact: the lengthy but gripping improvs, the deep fatback grooves and monster fills by drummer Jerry Shirley and bassist Greg Ridley, the outrageous charisma of the late singer and rhythm guitarist Steve Marriott, and, surely, the massive guitar orchestra pouring out of Frampton and Marriott’s 4x12 cabs, a sound which presaged the so-called “brown” sound by a good seven years. 

“So many players have asked me what the setup was for those performances,” Frampton says, “and I have to tell you, it was so simple. It was just a 100-watt Marshall plugged into a 4x12 Marshall slant cabinet, and a 50-watt Marshall into a 4x12 slant cabinet, with the two amps connected together. And I plugged my Les Paul Custom into that. 

“That’s it. That’s all there was. I used my volume pot on my guitar to turn down during the vocal parts, and I knew that my max throw on it was solo level. No echo, no delay, no boost. If there was any reverb or delay effect to speak of, it was just the amazing acoustics in the old Fillmore East.”

Indeed, that natural crowd and room ambiance – picked up wisely by engineer Eddie Kramer on left, center, and right room mics – is one big reason why so many classic live albums were recorded there, including Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys and the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East, among others. 

And Frampton is not the only guitarist on the album with a stupendous sound. Marriott’s single-pickup Epiphone Coronet, strung impossibly with .012s and driving a Marshall amp rig nearly identical to Frampton’s, positively roars. And even given Frampton’s quicksilver modal runs, it’s Marriott’s stinging Chicago blues licks, which he liberally injects into his raucous, sing-rapping stage banter, that very nearly steal the show. 

“I was a huge admirer of Steve’s playing from the first time I saw him play with the Small Faces,” Frampton says. “He’s always voted right up there as one of the all-time greatest voices, but he’s sorely underrated as a guitar player.” 

Indeed. Listen to the nearly 30-minute version of Dr. John’s “I Walk on Gilded Splinters,” or the epic prog-blues of “Rollin’ Stone,” and you’ll hear two guitarists working in uncanny tandem, even as Frampton blends dorian/blues licks (“I Don’t Need No Doctor”), Aeolian runs (“Stone Cold Fever”), and Mixolydian lines (“I’m Ready”), along with crisp arpeggios and swinging major and minor pentatonic licks (“Hallelujah, I Love Her So”).

Meanwhile, Marriott charges at ferocious five chords, swooping minor-to-major-third blues hammers and trills, and savvy minor-seventh chord comping. 

The alchemy between the two players on Fillmore created a new paradigm for rock guitar, one where jazz modality and blues grit could combine for blissful moments of twin-guitar harmony, flashes of surprising counterpoint, and even stark contrast.

“Steve was great at working out double solos with me,” echoes Frampton, “until we’d really sound like one big guitar. I just learned so much from Steve’s attack and his conviction on the instrument.”

No one knows Peter Frampton's gear better than his longtime Nashville-based guitar tech, Darren Hurst. We’ll leave it to him to give us the rundown on Peter’s expansive setup from 2019’s Finale: The Farewell Tour.

“Peter’s rig seems really complex at first glance, but it is deceptively simple in terms of signal flow,” Darren says. “It’s built on the idea of the shortest and cleanest signal path at all times, and is basically a center dry/left-and-right wet system, designed and built by Mark Snyder. 

“Peter’s main tone is very simple: It’s a Klon Centaur into a John Suhr clone of a 1970s Marshall JMP [modded by José Arredondo] into a single 4x12 cabinet loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s. There is a second Suhr Marshall clone that serves as a backup to the main head, and the proper ‘José’ Marshall that serves as the Talk Box amp. 

"The main Marshall is electronically split so that the preamp section and power amp are separated electronically and can be used individually. 

"In addition to the Marshall preamp, there’s a Fender Bassman and an Egnater preamp that can be chosen, but they all hit the power section of the Marshall, and this gives the various preamp sounds a very nice common characteristic. The clean intro to ‘Lines on My Face,’ which uses the Bassman preamp, is a good example.

“Using a Mesa/Boogie Switch-Track amp switcher, a pair of Voodoo Lab GCX loop switchers and an Axess Electronics RX1 Router Switcher, all pedals and loop effects are only punched into the signal chain when required. The front-end effects are exactly what they sound like – they’re part of the input signal chain to the main instrument input of the amps. 

“They’re divided into two categories: drives and boosts, and modulation. In the Drive section, you have a few other stompbox flavors to choose from in addition to the Klon Centaur. There’s a Fulltone OCD, a Voodoo Lab Sparkle Drive, an Origin Effects RevivalDrive – which was a new addition for the Finale tour – and a Creation Audio Labs MK4.23 Clean Boost, which just adds a touch of lift to the Marshall. 

"There’s also a Foxx Tone Machine Octave Fuzz, which gets used for about 15 seconds total in the show. And there’s an Origin Effects Cali76, which is basically a Universal Audio 1176–style compressor in a pedal.

“The Modulation front-end effects consist of an original MXR Phase 90 ‘Script’ pedal and an Electro-Harmonix POG Polyphonic Generator, which sees heavy use on ‘Lying.’ 

"Peter also has a pair of Mu-Tron pedals: a Mu-Tron Phasor II and a Mu-Tron III+ Envelope Filter/Auto-Wah, which are featured in his cover of ‘Black Hole Sun.’ One is set to an octave down, and the other to an octave up. The Mu-Trons are really musically expressive effects, and the filter responds to your attack and touch.

“The last few front-end effects are mounted on a pedalboard at his mic position and consist of a Digitech Whammy II, a Dunlop MC-4040 CAE Wah, and two Gig-FX pedals: a Chopper Tremolo and a Mega-Wah that is set to do auto-wah. 

"Peter often uses these two pedals together, as the blend of the Mega-Wah and the Chopper create an interesting and dynamic stutter effect. On this pedalboard, there’s an MXR Micro Amp, as well, to keep the signal at unity gain with the rest of the rig, and it is always on.

“The loop effects consist of three main delay/reverbs: Two T.C. Electronic M3000 Studio Reverb processors, and a Korg SDD-300 delay which is based on the classic Korg SDD-3000 rack delay. It has a really nice, warm decay that gets darker as the tails drop off. All delays are pre-programmed to the song. 

“There is also a T.C. Electronic TC 1210 Spatial Expander + Stereo Chorus Flanger, and an Eventide Eclipse V4. Peter also has an Alesis Q20 20-bit processor for a vintage Shadows/Hank Marvin–style delay. 

"The stereo effects are fed from the main Marshall’s effects loop, but they return to a Rane mixer, and the output is sent to a Mesa/Boogie Stereo 2:100 Rectifier stereo power amp, and this feeds the left and right Marshalls.  

“We’ve got two Leslie 147 cabinets with us that were modified by Murph at Nashville Hammond, and they accept a guitar signal from the front-end effects. The Leslie cabs are always on, and the rotary speed can be controlled by the Axess Electronics FX1 foot controller, which forms the heart of the switching system.“

"There are two of these pedalboards: one onstage at Peter’s mic position, and one in ‘guitar world,’ as I also punch various effects changes throughout the show. We created a split off the front-end effects as well that feeds a 1964 Vox AC15, which sits behind the Marshalls offstage, and they’re firing backwards to keep the stage volume at a reasonable level. The Vox is always on, and it adds some nice fullness in the midrange. 

“The last effect that must be mentioned, of course, is the Keeley/Framptone Talk Box which is based on the Bob Heil Talk Box that Peter used for many years. The Talk Box is fed with signal from the ‘José’ Marshall and is just such a signature effect of Peter’s. One thing that is really important with the Talk Box, though, is to make sure all your fillings are in place before you put your mouth on that tube!”

The Electric Guitar Vault

• Gibson 1954 Les Paul (the original “Phenix”)
• Gibson PF Les Paul Custom #2
• Gibson PF Les Paul Custom #3 (“While My Guitar Gently
• Weeps”)
• Gibson PF Les Paul Custom #4 (Spare, tuned to Eb)
• Gibson 1961 SG (tuned to Drop D)
• Gibson 1960 Les Paul (“Paulina”)
• Gibson 1964 Red ES-335
• Gibson 1960 Les Paul Reissue (Tom Murphy-aged)
• Gibson 1960 Les Paul Reissue
• Gibson 2009 Sunburst ES

The Acoustic Guitar Vault

• Epiphone 1964 Texan
• Martin D-42 #2
• Martin D-42 #3
• Martin D-42 #4
• Epiphone PF Signature “1964”
• Texan #1
• Maton SRS808c #1
• Maton SRS808c #2

In 2006, Peter Frampton’s keen desire to shine the primary spotlight on his guitar playing – and perhaps to put to rest the teen-idol stigma that had frustrated him since his 1976 blockbuster, Frampton Comes Alive! – was reciprocated with a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Pop Performance. 

The album was Fingerprints, a 14-track guitar tour de force that featured cool covers of songs like Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” along with funky, accomplished originals and guest appearances from Hank Marvin, Warren Haynes, Mike McCready, John Jorgenson, and a reunited Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts.  

In the years since, Frampton has cut a slew of solid albums that speak to his legacy as both a pivotal jazz-inspired rock player who bucked the British blues boom and an open-minded elder statesman, as likely to champion Radiohead and Pearl Jam as Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell. 

Indeed, it’s Radiohead’s thorny and lurching “Reckoner” that acts as the lead-off track on the Peter Frampton Band’s latest album, the instrumental covers collection aptly titled Frampton Forgets the Words.  

Frampton and his band – keyboardist Rob Arthur, bassist Steve Mackey, guitarist Adam Lester, and drummer Dan Wojciechowski – perform a spectrum of his favorite soul and rock tunes, ranging from Sly & the Family Stone’s “If You Want Me to Stay” and George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity” to David Bowie’s “Loving the Alien” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” 

In addition to the elegant melodic heads in each song, the far-reaching album finds the 71-year-old guitarist evoking a similar modal majesty in his solos as he did on Frampton Comes Alive! and Humble Pie’s 1971 classic Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, but with an arguably more mindful delivery.  

Perhaps, Frampton says, the encroaching physical limitations from his 2018 diagnosis of Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM) has informed a certain savoring of each note. 

Following his diagnosis, Frampton set out in summer 2019 on what he billed as Finale: The Farewell Tour, where he skillfully, and with apparent joy, reached into his ample back pages, showering outdoor amphitheaters across the country with that roiling, Leslie-assisted churn on “It’s a Plain Shame” and “Doobie Wah,” and digging into the brisk, Les Paul–plus-Marshall bark of Humble Pie classics like “Four-Day Creep” and “I Don’t Need No Doctor.” But the sense that this really was his goodbye was a concerning one.

In conversation, Frampton remains upbeat, resilient, gracious and still allied with the same excitement that first stirred his desire to play as a kid, busking on the steps of Bromley Technical High School with a young David Bowie.

With the latest and most accurate signature version of his legendary, lost-and-found three-pickup 1954 Gibson Black Beauty – a.k.a. the Phenix – now in production at the Gibson factory in Nashville, Frampton, too, it seems, has once more risen to new heights and plumbed new depths as a player, producer, and performer.

As he wrote of his many ups and downs in his best-selling 2020 autobiography, Do You Feel Like I Do?, “I’ve been to the moon and back without a rocket. But I’ve always managed to stay optimistic. There’s always reason to hold out hope.”

I’m so fond of your phrasing and touch on this record. The vibrato is very careful and deliberate, and the tone feels really curated, as well. Is there wisdom coming to you as a player now that might not have been there 50 years ago when you played with Humble Pie? 

It’s very hard to explain the things one does on a guitar, because I’ve been doing it for so long. I will say this: I do think that we are the sum of our years. We gain wisdom. I’ve been playing all my life. I’ve listened to many, many different players and many different pieces of music that I just love, and I will often sit down and play them note-for-note simply because I love them. 

Now, what has perhaps played into this feeling you’re describing in my playing, along with having all these years of experience, is that, when I was diagnosed with IBM, my muscle disease, it was obviously a devastating diagnosis, knowing that one day certain muscles won’t work anymore, and those muscles are in my hands, which obviously I need as a guitar player.

I’d like to think that every time I play, I always put my heart and soul into it and play with a blank mind, if you will. I’ve done all the research, all the work required up until I get to that solo. So whatever it is I’m playing on guitar, I try to blank my mind out at that moment and just play and let it happen.

I do think that my predicament has brought out something else in my playing, yes, and I think it’s a feeling of... well, it’s both a happy and a sad thing. I so enjoy playing, as we all do as lifelong guitar players. Perhaps knowing now that I don’t have forever, I do believe it’s brought even more soul into my playing, if that makes sense.

Well, let me just confirm that there are some truly soulful moments on this record. Let’s talk for instance about your playing on the last song of the record, “Maybe,” originally performed by Alison Krauss, a fellow Nashvillian. 

The reason I chose that song over many that I had on my wishlist was that my dear writing partner of many years, Gordon Kennedy, wrote that with Phil Madeira, who originally played it for Alison Krauss, and he sent their version of it to me shortly after it was recorded. It’s one of my all-time favorite songs, and you simply have to hear her sing it. 

As soon as we got our version mixed, the first thing I did was to send it to Alison because she inspired me so much with her voice on that track. If something gives me goose bumps – like I have right now just talking about Alison Krauss and this song – that’s what I want music to do for me. 

This is also why I wanted to record a version of Jaco Pastorius’s “Dreamland.” Again, it’s one of my all-time favorite melodies, written by Jaco and the late Michel Colombier.

This was just a very gut-level thing: “I want to play this song – it’s calling to me.” I was at the very beginning of my exploration of Jaco’s melodic sense at that time, but I thought keyboardist Rob Arthur and I should give it a try. 

We really just recorded it as an exercise, but we liked it so much that we decided to put the band on it as well. Again, this happened only because I wanted to play it as a personal tribute to Jaco and what he’s taught me. I love it when music happens like that.

In some ways, you’re revealing aspects of the tonalities of these songs by virtue of playing them as instrumentals – tonal qualities that maybe weren’t really magnified in the originals. A good example is George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity.” The song has this very deliberate, mindful pace, and then there’s that G diminished chord – or one could hear it as a C-7b5 chord – and you just find so much space and color and melancholy there. 

I’m not very well-versed in theory terms, but yeah, that particular chord is extremely important. In fact, somebody else in the band was playing it slightly differently than the original, and I said “No, that’s not it. That voicing changes the vibe of it.” I wanted that exact same feeling and mood. 

Now, the reason I did “Isn’t It a Pity” goes back to the day in early 1970 when I went down to Abbey Road for the first time to play acoustic guitar on what would become George’s great classic, All Things Must Pass. 

We recorded about six tracks over the course of 10 days or so. One morning, after a late tracking session, I walked into the control room and all the band were there, just starting to arrive, and George said to Phil Spector, “Play them ‘Isn’t It a Pity.’” 

Well, the mix he played completely freaked me out. Every tape machine in the room was going, and the control room seemed like it was spinning. There was echo coming from who knows where and this huge swell of sound, though there’s probably only five people playing on the track. 

It was so haunting. That chord is the one that triggers everything. It wouldn’t be anything if it weren’t for that one note change.

When I was studying your solos from Humble Pie, it was a great learning experience for me. [James Rotondi has been playing guitar for Jerry Shirley’s recent touring lineup under the Humble Pie banner, in tandem with former Bad Company guitarist Dave “Bucket” Colwell — Ed.] 

You generally play “on the chord” inside a progression, but when you stretch out to play over vamps, what keeps coming up for many of us is the modal aspect of your playing. Along with partial chord rakes and arpeggios, we hear a lot of Dorian and Mixolydian mode in your playing. What was your “aha” moment with realizing what the elements were to creating your own style? 

Well, I honestly don’t know what mode I’m in as a human being or a player. [laughs] Honestly, I’ve never known what mode I’m playing in. In fact, years ago, a dear friend of mine said, “You know you’re doing a Mixolydian mode here,” and I said, “What are you talking about?” And he sent me all the modes written out, and I realized, Oh, okay. That’s what they are, and I see why someone might interpret my playing along those lines. And then I put it down. I just don’t like to think too much about what I’m playing. 

But I did have a big “aha” moment once, of the kind you’re describing. It was when Humble Pie recorded the Rock On album in 1971, and we did the song “Stone Cold Fever.” 

I think I was out there with the guys for a few takes, and I’m playing my solo every take, and I’m going, Oh, gosh, I’m going to be worn out by the time I’m ready to do my solo overdub. So I stopped playing, and the three of them finished cutting the track. 

We all came into the control room and listened to it. I listened to the guitar playing I’d done, especially the elongated solo part, the one I thought wasn’t even a keeper, and I got this great feeling. I said to myself, “I think I’ve just realized my own style; I think that all these years I’ve been listening to everyone and their mate play – and stealing things from them – are over.”

When this happens, suddenly, you can play the same lick as Eric Clapton and it doesn’t sound like Eric Clapton. You can play the same lick as Jeff Beck, but you’ll never sound like Jeff Beck again. From now on, you’re only going to sound like you.

Once you’ve learned all those things from other players, and then they settle in your subconscious, they’re in the library of information now, but that’s it. You’re the one in charge. 

I realized at that moment, standing behind [producer] Glyn Johns as he played the track back with all the guys. That’s when I realized that I had achieved something that I’d always wanted to do. 

I still had a long way to go, and I still feel like I have a long way to go. We’re never finished learning. But at that moment, I knew I was on the right track. I’d arrived at my unique voice on the instrument. All of a sudden, I had my style.”

• Peter Frampton Forgets the Words is out now via UMe.
• To make a donation to the Peter Frampton Myositis Research Fund, visit here

Gibson has teamed up with Peter Frampton to create the new “Phenix” Les Paul Custom VOS guitar.

First teased back in January, with few accompanying details, the new Custom Shop "Phenix" is a replica of Frampton's legendary Les Paul Custom of the same name, which was pictured on the cover of his blockbuster 1976 album, Frampton Comes Alive!, and was thought to be lost forever in a 1980 cargo plane crash, only to be miraculously recovered in 2011. 

Like the original, the new Custom Shop Phenix features a mahogany body and neck, and an ebony fingerboard with custom pearl inlays.

It features three open coil Gibson Custom humbuckers, with custom wiring, a 3-way toggle switch, and volume and tone knobs for the neck and bridge pickups, and another pair of knobs specifically wired to the middle pickup.

Other appointments include gold hardware, Grover tuners, Schaller Strap Locks, and Frampton's signature on the headstock.

“My brand-new Gibson Les Paul Custom VOS has arrived, and boy is it good,” Frampton said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more pleased with the look and sound.

"Gibson has gone that extra mile in every area to make this feel and sound the closest to my original, storied Phenix Les Paul Custom guitar. The neck and weight of this mahogany guitar will amaze you at how great it feels and how light it is (and it’s even a hair lighter than the Phenix). This is the real deal.”

The Gibson Peter Frampton signature “Phenix” Les Paul Custom VOS is available now  – in an Ebony finish – for $6,999.

For more info on the guitar, stop by gibson.com.

As part of the unveiling of its 2021 lineup, Gibson has announced new signature guitars for Marcus King, Jerry Cantrell, Peter Frampton, Sergio Vallin, and Slim Harpo.

Details and specs are still fairly hard to come by on all of the new models, but here's what we know so far. 

First, there's the Marcus King ES-345 (pictured above). Based on King's own ’62 ES-345, the new signature guitar features a sideway Vibrola tailpiece, split parallelogram inlays, and a “Custom Made” plaque behind the bridge.

Second, there's the Peter Frampton “Phenix” Les Paul Custom VOS. This will likely be a wider reissue of the ultra-limited-edition 2015 replica of Frampton's legendary triple-humbucker Black Beauty. 

As such, we're expecting a mahogany body and neck, an ebony fingerboard, a pearl custom inlay, and a ’54 Les Paul Custom holly veneer headstock. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not the “Phenix” Les Paul Custom VOS will boast the aged finish of the 2015 reissue.

Third among the new signatures is a new Les Paul for Jerry Cantrell, the “Wino” Custom. Given the guitar's name, we're guessing this is a replica of the Alice in Chains guitarist's ’90s Wine Red Custom Shop Les Paul.

Additional signature models were also announced for Maná's Sergio Vallin – a 1955 Les Paul Bigsby – and Slim Harpo, an ES-330.

We'll bring you more info on all of the new signature models as soon as we have it. For now though, keep your eyes on gibson.com.

“All I ever wanted to do was play guitar, and it’s taken me many different places – physically and mentally,” Peter Frampton writes in his new autobiography, Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir. 

Written with Alan Light, the tell-all elaborates thoroughly on that statement, as the guitarist reveals his career highs with Humble Pie and his monster solo breakthrough album, Frampton Comes Alive!. and his personal lows, including his struggles with substance abuse and recent battle with the muscle disease inclusion body myositis. 

In addition to sharing stories about his friendships with artists like George Harrison and David Bowie, Frampton discusses his own relationship with the guitar, including one very special – and now quite famous – instrument: his mid-1950s Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty.”

That guitar is the subject of this excerpt from the forthcoming memoir. In it, Frampton tells the story behind how he recovered the Custom years after it was presumed lost in a plane crash.

Frampton acquired the guitar in 1970, while he was a member of Humble Pie, from his friend Marc Mariana. As the guitar’s owner, Mariana had switched out the guitar’s P-90s with humbuckers and sanded down the neck. 

Frampton loved the Black Beauty and made it his main guitar, using it for Humble Pie’s breakthrough album, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, and his own Frampton Comes Alive!, where it appears on the cover.

The guitar continued to serve him until 1980. That November, Frampton and his band narrowly escaped Panama after they were forced to cancel a concert there, incurring the wrath of then-president Manuel Noriega. The group’s gear was less lucky: The cargo plane carrying it crashed on takeoff from Curaçao.

In fact, the Custom was among four guitars that survived with minimal damage, though this information was never passed along to Frampton.

The Black Beauty was subsequently sold to a musician in Caracas, Venezuela who played it for 15 years. Its origins were finally discovered when his son brought it to a local luthier named Donald Balentina, who was also an immigrations officer at the Curaçao airport. 

Balentina instantly knew the identity of the guitar and made contact with Frampton through the guitarist’s manager, Lisa Jenkins. But when he told the owner’s son he knew of the guitar’s background, the boy fled with the instrument. Frampton’s excerpt picks up the story in 2011, two years later.

Two years go by and I thought I’d lost the guitar forever. But then the son of the current “owner” came back to Donald’s place again. He asked him, “So how much are you going to pay me for this guitar? I want to buy another one.” 

Donald asked, “What do you want for it?” And the boy said $5,000 – which was pretty close to the price of a nice new Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul. He said, “Give me your number and I’ll contact Mr. Frampton.”

Donald called Lisa Jenkins to let us know that he had made contact with the boy again, and he now wanted to sell the guitar. Lisa immediately started talking with Donald to facilitate the return of my old Black Beauty. Lisa suggested that we all meet in Nashville at the hotel where I always stayed when I drove in from Cincinnati. 

But we think Donald was worried that we were going to have whoever brought the guitar back arrested in Miami by the FBI, because it was still technically stolen merchandise.

I had no such intent – all I ever wanted was to have my lost treasure back in my hands, and that it wasn’t going to cost me an arm and a leg. This goes on and on; he’s scared to bring it, and then he said that he couldn’t pay for the guitar himself, anyway.

Donald went to Curaçao’s Minister of Tourism and explained the situation. He said, “Look, it will be great if Peter Frampton gets his guitar back after so many years, and the island’s Minister of Tourism gets to be the savior!” I guess he loved the idea, because in the end, both Donald and the Minister of Tourism flew up from Curaçao, bringing the guitar with them.

Before they got on a plane, though, they were still worried that I was going to have them arrested. Lisa told them to call the hotel in Nashville we had booked for them, and once the hotel confirmed that they did have reservations, the trip was on. I could then, and only then, begin to see a light at the end of a 32-year-long tunnel.

We had three cameras set up in the suite waiting. My tour manager, Donnie Lewis, had a friend stationed there who does personal security. We had no idea how this was going to play out.

The two very excited travelers came in and everyone was introduced. The thing I noticed first was the case that was covering the guitar. When I got my very first guitar, the case was just a plastic cover and a zip; it kept the dust off, but it wasn’t protective. Well, that’s what the Gibson was in, I swear.

Donald had read everything anyone had ever said about this guitar. He handed it to me, and it’s a very light Les Paul, so before I even took the cover off I could feel the weight of it. He said, “It’s light, isn’t it?” 

Without even looking, I could just feel it was mine. I finally got the cover off and it was just like putting on an old pair of extremely comfy shoes. “Yes, it’s mine.” And there she was! Back home!

Once the expletives, cheers, and thank yous had all died down a bit, I was left in this wonderful kind of shock with a shit-eating grin. During the drive over to the Gibson Custom Shop, I couldn’t help feeling I was having a weird dream and I would wake up any minute. We had some fine guitar aficionados waiting to see and check this baby out.

All my friends at Gibson – Rick Gembar, SR VP/GM; Mike McGuire, head of the Custom Shop; and George Gruhn and Walter Carter – were there studying it, taking this plate off and that knob off. They finally agreed that it was a 1954/’55 Black Beauty retrofitted with three humbucking pickups (the serial number had been sanded off before Marc Mariana gave it to me).

I got the guitar back for the last couple days of rehearsal before the second half of the Frampton Comes Alive! 35 tour, but the band didn’t know I had it yet. I had my back to them as I put it on. We never run through “Do You Feel” or any of the older songs we play every night, so I casually said, “Let’s run through the beginning of ‘Do You Feel,’ just so I can check my sound.” 

I counted it in, we started to play the intro, and I turned around – and I could see the band had a look of surprise in their eyes, which were now huge, “Hey what is that? It’s the sound. That’s the sound of the record! That’s your guitar!” 

They realized what it was just from listening to me play the intro; the difference in sound is that noticeable. And then we played through just about everything off Frampton Comes Alive! that afternoon. Now we all had shit-eating grins! That was a rehearsal I will never forget. Thank you, Curaçao!

I had to leave the guitar at Gibson so they could bring her up to speed. I wanted all the scars left as is, but anything that didn’t work properly, like the tuners or any bad electronics, had to be replaced.

I can’t thank all my friends enough for donating original pieces for the guitar, like “Patent Applied For” pickups and ’50s capacitors and volume and tone knobs, some still in their new old boxes. We call those beautiful old parts new old stock – NOS.

There are still burn marks, dents and tons of other scratches, but that’s the way she will stay. I only wish we could sit down together, have a nice cuppa tea, and find out what, when, how, and where she’s been for the last 30 years!

It was finally ready by the time we played the Beacon in New York. Anthony Mason had already done an interview with me for CBS about the return of the guitar, so he was there that night, filming me on the bus before the show. He asked how I felt about playing it onstage, and I said, “I’m scared shitless that I’ll make a mistake!”

Right before “Do You Feel,” which is always the last number of the set, I walked off and the stage went dark. My tech brought out the guitar, placed it in the middle of the stage on a stand, pitch dark, and then all the spotlights hit it at once – bam! The crowd went nuts; she was the star of the show, they could see what she was. 

I picked her up and we started to play “Do You Feel” – and I did make a slight mistake in the intro, but they edited it out of the CBS Sunday Morning piece. The Phenix wasn’t nervous, but I was. Thank you, Anthony.

Years after we had returned from South America in 1980, Barbara and I stayed over the weekend in New York, and on Monday morning, before we checked out, I had Good Morning America on and I heard my name. I sat up and it was the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous guy, Robin Leach.

He said, “News has finally reached me. I now have the true story about Peter Frampton escaping from Panama and Noriega’s troops.” What? “Back in 1980, a well-placed call was made to the White House, as Frampton had connections there” – yeah, because I’d been to the White House once!

He said that a military jet with troops had been sent down to Panama, that there was a rescue mission and Frampton, his band, and crew had all been rescued by the CIA and brought back to Andrews Air Force Base. We were in hysterics! We had gotten out of there all on our own. 

The American consulate wasn’t a lot of help, if I remember. I just couldn’t believe my ears hearing him spew all this bullshit. It was pretty exciting stuff, but it was totally untrue.

It’s wonderful to have my old Les Paul back because for so many years after the crash, fans would ask me, “Is that the one you played on Frampton Comes Alive!?” and I’d have to say no. 

When I moved to Nashville in the ’90s, Gibson’s Mike McGuire suggested we work on a replacement. I was thrilled! He and I and many great people at Gibson worked for about a year on building one that was as close to the original as I could remember.

I played it for years, but when the Phenix arrived back and I compared the old and the new, it was no contest. They both sounded great, but the Phenix just sounds and plays like the Phenix! When I announced her at the Beacon Theatre show, I could see this was her night in the limelight.

• Peter Frampton's Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir was written by Frampton with Alan Light and is out now via Hachette Books.

Eric Clapton has announced a live album of performances culled from the 2019 edition of his Crossroads Guitar Festival.

Spanning 3CDs and 6LPs - and 2DVDs and a Blu-ray - the 42-song set features performances from Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, Peter Frampton, Gary Clark Jr., The Marcus King Band, Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Clapton himself and many, many more.

Taking place at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas on September 20 & 21, 2019, the festival was put together to raise money for the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, the chemical dependency treatment and education facility that Clapton helped found in 1998.

Highlights from the mammoth live album/film include Clapton and Frampton's version of The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (the first time the two had ever shared a stage together), Clapton's version of "Layla" with John Mayer and Clapton's acoustic version of "Wonderful Tonight" with Andy Fairweather Low.

Other highlights include brief but incendiary sets from Jeff Beck, Gary Clark Jr., Lianne La Havas and many more, plus Clapton's moving cover of Prince's "Purple Rain." 

Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival 2019 is set for a November 20 release. To preorder the album, step right this way.

Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival 2019 tracklist:

1. "Native Stepson" – Sonny Landreth    
2. "Wonderful Tonight" – Eric Clapton & Andy Fairweather Low
3. "Lay Down Sally" – Eric Clapton & Andy Fairweather Low
4. "Million Miles" – Bonnie Raitt, Keb’ Mo’ & Alan Darby
5. "Son’s Gonna Rise" – Citizen Cope with Gary Clark Jr. 
6. "Lait / De Ushuaia A La Quiaca" - Gustavo Santaolalla
7. "I Wanna Be Your Dog" – Doyle Bramhall II with Tedeschi Trucks, Band
8. "That’s How Strong My Love Is" – Doyle Bramhall II with Tedeschi Trucks Band
9. "Lift Off"– Tom Misch
10. "Cognac" – Buddy Guy & Jonny Lang
11. "Everything Is Broken" – Sheryl Crow & Bonnie Raitt
12. "Every Day Is A Winding Road" – Sheryl Crow with James Bay
13. "Retrato" – Daniel Santiago & Pedro Martins
14. "B-Side" – Kurt Rosenwinkel with Pedro Martins 
15. "Baby, Please Come Home" – Jimmie Vaughan with Bonnie Raitt
16. "How Long" – The Marcus King Band
17. "Goodbye Carolina" – The Marcus King Band
18. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" – Peter Frampton with Eric Clapton
19. "Space For The Papa" – Jeff Beck
20. "Big Block" – Jeff Beck
21. "Caroline, No" – Jeff Beck
22. "Cut Em Loose" – Robert Randolph
23. "Hold Back The River" – James Bay
24. "When We Were On Fire" – James Bay
25. "Mas y Mas" – Los Lobos
26. "Am I Wrong?" – Keb’ Mo’
27. "Slow Dancing In A Burning Room" – John Mayer
28. "How Blue Can You Get?" – Tedeschi Trucks Band
29. "Shame" – Tedeschi Trucks Band
30. "Is Your Love Big Enough" – Lianne La Havas
31. "I Say A Little Prayer" – Lianne La Havas
32. "Feed The Babies" – Gary Clark Jr. 
33. "I Got My Eyes On You (Locked & Loaded)" – Gary Clark Jr. 
34. "Pearl Cadillac" – Gary Clark Jr. 
35. "Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down" – Vince Gill with Albert Lee & Jerry Douglas
36. "Tulsa Time" – Vince Gill with Albert Lee, Bradley Walker, Albert Lee & Jerry Douglas
37. "Drifting Too Far From The Shore" – Bradley Walker with Vince Gill, Albert Lee & Jerry Douglas
38. "Badge"– Eric Clapton
39. "Layla" – Eric Clapton with John Mayer & Doyle Bramhall II
40. "Purple Rain" – Eric Clapton & Ensemble
41. "High Time We Went" – Eric Clapton & Ensemble
42. "Going Going Gone" - Doyle Bramhall II with Tedeschi Trucks Band

Don Felder named his new album American Rock ’n’ Roll (BMG), and it’s clear from the first words he sings on the record — “Oh, Mr. Hendrix, how high he could fly” — that the singer, songwriter and guitarist remains, first and foremost, a proud fan of the titular music.

“The song is like a musical documentary,” Felder says of the title track. Indeed, in addition to Hendrix, the tune name-checks everyone from the Allman Brothers, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger to Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day. “It’s me remembering all the things that have gotten me excited about this music, from seeing Elvis Presley on television to hearing B.B. King on the radio to being at Woodstock and watching Hendrix and Santana and Janis Joplin and my friends Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

“That was probably the biggest nuclear explosion that has ever happened in the history of rock and roll,” he continues. “And witnessing that kind of excitement and impact and phenomenon has been one of the key things that’s propelled me to do this over and over again. It’s why I’m still doing it.”

To be sure, across almost 50 years, Felder has contributed more than his fair share of legendary moments to the American rock and roll canon. First and foremost, there is his work with the Eagles. In addition to cowriting one of the most famous songs in the genre’s history, “Hotel California,” he also played that tune’s iconic licks and solos, the latter in harmony with Joe Walsh, and helped write, record and perform on classic Eagles albums like One of These Nights and The Long Run.

Following the group’s dissolution in 1980, Felder guested on albums by the Bee Gees, Stevie Nicks and others, and experienced some success as a solo artist, in particular “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride),” the riffy theme song to the 1981 animated sci-fi flick Heavy Metal. (The tune experienced a resurgence a few years back when it made a surprise appearance in a quite awesome South Park episode that spoofed the movie.) He also took part in the massively successful Eagles reunion in the 1990s but exited in 2001 under acrimonious circumstances. It wasn’t until 2012 that Felder reappeared on the music scene in earnest, when he released Road to Forever, his first solo album in almost 30 years.

Now he’s back with American Rock ’n’ Roll, which, in addition to showcasing Felder’s strong songwriting and vocals and inimitable lead chops, also finds him joined by a slew of A-list guitarists, including Slash (on the title track), Peter Frampton (“The Way Things Have to Be”), Richie Sambora (“Limelight”), Joe Satriani (“Rock You”) and Alex Lifeson (“Charmed”). There are also vocal contributions from Sammy Hagar and Bob Weir and drums from Mick Fleetwood and Chad Smith, among other guest spots. The result is an album that’s as big a blast to listen to as it was to make. Indeed, Felder says, “Every time I’d go into the studio, I’d walk away feeling fantastic.”

In the following interview with Guitar Player, Felder talks about his life in music, from his legendary work with the Eagles and the cult-classic status of “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride)” to what led him to step back from the industry and, a few years ago, return to it with renewed vigor. Of course, he also gave us all the details behind the making of American Rock ’n’ Roll, including how he recruited the various guest artists and the gear that was used in its creation. “Music has always brought me so much love and joy my entire life,” Felder says. “That’s the reason I first started doing it all those years ago, and it’s the reason I still do it today.”

You’re joined by a lot of great guests on American Rock ’n’ Roll. What led you to go in that direction with the album?

On my last record, Road to Forever, for some reason I felt compelled to play all the guitars, mandolins, pedal steels — everything with strings on it. I invited Steve Lukather to play on one song, but other than that, everything on the album I did myself. Now, that record is clinically perfect, but it lacks the fire and enthusiasm and the feeling of sitting toe-to-toe with someone — whether it’s me and Slash, or me and Satriani, or me and Peter Frampton — and coming up with stuff on the spot. And I love that spontaneity, and the energy in the moment of creativity, where things just gush out of you. I missed that on my last record. So this one started with me bringing in a couple of guests, and it turned out to be so much fun that I started looking at nearly every track and asking myself, Who can I get here?

How did you get some of these artists involved?

Well, Peter Frampton, we did a bunch of dates together a few years on the Frampton’s Guitar Circus tour. And onstage, he would play a Les Paul through a Leslie, and it just had this heavenly, angelic quality to it. And for one of my new songs, “The Way Things Have to Be,” I just thought that would be the perfect tone. So I hopped on a plane with a little hard drive under my arm and flew to see Peter in Nashville. We went into his studio, and literally two hours later, we had this beautiful track. And then I was out the door.

Were most of these guest spots done live in the studio with you playing along?

Mostly, yeah. For instance, Slash lives not too far from where I do, and when I started writing the title track, I had the lyrics that run through the decades and cite all the people that have been so influential in American rock and roll. And when I got to the lyric, “Guns, Slash and Rose,” I thought, God, he would be perfect to play on this track! So I reached out to him, and he came over to my studio. We plugged him into one of my Marshalls, and I used a little [Fender] tweed Deluxe, and then we sat there together and just played. We made, I think, two or three passes through the song and did a little editing between our solos. And it turned out really great.

Then for “Rock You,” I called up Sammy [Hagar], who I’ve known since the ’80s, and I said, “You know, I’ve got this great idea for a song. I’d love for you to do a duet with me, and we can trade off verses.” And he said, “Yeah, come on up.” So I flew up to San Francisco to Sammy’s studio, we set up a mic, and literally 45 minutes later, I had sung my parts, he had sung his parts, and that was it. And Joe Satriani, he’s up there too, and he keeps his guitars in the back of Sammy’s studio. So we plugged in and sat in the control room and made up some harmony stuff, and he played a solo as well. And the funny thing is, Bob Weir has a studio about two blocks away, and when there’s nothing going on in his studio he meanders over to Sammy’s and hangs out. So while we’re recording this song, he comes walking in. And I go, “Bob, you’ve got to sing, ‘Rock you’ on this chorus!” We had him sing it about five times, and that was it.

That’s pretty serendipitous.

Yeah. A lot of it sort of came together through whatever forces were there, without my having to do anything.

Another great tune is “Limelight,” which has Richie Sambora on it.

I originally wanted to try to get Joe Walsh to play on that song, but it became very complicated and — um — politically incorrect, I guess would be the best way to say it. [laughs] So I reached out to Richie, who I’ve known a long time, and he said, “Yeah, sure, come on over.” So I went over to Richie’s house at about 11 o’clock one morning, again with my hard drive tucked under my arm. And Richie has this studio setup in the breakfast nook of his kitchen, so we were standing in his kitchen doing the song! And he said, “I want to have a different sound.” So he got this pedal called a POG [the Electro-Harmonix Polyphonic Octave Generator] that he used on his part. It sounds kind of like a talk box in octaves. I thought it was perfect. I didn’t even know what a POG was at the time, to tell you the truth.

What gear did you use on the record?

I have seven Les Pauls that I keep in my studio, and I have them set up in different tunings. Some are in standard, some of them are a half-step down, some of them are set up for slide. Some have Gibson pickups, some have Seymour Duncans, which are nice and hot. So I always use some Les Paul, but I tried to not use them all the time on this record.

One guitar I had was a custom model. James Young from Styx was kind enough to put me in touch with his guitar builder, and he built me a Strat-style guitar with custom pickups and a Sustainiac. If you listen to “Sun,” there are two guitars that sound like pedal steels, but it’s actually me playing slide in harmony on that Strat with the Sustainiac, because you can hit a note and it will just sit there forever with the slide on it. And then I used an old orange Gretsch Tennessean that I bought in the early ’70s. It sounded fantastic, but I hated the orange color, so I had it refinished in black with gold hardware. I think I used it on maybe a half a dozen Eagles records and played it live on things like “Desperado.”

And then for acoustic, I used a ’64 Martin D-35 that is just a magnificent-sounding guitar. As a matter of fact, it was on every Eagles album from when I joined the band until I left. I also used a Gibson J-200 on some stuff, there’s a couple of Taylors, an old Fender Duo-Sonic, a Tele — just a lot of different things.

How about amps?

God, I honestly don’t know how many old amps I have. It goes all the way back to old National and Fender stuff. On this record I used a ’64 Marshall 50-watt, a couple of Dumble amps, an old blackface Fender ’65 Deluxe Reverb, some old Vox AC30s. In general, I like smaller amps. You can mic a small combo like a Fender tweed Deluxe or Champ and it sounds bigger than if you put 100 watts through four 4x12s. Like on “Hearts on Fire,” I used this one little tweed Champ that I also used on the Eagles’ “Victim of Love.” It’s a big-sounding song, but the setup is just a Tele through that little Champ.

Did you use your iconic white Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck at all?

Not on the record. But the original double-neck has been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since, I think, 1998, on display in the Eagles exhibit. And that guitar is also at the exhibit the Hall of Fame and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are putting on in New York about the most influential guitars in rock. I was unbelievably flattered that they would ask me to be a part of that. But the double-neck I have now, that’s a copy — it’s one of 50. I think it was back in about 2003 when the Gibson Custom Shop called me up and said, “We want to do a Don Felder ‘Hotel California’ guitar.” And I went, “Well, which one?” [laughs] Because I played a ’59 ’burst on the recording, but then when I got onstage with the Eagles I had to figure out how I was going to play the 12-string introductory part and the harmonies and all the other stuff that I had to do. And the only way I could figure it out was to use the double-neck. And I’ve been lugging that bear around ever since. I think my back issues have a lot to do with that Gibson 1275!

But so I said to Gibson, “Do you want to do the Les Paul or do you want to do the double-neck?” And they said, “Let’s do both!” So they made 150 double-necks and 300 Les Pauls. They were identical. And the one I brought down to the photo shoot [for this issue of Guitar Player] was what they call an “artist proof.” They made these things, sent them to me, and I had to play them and give them the thumbs up. I received five artist proofs, and that was one of them.

Speaking of the Eagles, I have to ask, what was the issue with getting Joe Walsh to play on your song “Limelight”?

I wouldn’t say there were “issues.” It’s just… It’s hard for Joe to step outside of his commitment with the Eagles and come and record with me. I have no problems with Joe. I’ll love him until my last breath. I respect him and love to play with him. And, hopefully, somewhere in the future we’ll be able to do that.

Even as you’re creating all this new music, you still, of course, play the older Eagles material onstage. You embrace your past.

Absolutely. I think it’s an amazing phenomenon that, for whatever reason in the cosmic plan, those people got together in that band and were able to write and sing and play guitars and drums and all these instruments in a kind of magical, unbelievably great way. It’s an honor to have been a part of something like that. I mean, to have two of the biggest-selling albums of all time [Their Greatest Hits] and Hotel California]! You don’t start out at 10 years old with a broken-up Sears & Roebuck guitar thinking that anything like that could even happen, much less that it would happen to you. So I’m very proud to go onstage and play some of the songs that I wrote, co-wrote and played with those guys for 27 years. It’s a wonderful honor, and I never think ill of it. I have the highest regard and respect for that music.

Post-Eagles, you put out a few solo recordings but then took a long break from music. Why?

Well, what happened is I had four young children, and I had been on the road on and off, but mostly on, for close to 10 years. They have grown up without a father. When the Eagles hit the hold button, you’re right, I did a couple of songs, like “All of You” and “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride)” [both for the film Heavy Metal] and some other stuff, like my solo album [1983’s Airborne]. And I was asked then to go out on the road, but I declined. I said, “I don’t need to be on the road. I need to be at home raising these kids.”

So I made a conscious effort to not leave, to not go on the road and to not try to build a solo career. I made a decision to be there as a dad — to get up in the morning, make breakfast for the kids, pack them up for school and drive them to school. I was commissioner of the Malibu Little League and soccer teams. And I loved every day and every year of it. I have no regrets about having done that.

And so, finally, my kids grew up and they all left home. And around 2011, I wound up getting a divorce. At that point, I really wanted to start doing stuff again. And now that’s blossomed into me having 399 days a year where I’m working! [laughs]

You mentioned “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride).” That’s become something of a cult classic over the years.

You know, it’s funny — when the Eagles were doing the Hell Freezes Over tour, there would be at least one, if not multiple people, that throughout the course of every show would yell out, “Heavy metal!”

Which is not a phrase you usually hear at an Eagles show.

There was no way that Don Henley and Glenn Frey were gonna let me do “Heavy Metal.” It was not gonna happen. [laughs] But you know, I originally wrote that song for [1979’s] The Long Run, for Joe [Walsh] and me to play together. All those chromatic run-ups and run-downs and solo trade-offs — that all would have been me and Joe.

No kidding?

Yeah. But it never got finished. The lyrics never got completed. In fact, it used to be called, “You’re Really High, Aren’t You?” That was the working title. And you know, it was also kind of the state of mind during The Long Run. [laughs] So there you go.

Slash Talks “American Rock ’n’ Roll”

How did you get involved on the song “American Rock ’n’ Roll”?

A mutual friend who works with Don emailed me and asked if I was interested in doing the song. I’m a big Don Felder fan, and I was honored to get that email, so I just responded, “Yes! I would love to!”

How did you develop your solo? Was it off the cuff, or did Don tell you what he was looking for?

No, it was totally off the cuff. I just came in, they told me where the section was for my solo, and we went from there. Don came in, and he was great — he just let me do my thing on the track. They also explained to me how they were going to edit Don’s solo into it, intercutting mine with his, so that we both had very fluid solos. And it worked out pretty well.

How far back does your relationship with Don go?

He and I have never met until now, so our relationship doesn’t go back, other than the fact that I have listened to him for as long as I can remember.

What do you like about Don as a player and a songwriter?

As a player, he’s got a very recognizable sound, feel and tone. And he’s got a great note selection. Most importantly, he’s got his own personality on the guitar, and it’s easy to recognize. It’s a good one — something that appeals to me. As a songwriter, well, obviously, he’s one of the great ones, whether it’s his stuff with the Eagles or solo.

Joe Satriani Talks "Rock You"

How did you get involved on Don’s song “Rock You”?

Robin DiMaggio [producer and drummer who has worked with both Felder and Satriani] asked if I would be interested in playing on Don’s album, and I jumped at the chance. Sammy Hagar’s studio turned out to be the most convenient place to meet up, and before you know, it Sammy, Bob Weir and I were all together on the same track!

You play a pretty ripping solo on the song. How did you develop it? Was it spontaneous, or did Don give you any direction for it?

He asked me to go crazy for the middle solo, which I recorded at my home studio prior to meeting up. Then once we were together at Sammy’s, Don wrote, on the spot, a series of riffs and motifs for us to play together, alternately harmonizing and trading licks.

That’s the kind of thing he and Joe Walsh would do. How did the two of you work those out?

When you’re playing guitar with Don Felder, you listen and follow. After all, he is Don Felder!

To that end, what do you love about Don as a player and a songwriter?

As a player and a composer Don has a unique, American style and sound. His playing is always evocative, strong and solid. His inventions turn into instant classic riffs.

Peter Frampton Talks "The Way Things Have to Be”

How did you get involved on Don’s new album?

He had the song “The Way Things Have to Be,” and he’d already had some idea of what he wanted me to play and what he wanted me to sing. So I did a little bit of both. It was a lot of fun. He came to my studio in Nashville, and we did it there. He already had the track, and I just overdubbed my parts. It was great.

How far back does your relationship with Don go?

We met around the time of the Peter Frampton’s Guitar Circus tour, in 2013 or 2014. I asked if he would be interested in joining, and he said yes.

What made you want to bring him into the Circus?

Well, he’s obviously written some legendary songs as part of the Eagles — one of them, in fact, being their biggest song ever. [laughs] So when we were thinking of people to become part of the tour, he was one of the first people we asked.

Back in the day, were you a big fan of Don’s?

Absolutely! Every Eagles album is perfection. People think they’ve released a lot more than they actually have, but the Eagles were always a band that didn’t go near the studio until they had 10 or 12 killer songs. And even then, they take their time. I always thought it was an excessive approach until I realized that every one of their albums was a smash!

Richie Sambora Talks "Limelight"

Don told us that you recorded your parts for “Limelight” in your kitchen.

I did! I have a studio in there. It’s great. You walk downstairs in the morning and you sit down, and you’re right there. It’s homespun, but everything works. Bob Rock put it together for me, and there’s a bunch of great gear. I always have guests come over, and Don is one of my honored guests. He played on some stuff for me, and I did some stuff for him.

How did you and Don first meet?

The first time was at a ceremony many, many years ago. I’d been working with Norm from Norman’s Rare Guitars, doing some stuff for the [social services organization] Midnight Mission, and I got an award. Don played at the event and I played with him, and I think that’s when we started getting going. After that, I got a call from him: “Hey, you wanna come to China with me?” I go, “I’ve got a little work to do, Don. I can’t really go right now!” [laughs] But we stayed friends. It’s a nice thing when your heroes become your friends. It’s wild.

What is it about Don that makes him one of your heroes?

Don is an amazing, proficient, unbelievable hook-meister and songwriter. I grew up on his licks. When I was in cover bands all I did was play Eagles songs. And the first time I saw the Eagles it was at Giants Stadium [in New Jersey]. They were headlining, and Heart opened up. Don came out and shredded it. I was about 15.

Don was a part of me being schooled as a guitar player, because he made sure every note was memorable. That’s probably the greatest thing I could say about the guy, besides him being a nice dude. Everything was solid. It was beautiful, and you remembered it. The guitar sound, the guitar playing—he had it all down.

The recent news that Peter Frampton will stop touring in 2019 has alarmed fans, and with good reason. 

The legendary guitarist has revealed that he has the rare auto-immune disease Inclusion Body Myositis (or IBM). The progressive muscular disorder causes muscle inflammation, weakness and atrophy. Frampton expects IBM will ultimately hamper his ability to play guitar, and, being a perfectionist, he’s decided to launch one last tour — the Peter Frampton Finale: The Farewell Tour — before the disease makes performing difficult.

“What will happen, unfortunately, is that it affects the finger flexors,” he explained when the news broke. “So for a guitar player, it’s not very good.” Frampton says that, while he has felt the effects of the disease in his fingers, he can still play. “But in a year’s time, maybe not so good.”

Foreboding as this may sound, it doesn’t mean Frampton is going to stop making records anytime soon. In fact, just minutes before interviewing the guitarist for this story, three cuts from his upcoming blues album hit my inbox. When Frampton’s call came in, I was only part way though listening to his covers of Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Taj Mahal’s “She Caught the Katy” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind,” which Frampton interprets beautifully as an instrumental.

“It’s all my favorite stuff — just standard blues songs that I felt I could really get my teeth into,” Frampton explains. “It goes from Willie Dixon– type songs to Muddy Waters and Miles Davis. We even do ‘All Blues’ from [Davis’s] Kind of Blue, which we had the great Larry Carlton come and play on. Kim Wilson from the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who is one of the best blues harp players I’ve ever heard, also joined us on three tracks, two of which are on the first volume.”

This is just the latest chapter in what has been Frampton’s long and varied career. After starting out in 1965 at age 16 with the British pop rock group the Herd, he joined Humble Pie, where he established himself as one of rock’s premier guitarists. He launched his solo career in 1972 with the band Frampton’s Camel before achieving superstar status in 1976 with his multi-Platinum breakthrough album, Frampton Comes Alive! His 2006 release, Fingerprints, was his first instrumental record, and he’s continued to issue albums at a rate of every three or four years. If Frampton’s current studio output is sustained to even a fraction of what it is now, we can likely expect to hear a lot more music coming from him in years to come.

So you have actually recorded two albums worth of blues tunes?

Yes, in the first 15 days we cut, like, 33 tracks. We did the first batch in 10 days, took some time off and came back and did another five days, and that was enough for two albums. In fact, more than that. The first volume is called All Blues, and it’s the Peter Frampton Band — I’m giving us a name for the blues stuff. There will be another blues album coming, as well an album of instrumental covers. Since we had some time left over, we started my next solo record too. We’ve got three tracks down, so we’re looking a couple of years ahead.

Were any other players enlisted for the blues project?

Yes, Sonny Landreth. Sonny had played with us on the Guitar Circus tour, and B.B. King was on it for about a month, opening up for us as a special guest unbelievably. I had to pinch myself on that one! Each night I’d get the call to go and jam with B.B., so I’d go out there and sit with him, and we’d talk and jam on “The Thrill is Gone.” When I thought about recording it for my blues album, I was thinking, I’m not sure I can do that one, it’s such a B.B. King song. We were just messing around with it, and then we got Sonny to come and overdub a solo with me. Even he said, “I was worried, because you’re touching something that is such a B.B. classic.” But we just felt that if there was ever a way to pay tribute to him, it was to do a good version. [laughs] I leave it to those who listen to make their own minds up, but I think it’s a phenomenal version.

Where did you record these songs?

I have a full-fledged studio in Nashville that I was able to pick up when I moved here. Since October, we’ve done over 40 tracks there. I’ve been recording as much as I can in the shortest space of time because I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to play. I haven’t recorded this much in such a short space of time in my entire career.

What guitars did you use on the new record?

For the majority of this record I’ve been playing a ’59 ES-335. But I did also use my ’54 Les Paul — we call it the Phenix now — that I got back in 2012. [The famed three-pickup Les Paul, which Frampton used with Humble Pie and during his early solo career, vanished for more than three decades after the cargo plane transporting it crashed in Venezuela in 1980.] So it was mainly those two guitars, along with a Strat that I used on one song.

What amps did you use?

I had a Vox AC15 from 1964 and my ’65 Fender Deluxe Reverb, which is an animal. If you were to get three 1965 Deluxe Reverbs and put them next to one another and plugged into each, they’d all sound different, and this one is just a brute. It’s a got a real fiery tone.

So, you don’t use any amp plug-ins in the studio?

Given the choice I would always use a real amp. Plug-ins are wonderful, and they are getting better and better, but there’s nothing like plugging straight into an amp. All the best sounds I’ve ever got were just the right guitar plugged into the right amp at the right level. It’s the same for playing live, too, because I have to be close to my amp. Having nothing onstage and relying on monitors kind of defeats the purpose for me. I use the in-ear monitors but I’ve got my amp right behind me so I’m feeling it as well as hearing it. I use the same system I’ve used for years now. It’s lots of bells and whistles, but it means that I can play every sound that I need from all the records.

You get a very rich overdriven sound on the new tracks I’ve heard. Is there a particular pedal that gets some credit for that?

You know, I’ve recently been using the Origin Effects Revival Drive. You can plug into a Fender and make it sound like a Marshall, or vice-versa. I don’t know if you need to do that, but I find that most distortion units either work well with a Marshall-type amp or they work well with a Fender-type amp. They usually don’t with both, but this one does. It works well with everything. I haven’t used it live yet, but I think I’m going to. I got it right after the last tour, and now we’ll be gearing up for the new tour and I’ll be taking things out of the rack and putting other stuff in.

Are there any other new effects that have found a place in your system?

I’ve known Eventide’s Rich Factor [an inventor and one of the company founders] for longer than I care to remember, and I think I got the first harmonizer they ever made. Of course, they’ve got the H9 [harmonizer/multi-effects pedal], which is wonderful, and I have one of them on a little B-rig board that I use with a single amp. But they've also come up with this pedal called the Rose Delay, which I believe they premiered at NAMM last January. It’s a rich-sounding and phenomenal delay unit that has a different way of modulating the sound with the speed and depth controls. It’s so close to having a reel-to-reel tape deck next to you, with a variable speed, and the way you can get it to wow and flutter is incredible. It was basically a one-trick pony when he first sent me one, but then I said it would be great if we could have some presets. So now you’ve got five customizable presets, and they went a step further by making it MIDI, so you can have a million presets if you control it with a MIDI device, which I will probably do.

What are your favorite acoustic guitars?

When I left Humble Pie I bought a D-45 Martin from Manny’s in New York. I recorded all of [1973’s] Frampton’s Camel with that, so “Lines on my Face” and all those acoustic things are with that guitar. Then we went out on the road and it got stolen, and I never really could bring myself to buy another Martin, because I missed that one so much. But I still had my Epiphone acoustic that I had bought when I was in Humble Pie. It’s the same year and model as Paul McCartney’s, except his is blond and mine is sunburst.

So anyway, in the early 2000s, I went to the NAMM show and saw Dick Boak from Martin there, and I told him the story of losing my D-45. He said, “You mean you don’t have a Martin? We’ll have to make you one.” So, he asked what I would like, and I told him that I didn’t need all the inlay, so let’s make it a D-42. I said that I loved the Stephen Stills high-end twinkly sound, so he suggested an Adirondack top. Since my D-45 only lasted through the Frampton’s Camel album, he thought to call it the Frampton’s Camel D-42 and put a little design of a camel on the headstock. So I’ve got a bunch of those guitars. Epiphone also just released a signature model [the Limited Edition Peter Frampton “Texan”] that’s just like mine, except it sounds better. It’s a workhorse with a beautiful sound, and I use it live too.

Did Epiphone actually take your guitars to spec out for the reissue?

Yes, they did with the acoustic. With the “Phenix,” however, Gibson scanned it as soon as I got it back, so I believe they passed those scans onto Epiphone for that one. I have to say they did a phenomenal job because it plays and sounds great.

What gauge strings do you have on your acoustics and electrics?

I use D’Addario or Elixir strings on the acoustics, and I regularly use an .011 through .052 set. On my electrics I use a .009 through .042 set, or .009 through .044 if I’m tuning a half-step down. Again, because of the slight weakness in my hands I might have to go down a gauge. We’ll see.

You always get a great slide sound. What slides and tunings do you use?

I use the shorter glass slide and sometimes a thin metal one. My go-to tunings would be open G or A, but a slide tuning really depends on the key of the song, and what kind of sound and notes are needed. Open E or D has a completely different effect aurally from open G or A. I even tuned to a C chord for the slide on the studio version of “Somethin’s Happening.” I love open tunings for writing, because a new tuning is like playing a different instrument with new inspirations.

I think one of your standout acoustic pieces is “Ida Y Vuelta” from the Fingerprints album. What did you play on that song?

I used on old Tacoma Chief on that one. I have two of them actually, and they have a unique sound. I’m playing it with my fingers on that track, for the rhythm part anyway, and it’s got this biting sound that I love.

Also, on Fingerprints, there’s a song called “Souvenirs de Nos Pères” [“Memories of Our Fathers”] where you nail the Django sound. Can you talk about that tune?

I had wanted to do a Django tribute, and John Jorgenson and I had both lost our fathers recently, so that was basically a tribute to them. John came up with that whole melody and played it to me, and I said, “Oh my god, that’s fantastic!” Then I had to shed for about a month to be able to play it.

Did you use a Macaferri-style guitar for that track?

It was a Gitane, the one with the oval soundhole. I have one now that was built by Dupont in France, and I firmly believe that if Django were alive today he would be playing a Dupont, because it’s so good. When I got it out of the case and picked it up and played one chord on it, I got chills. It’s that sound! It’s inspiring to play even if you’re not playing Django style. On that guitar, I use the Argentine .010 strings, which is what Django apparently used. It’s easier for me with that gauge.

You still tour with valuable vintage guitars. How do you deal with well-founded concerns about that?

Well, when I got the Phenix back, everyone said, “You’re not going to put that on the road are you?” And I said, “Not take it on the road? It’s lived through an air crash, so I think it will be okay.” That’s all I used to play for 10 years after I first got it, so obviously I’m going to take it out with me. I also take a 1960 Les Paul that was owned by JJ Cale. He sold it to his producer Audie Ashworth, and when he passed away, his wife wanted it to go to a good home and I was the lucky recipient of this beautiful ’burst. We lost so much stuff in the 2010 Nashville flood, and I was very fortunate that it was insured. But instead of replacing everything, which is multiples of guitars that I didn’t play anymore, I just went out and got a good one of each. I have a great ’63 Jazzmaster and a ’58 Jaguar, and I recently I got a really nice ’59 Tele. I just got some choice pieces as opposed to replacing everything.

Blues was huge in England when you were coming up. How did you manage to evolve your playing into something noticeably different from what, say, Peter Green, Mick Taylor and Eric Clapton were doing?

When I started to go see John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton up in London and other places, I suddenly realized that everybody was trying to be Eric. They were trying to look like him, play like him and use the same stuff he used. I loved Eric’s playing, always have. He’s been a major influence on everyone, including me, because his licks are masterful and it’s such a beautiful clean blues style. But I felt that everyone was going to end up sounding like Eric Clapton. It’s just too seductive, and I’ll go there too. However, because of my parents having brought me up on Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, I had this sort of inbred jazzy side to me from a very early age. When I was about 13 or 14, I started listening to Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Joe Pass, and then, later on, a very young George Benson with the Jack McDuff trio. So before and during the Herd was when I was really burying myself in those guys.

Would you say your jazz-informed blues-rock style fully came to fruition in Humble Pie?

Yes. When Steve Marriott and I formed Humble Pie and we were jamming together, he was hard blues and I was more lyrical jazz rock. I’m putting myself in my own box there, but that’s the only way I can describe it. The combination of the two styles pushed me into the first couple of albums of Humble Pie where I found that I had a style of my own. It wasn’t blues and it wasn’t jazz, but it was everything I’d got in my library of licks in my head, and now it’s just coming out sounding like me.