The guitarist Pete Townshend wanted to replace him in The Who
Every member of The Who was responsible for making them the rock juggernaut they were. While the band have been able to carry on these days with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend leading the charge, nothing is going to replace the magic that they had when Keith Moon was behind the drumkit, and John Entwistle took the stage with his thunderous bass grooves. If Townshend had had his way, Peter Frampton would have been doing his job for him a long time ago.
Then again, to think of The Who without Pete Townshend is practically like thinking of living without water. Aside from being their main songwriter, Townshend was the leading voice behind the band half the time, envisioning its grand plans to become one of the greatest rock outfits in the world whenever they went onstage.
Although Townshend steered the group through thick and thin, he didn’t consider the band his main gig for a while. Since no rock group was meant to last that long, Townshend figured he would take most of his ideas back to art school after a handful of albums. Let’s just say that life took a different turn for him later.
Outside of working in the Mod tradition, Townshend was hard at work putting together the band’s grandiose statements in the late 1960s. After shattering down the boundaries of rock and roll with the group’s concept album Tommy, the decision to make the next album an equally strong artistic statement led to the album Lifehouse being salvaged for Who’s Next.
While Townshend was still realising the dreams in his head, Frampton was still hard at work in Humble Pie. Playing the trademark blues rock that would become customary around the early 1970s, Frampton would eventually explode the minute he hit the stage, becoming everyone’s favourite guitar hero off the back of his solo masterpiece, Frampton Comes Alive.
After Frampton hit a slump following the underwhelming sales of his studio material, he remembered getting a call from Townshend to work on Who material, telling Rolling Stone, “He said, ‘Yeah, so I’ve made this decision that I’m not going to tour with the Who anymore. I’ll still write the songs, but I want you to take my place, and . . .’ Wait, what? I remember the first thing that I said — when he paused — I said, ‘That’s an enormous pair of shoes to fill! I can’t do that.'”
Even though any other guitarist would have killed to work with a band of that calibre, Frampton was thinking logistically. If you were asked to be a member of one of the greatest rock groups of all time, you would probably be pretty pissed if every member of the audience just compared your playing to the person that came before.
It’s not shocking why Townshend wanted out, either, having done most of the work throughout the band’s epic Quadrophenia tour. While Frampton eventually thought it over, he admitted to leaving Townshend hanging for too long, by which time the Who mastermind already figured that he should stay among their ranks. Although the majority of The Who’s guitar tracks are already perfect the way they are, a live album featuring Frampton soloing over Townshend’s changes is the kind of heaven-sent mashup no one got to hear.
