The 1976 album that scared Peter Frampton “to death”
Never looking for fame, Peter Frampton, like most classic rock veterans who stand the test of time, enjoyed listening to music and thought he’d try his hand at making some of his own, and a decade after his entrance onto the scene, he’d have one of the best-selling live albums of all time.
In a story of humble beginnings, his interest in music started at age seven, when he discovered his grandmother’s banjolele in the attic of his childhood home, and he grew up on the sounds of Cliff Richard and Buddy Holly, and later Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. While gorging on music that seemed to soar out of these virtuous superheroes, neither the record player nor the television ever became a mirror.
As his teenage years kicked off in earnest, the avalanche of opportunities started, and by 1966, he became a member of The Herd, while in 1969, he joined Small Faces musician Steve Marriott to form Humble Pie. Ever the opportunist, he also enjoyed session recordings with other artists like Harry Nilsson, George Harrison, and Jerry Lee Lewis, so it was no surprise that after four albums and one live album with Humble Pie, Frampton went solo in 1971.
His debut came with 1972’s Wind of Change, starring Billy Preston and Beatle Ringo Starr, and despite the star-studded kickstart, none of his early albums seemed to draw in much commercial success. In comparison, his 1971 performance of ‘Rockin’ the Fillmore’ with Humble Pie reached number 21 on the Billboard 200 and entered the charts in the UK.
It was time for Frampton to panic, but Lady Luck hit just in time, and in 1976, Frampton soared all the way to the top with his best-selling live album, Frampton Comes Alive!, which spent a total of 97 weeks on the Billboard 200, including ten weeks in the very top spot. Forget Fleetwood Mac’s Fleetwood Mac, Frampton bagged the top-selling album of 1976, which showed immense staying power: It was also the 14th best-seller of 1977.
After the long, hard slog of the decade prior, you’d think Frampton would be ready, but the opposite was true: “I went from a musician to a pop star overnight,” Frampton shared with Billboard magazine, reflecting, “That’s a very hard thing to scrape off”.
He elaborated on this point of view in another interview with People magazine, sharing, “I’ve never been driven by money, only by music and the playing. Unfortunately, there was at least one, maybe more, that saw me as the golden goose and stopped caring about me and treated me more like a commodity. ‘He’ll do this, he’ll do that’. I was scared to death with the situation I was in.”
An avid fan of so many classic musicians in his early days, Frampton knew what came next: being flung around like a puppet, making money for the money-hungry bosses at the top. The prospect of losing agency and the heart of his music in place of profits repulsed the new teen heart-throb, as he explained, “When we became the biggest album of all time in America and Canada, that was the scariest thing for me, because it took me six years to write those songs. I’m a perfectionist, and that’s why I wasn’t thrilled with following up the live album at all. I didn’t want to make that album then.”
Reluctantly, Frampton recorded the album’s follow-up, I’m in You, which, despite some success on a single level, would never allow him to replicate the triumph of his 1976 live album, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from that lesson.
