Peter Frampton’s Still Alive: On Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and Taylor Swift
By any measure, Peter Frampton should be dead. In the late 1970s he attained a sort of fame—in the aftermath of the release of his record-breaking 11-million selling live album Frampton Comes Alive—that few experience, and even fewer survive. The predictable career and personal ups and downs followed: crashed cars, rehab, ugly break-ups. Frampton clawed his way back, with a bit of help from his childhood pal David Bowie (who brought him along as his lead guitarist on his 1987 Glass Spider world tour), earning a Grammy for his gorgeous instrumental album Fingerprints in 2006, and building his audience back the old-fashioned way: through relentless touring.
Then, in 2019, Frampton was diagnosed with inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscular disease. At first unsteady on his feet, Frampton soon found himself unable to walk without assistance. Then it became clear that the disease was affecting his guitar playing. During the promotional run for his best-selling memoir, he announced a farewell tour and, when I interviewed him and then saw him perform at Madison Square Garden, in the fall of 2019, it really did seem like the end.
When I caught up with Frampton during the pandemic, he had all but given up the guitar. Busying himself with archival work, he was looking down the barrel of a long, slow decline, and a retirement hardly befitting one of the true greats of the Golden Age of rock and roll.