Boy Could He Play Guitar

In1976 Peter Frampton released an album that ensured that his life would never be the same. “Frampton Comes Alive” was easily the best selling album of the year and made Frampton a mega star. He was everywhere. You couldn’t turn on a radio or television without ether seeing or hearing him or something about him. The sad part about it, and I’ve written about it before, is that it almost made listening to him intolerable for many years. The other consequence of becoming the superstar he became was that it changed who he was and what he was about musically.

Peter Frampton is a guitar player and a mighty fine one at that. He’s not only a really good player; he’s ridiculously underrated at it too. I really believe that if the live album didn’t achieve the heights that it did, he’d be considered one of the top five or so guitarists of his era. That’s the problem with his becoming a pop star, people stopped taking him seriously as a musician. It’s truly a loss to the public that we all shut him out of our musical tastes so many years ago.

I saw Frampton at Meadowbrook Theater last night and really enjoyed the show. Opening with a song by Junior Walker and The All Stars and closing with George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is something you don’t normally hear from an artists with as large a catalogue as his. He did the obligatory numbers from the live album and his cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” was spot on, as you’d expect. What Peter Frampton mostly did last night though, was play the guitar.

A few years ago he won a Grammy Award for best pop instrumental album. He played a few songs from that album along with a couple from his as yet to be released new cd and you could just see what it did for him. He played guitar. He made it seem that it was what he was born to do. I looked him up on the web the other day and found he was self-taught. That’s impressive but a number of folks have done that. When you see that he taught himself at the age of eight, well, you can see how I’m moved by it. Even with the encore of the Harrison song, he had a good 10-minute “jam” with the band that though seemed effortless for him, was some pretty nifty work. He also played an instrumental version of Sound Garden’s “Black Hole Sun” that was really pleasant on the ears.

I normally get incredibly bored whenever I’m at a show when the band goes into those long swooning guitar solos that were a staple of most concerts I went to as a kid. This was different though. Peter Frampton sings with his guitar, and as stated already, he does it really well. Though he played numerous musical passages throughout the night, I never found myself getting restless. He played like it was meant to be and he played it without the fanfare or ego that normally comes with it. He just seemed to be in a really good place musically and looked like he really was enjoying himself. I was too.