THE BOOK ON FRAMPTON

PETER FRAMPTON RELEASES AN ENGAGING MEMOIR CHRONICLING HIS PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL HIGHS AND LOWS.

- CHRIS M. JUNIOR

By his own admission, he really shouldn’t be a guitar player, due to not having long fingers. After tell-ing Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green he was a Taurus, Green abruptly ended their guitar jam. And about a year before he became a superstar, his name was thrown into the proverbial hat by his friends Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts to be the new guitarist in The Rolling Stones.

These are among the many fascinating tidbits and tales Peter Frampton writes about in Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir, released in October by Hachette Books. It’s a book for casual as well as hardcore Frampton fans, full of detailed accounts of his days as a member of The Herd and also Humble Pie, his sideman gigs for some of rock’s biggest names and, of course, his successful solo career, with plenty of pages devoted to the Frampton Comes Alive! period.

Frampton doesn’t shy away from the negatives that came with the success of Comes Alive!, nor does he gloss over his ongoing battle with inclusion body myositis (IBM), a muscle disease that causes weakness in the fingers, wrists and thighs.

GOLDMINE: Was writing a memoir something you’d wanted to do for a long time, or did the impetus for the book come to you recently?

PETER FRAMPTON: It all sort of started to ferment around the same time we decided to do the farewell tour of the U.S. first. We haven’t been able to do the South American or European (legs) for obvious reasons. Ken Levitan, my manager, over the years had said, “You know, when you’re ready for the book …” I kind of felt that now that the decision had been made to stop touring, it was probably a good time to do the book.