Free Republic

“I felt like I had lost before I started the next part of my career,” Peter Frampton says of the blowout success of his 1976 album, Frampton Comes Alive! “Before there was nothing to compete with. Now, I felt, ‘I’m competing with Peter Frampton.’” In a new interview with Billboard, the guitar icon reflects on his smash live album, which turns 50 this year. The two-album set was recorded during the 1975 tour for his fourth solo album, Frampton. At the time, he was still struggling for success following his time with English hard rockers Humble Pie. Frampton Comes Alive!...

Peter Frampton and his favorite guitar are together again following a 31-year estrangement, the New York Times reports. The singer, who played the Gibson Electric Guitar on his 1976 album Frampton Comes Alive!, assumed the instrument had been wrecked in 1980 when a cargo plane crashed in Caracas, Venezuela, en route to Frampton's concert in Panama. As it happened, the guitar was recovered -- and sold to a musician on the Caribbean island of Curacao. “For 30 years, it didn’t exist – it went up in a puff of smoke as far as I was concerned,” Frampton told The Times...