Quote of the Day (Peter Frampton, on Musicians With Longevity)

“People who have longevity in music are usually the ones who never think they’re that special, so they keep pushing the envelope, listening, and learning more. I'll never be as good as I want to be, because the goal posts are always moving. If a player ever starts to think they're hot s—t and stops trying to improve themselves, it's curtains, or stagnation at the very least. But my friend and yours, B. B. King, was the most humble man, till the day he died.”— English-American rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and singer-songwriter Peter Frampton with Alan Light, Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoir (2020)

B.B. King would find a kindred spirit, I firmly believe, in Peter Frampton. Few entertainers have known his level of fame as a teen idol after the release of his multiplatinum album Frampton Comes Alive in the mid-Seventies. 

But few have reacted with as much modesty and gratitude after his richly deserved election to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame last month.

There was a time when I would have gagged on that phrase “richly deserved.” I had purchased and enjoyed Frampton Comes Alive, but been deeply disappointed with his solo follow, I’m in You, as well as with his participation in a film project I still regard as sacrilegious, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

To his credit, Frampton has acknowledged these creative mistakes, along with the substance abuse that put his career and life at risk for a long time. He rededicated himself to his work and reminded listeners why, ever since his days with Humble Pie, he became one of the elite rock ‘n’ roll guitarists.

Memoirs can be a fraught genre, filled at times with artful trimming and deception, but Frampton’s strikes me as one written by a musician who takes pride in his work and the friends he’s made along the way without yielding to overweening ego. In short, he seems as likable as they come.

Fans naturally value skill in performers, but honesty, humility and thankfulness can be in far shorter supply. These latter qualities shine as brightly with Frampton as the prowess with the “talk box” that made him a music-industry phenomenon nearly a half-century ago.

(For further information on the inflammatory muscle disease through which Frampton has persevered over the last half-dozen years, inclusion body myositis (IBM), see this July 2020 post from the Myositis Association blog.)

(Photo of Frampton performing at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, FL, taken on Sept. 26, 2006, by Carl Lender)

Quote of the Day (Vivian Gornick, on Persisting at Writing)

“It's terrible, not to be able to work every day, but every day, in my long writing life, to come up against the fog in the head. The inability to think, to write another sentence. There are many days when I don't write anything. But I always sit down at the desk. Absolutely. Every morning, religiously.”— American feminist literary critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist Vivian Gornick quoted by Alexandra Schwartz, “Look Again,” The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2020

(Photograph of Vivian Gornick taken Oct. 4, 2018, through YouTube by librairie mollat.)

Quote of the Day (Michael Oakeshott, on Conversation)

“Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.”— English philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind (1959)

TV Quote of the Day (Jerry Seinfeld, on Pain-Relieving Ingredients)

“Then they tell you about the pain-relieving ingredient. There's always gotta be a lotta that. Nobody wants anything less than 'extra-strength. 'Extra-strength' is the absolute minimum. You can’t even get 'strength.' Strength' is out now. It's all 'extra-strength.' Some people are not satisfied with 'extra,' they want 'maximum.’ Give me the 'maximum-strength.’ ‘Give me the maximum allowable human dosage.’ ‘Figure out what will kill me and then back it off a little bit.’"—Stand-up comedian and sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld, “Jerry Seinfeld: ‘I’m Telling You for the Last Time’”, original air date Aug. 9, 1998, written by Jerry Seinfeld, directed by Marty Callner

Happy 70^th birthday to Jerry Seinfeld!

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoevsky, on ‘The Man Who Lies to Himself’)

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill -- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.”— Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1880), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Constance Garnett

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Moses Mendelssohn, Urging ‘The Right to Be Different’)

“Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it, as long he does not disturb public felicity and acts honestly toward the civil laws, toward you and his fellow citizens. Let no one in your states be a searcher of hearts and a judge of thoughts.”— German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), “The Right to Be Different” (1783), in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, Second Edition, edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (1995)

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on Hatred)

“A man’s hatred of his own condition no more helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.” —Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist and poet George Santayana (1863-1952), Reason in Common Sense (Vol. 1 of “The Life of Reason”) (1905)