Flashback, January 1976: Massive ‘Comes Alive’ Success Nearly Undoes Frampton

Frampton Comes Alive! came charging out of the gate at the start of 1976 and maintained its momentum throughout the year, and beyond. English guitarist Peter Frampton experienced the kind of success he’d never enjoyed before, as the double-live set became the best-selling LP of the year—and, with more than 8 million copies sold in the U.S. and 11 million worldwide, it remains one of the bestselling live albums of all time.

All of it came at a price, though, that left him, in the words of screenwriter-director Cameron Crowe (a friend since interviewing him for Rolling Stone) “strapped to the nose cone of rock 'n' roll.”

It wasn’t a case of success too soon—Frampton’s lack of a commercial breakthrough after four solo LPs had left him craving more. But it was a case of too much, as the 25-year-old loathed himself for following management’s urging to follow up with an ill-conceived studio album and a film adaptation of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The lack of preparation for overwhelming success contrasted enormously with his careful buildup as a live performer. 

As the opening act for a number of more seasoned performers—Edgar Winter, J. Geils, ZZ Top, and “the best teacher” Steve Marriott—Frampton “learned something new from every act—how they got the audience going, how they built their set. I would steal stuff from everyone, watch how they would say certain things and what reaction they would get.”

The original plan was to have a single LP of his live performances. But he was persuaded to add more songs to fill out a second disk—notably, “Baby I Love Your Way” and “Show Me the Way,” which became hit singles that lifted the collection into the sales stratosphere.

“Show Me the Way” featured the distinctive sound of Frampton’s electric guitar filtered through a “Talk Box,” as did the third single, “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

The news that the album hit #1 in April initially made Frampton euphoric: “Career-wise this was the best news I could ever hear—I was in shock.” Then self-doubt began to creep in: “I couldn’t help listening to the man on my other shoulder whispering, ‘How are you going to follow this one up, buddy?’”

By the end of the road tour to promote Frampton Comes Alive!, the new rock idol was feeling utterly frazzled. In an interview this month with Christopher Scapelliti of Guitar Player, Frampton reflected, “The biggest mistake was just not shutting down at that point.”

But he yielded to the advice of manager Dee Anthony that he get back into the studio and record I’m in You, even though he felt he didn’t have enough good songs at that point to put out a full disk.

The influence of Anthony—who, according to Frampton, was connected to organized crime—was malign in other ways, as perhaps indicated by his listing on this 2019 list of “Classic Rock Musicians Who Got Ripped Off by Managers and Record Labels Part 1.”

Anthony had “three rules of success” cited in Fred Goodman’s 1997 account of the business of rock ‘n’ roll, The Mansion on the Hill: “The first thing is, get the money. The second thing is to remember to get the money. The third thing…is always remember to get the money.”

His ultimate aim was to steer clients away from thinking about their finances, and he had a surefire means of doing so with Frampton, the musician remembered:

“I was kept high. If I needed weed, he [Anthony] made sure I had weed. If I needed cocaine, he made sure I had cocaine. He didn’t want me thinking about what was going on. It was criminal. I could have put him in jail.”

A 1978 car crash almost killed Frampton, and it took 20 years for him to shake his alcohol and drug addictions. The story of his rise and fall sounds like an episode of Behind the Music (and in fact, in the year 2000, it was an episode of the long-running VH-1 series).

Only that wasn’t the end for him. He rediscovered his love of music when he became lead guitarist on tour for longtime friend David Bowie in 1987; released several well-received solo albums in the 1990s; acted in Crowe’s Oscar-winning Almost Famous; and published Do You Feel Like I Do?, a memoir notable for its honesty and thoughtfulness.

In 2024, Frampton was elected to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and as I wrote in this blog post at the time, “few have reacted with as much modesty and gratitude” to this honor. His 2019. Frampton disclosure that he was diagnosed with the inflammatory muscle disease Inclusion-Body Myositis left many fans wishing him nothing but the best, and glad that they could see him perform for as long as his health permits.