If you were just hitting your teens when Frampton Comes Alive! came out of nowhere to become one of the best selling albums of all time, what you saw on your album cover was a close-up of a guy and just a hint of his guitar (side note: I thought he had pink hair, based on the cover-wrong).
But once you got home and tore off the plastic wrap and opened the cover – what you saw was this:
There it was – his 1954 Les Paul Custom. It had 3 pickups, which was unlike most LP guys at the time (Billy Gibbons, Jimmy Page and others were famously playing sunburst, 2 pickup models). It was almost bigger than he was, and maybe just as heavy, but it became iconic.
What I did not know until today, is that the guitar on millions of album covers and still counting disappeared for a long time. Everyone assumed that his guitar was destroyed in a cargo plane crash in 1980. But it turns out that it somehow survived the crash in the tail of the plane and was returned to Frampton 31 years later. It was nicknamed The Phenix (their spelling).
I’m sure Frampton helped sell millions of Gibson guitars, so I guess it’s fitting that they now worked with him to design a new signature model called The Peter Frampton “Phenix” Les Paul Custom VOS, which is meant to recreate, down to the smallest details, Frampton’s original. He says he’s thrilled with the model and that it’s even a little lighter than its namesake. You can get all the tech specs here.
Courtesy: Gibson
Fans will know that he has officially retired from publicly performing after being diagnosed with inclusion body myositis — an incurable inflammatory condition that causes muscles to weaken slowly. But he has been staying busy.
In addition to the guitar line, he released a memoir called Do You Feel Like I Do? And he has released a new CD called Frampton Forgets The Words--a collection of 10 of his favorite pieces of music.
For those of us who were 13 year old fans and later abandoned him for “harder” artists, we eventually came back, but this has been an unexpected bit of memory time travel.
