Even after 36 years Peter Frampton carries on with great energy, a love for live shows and an attitude that makes everyone enjoy talking and being around him. 36 years ago his passion for live recordings led to one of the most successful live albums of the time – Frampton Comes Alive. Featuring hits like “Do You Feel Like We Do”, “Show Me The Way” and “Baby, I Love Your Way,” he hasn’t stopped for a moment and continues to push into new territory when it comes to live performances and recordings. At the beginning of this year, word spread throughout the tight-knit community of guitarists: the incredible story of the return of Peter Frampton’s iconic Black Beauty that was thought to have been destroyed in a plane crash. There’s something amazing about both the story and how a single, unique guitar could cause people to turn in their seats. In the interview below we speak with Peter on the return of his prized guitar, his gear, his live shows and advice for musicians.
Where were you when you first heard that your Black Beauty (The Phoenix) had been found? What did you feel when you got the news?
“It was an email to my Frampton.com email and I opened it up and there was just a picture of the guitar with the three white Seymour Duncan pickups that I had just put in before I went on that South American tour in 1980. I knew it was mine. There was so much about that guitar that was memorable to me. As I scrolled down there were forensically taken pictures of the inside with the pickups out, underneath the pickups and inside the volume control cavity. You could see close ups of everything. It was evident it was my guitar. I think my mind went blank! It was too much to take in, because for 30 years I thought it was up in a puff of smoke. Having had that guitar for ten years, and that ten years being the most active of my career, from Rocking The Filmore to Humble Pie, all my solo records and of course Frampton Comes Alive – it is the guitar on the front cover and the one I played on the album.”
“Then fear came into it: how am I going to get it back? Am I ever going to see it? If I get it back will the people think I am going to put them in prison for stealing, because obviously it was stolen – it was stolen from the debris site from the guard who was put on payroll to guard the debris for the insurance company.
“We’ll never know how many guitars survived. I know the white one is available down there too but I’m not going to go through what I went through for this, this is the only one. If somebody came to me one day with the Strat obviously it would be phenomenal  But this one is plenty. It’s a little singed around the headstock. We left it that way and Gibson did a phenomenal job in not doing too much. We only did what was necessary to bring it back.”

How does it play? Does it sound as good or have more character?
“It sounds exactly the same. It doesn’t have the guff of some of the maple tops – don’t forget this is pure mahogany. The Black Beauty was a 1954 guitar so it was before they put maple tops on Les Pauls. It was also early mahogany when they were farming that up the mountainside in Honduras where the wood was lighter the further away from the water table it was – that’s why all the early Les Pauls were lighter. It has a sweet tone that is very identifiable. I just plugged it in and everyones’ heads snapped around. It’s so difficult to describe sound, but it has characteristics that just lend itself to when we play Comes Alive, and when I use that guitar, it sounds like the record.”
You’re known as a man of tone and you’ve long since mastered the TalkBox. What gear and components are important to you?
“I’m always in search of the perfect sound – that’s my motto on Twitter. I am always in search of something a little different, because you get used to what you have. When you go back to using the original stuff and you plug straight into an amp like my ’59 Fender Deluxe Tweed which is phenomenal, it’s very hard to beat that. I have a ’55 Champ that I’ve been using in Nashville as well. I call the Les Paul that I got back The Phoenix, Mark Mariana who gave me the guitar – and this is all documented on extra footage on the Blu-Ray DVD, in that we captured the guitar coming back and we got a three camera shoot for every stage of that guitar coming back. The day they walked into the hotel room in South America to me playing it on stage. It’s a real cool documentary and I’m real proud of it.”
You have a  2 DVD set and a 3 CD set recently out. Do you record everything and spend a lot of your time going through different recordings? What inspired you to make your performances available show by show?
“We make available to the audience every night the whole show on CD. I think we will be going to download or thumb drives. The audience loves it. With the CDs, within 20 minutes of us finishing the show hundreds of people will be buying the whole show every night. They could listen to the show again: it’s their show, the one they were at. Then fans were talking on social networks, “You’ve got to get so-and-so night!” From now on I don’t see it stopping. The byproduct of that was not only could we do the DVD from the two nights we filmed but we were multi-tracking every night. There are 30 tracks on the CD, 29 on the DVD, from Montreal, Walla Walla, Washington, London, Cambridge, from everywhere. I went through 116 shows and chosed what I thought was best.”
Your live shows still have all the energy of 35 years ago. Where do you draw the energy and inspiration from? Do you have any rituals before you go on stage?
“That’s why I was put on this Earth, to do what I am doing. Ever since I first got on stage when I was 8 years old it gave me a feeling like nothing else of being able to entertain people and at the same time enjoy myself by doing what I love. My whole day on tour, from the moment I get up to the moment I come off stage, is planned. I’m very Type-A to a fault, a lot of people would say. Whatever it is, it makes me who I am and I enjoy it immensely. Do I have a rough night some nights? Yes of course I do. Do I blow a show occasionally? Yes I do. Do people occasionally not like me for that? Yeah I am just human and have great nights and awful nights. When I don’t have a good night I get pissed off at myself and not anybody else. It is very important to me that everything have the potential to go as well as possible, so I take precautions throughout the day.”

Do you have any tips for guitar players who are just starting to get into writing and performing their own songs?
“Listen to as many guitar players as you can and steal from them and copy from them. I still do that! One day you’ll start to play solos and you’ll find little bits of certain people and be thinking, “Oh, I know where that came from…” Then one day you don’t really know where it came from, it’s just a mish-mash of the people you’ve listened to but it’s coming out your way and that’s the it factor of the guitarist, you can’t really say who influenced you anymore because it’s everybody. That to me is always my goal. I wanted to be someone who when you put the needle down – well I guess you can’t say that anymore but let’s say it anyway – that you would put the needle down on one of my solos and someone would say “That’s Frampton.” And I believe to a certain extent I got to that point. Now it’s just the case of improving every day and doing something I couldn’t do yesterday. Today, be better than you were yesterday.”
To learn more about Peter Frampton and the FCA 35 DVD and CD click here.
For performance by performance recording, click here.