Peter Frampton - Do You Feel Like I Do? A Memoir

Which band wasnt I in?!

L et me tell you one thingif Peter Frampton does not play, first I kill you, and then I kill Peter Frampton.

We were in a motel in Panama City, Panama, and I could overhear the local promoter threatening my road manager. We were supposed to play a sold-out stadium show that night, but the previous day, the cargo plane carrying our gear had crashed on the runway leaving Caracas, Venezuela, exploding and destroying all of our equipment on boardincluding my main guitar, a black 1954 Gibson Les Paul, the one I first played on Humble Pies breakthrough album, Performance: Rockin the Fillmore, the one on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive!

In Panama, I had sent the crew out to try to borrow some guitars, go to music shops, see if there was a PA company with enough sound equipment to fill a stadium. About five oclock that evening, the crew came to my suite. I opened the door and they threw in some wires; for the talk box tube, they had gone to, like, Sears and got one of those black hoses for a washing machine. I put my mouth on it and my whole mouth turned black. I said, That aint gonna work! They had nothing.

Rodney Eckerman, my road manager, called the promoter and said that it wasnt going to happenand the promoter obviously told his buddy Manuel Noriega that we werent going to play. Rodney said, Everybody get into Peters room so Ive got you all together. I think we might have to escape this country.

This was Election Day 1980, when Reagan got in, and we were listening to the results coming in on the BBC World Service. The motel was built around the pool, so we could see Rodney at a table by the pool, talking to the promoter. We opened the window and were listening, and Rodneys going, I hate to tell you this, but we cant play and were going to have to reschedule, and thats when we heard these death threats.

Rodney ran up and said, Get yourself to Pan Am; Ive already called, they know whats going on and theyre prepared. Theyre keeping the plane for us, and theyve told all the other passengers whats going on. Ill meet you there, I have to go with the promoter to sort this out. But there were all these armed police around the hotel, so we couldnt leave. We started talking to the guards and giving them beers and stuff, and we discovered they didnt know why they were there. I dont think they had any idea. So one by one, we snuck out of the hotel, walked away slowly, and got cabs to the airport.

We all made it there, but weve got no passports, because in Europe and South America, the promoter would keep your passports so that you had to do the gig. I dont know whether they still do this, but they did it then. Were going, English, Americanweve got one South African, the keyboard player, Arthur Stead; theyll never let him back into America!

We got to the gate and Pan Am said, Give us your boarding passes. They got immigration to stamp our boarding passes instead of our passports. It was bizarre. We got on the plane, they quickly shut the door, and the entire plane erupted in applause.

We still had to go to Puerto Rico to play a stadium there, so the road crew arranged for a complete set of gear to be flown down. I was playing guitars Id never even heard of. But we made it back to America after Puerto Rico, and then my guitar tech, Jon JD Dworkow, went back down to Caracas to see the damage and what, if anything, was left. But there was nothing; it had been a fireball crash. The planes tail had broken off; it was still all there, pretty much in one piece. The rest, there was nothing. And surely there was no way my beloved guitar had survived.