Peter Frampton Didn’t Know How Much David Bowie Helped Him
Peter Frampton still regrets releasing 1977's I’m In You, but says he's thankful to David Bowie for his presence in the aftermath.
“I didn’t want to make I’m In You,” Frampton tells Guitar World. “I didn’t even want to hand it in; I didn’t like it. I knew it wasn’t good enough, but everybody was ‘Rush, rush, rush.’ I wanted to wait until I had the best material I could come up with, however long that would have taken.”
“I lost a cassette tape that had a load of ideas on it – that was devastating to me,” he continued. “I remembered some of them but not all of them. The bulk of my new material that I had up until that point disappeared. It was a painful record to make.”
Despite that, the initial response was good. “Even though ‘I’m In You’ was a huge single in the States and the album went right up the charts straight away, things dropped off pretty quickly,” Frampton said. “The I’m In You tour was fine, that was good. Then after that, when that had sunk in, I think that’s when I started to lose a lot of audience. That was the situation. I felt like I was in a sinking ship.”
Then school friend Bowie invited Frampton to play on his 1987 album Never Let Me Down, and made him a member of the Glass Spider touring band. It revitalized the guitarist's career and “changed my credibility,” Frampton said. “A teenybopper star, his length of career is about 18 months – whereas a musician’s career is a lifetime. I’m a musician first and foremost. David gave me back that credibility to continue and bring people back to me.”
Even so, it took Frampton a while to realize just how much Bowie had helped: “I can never thank him enough for that. He knew what he was doing for me before I knew what he was doing for me.”
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