In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: Wind of Change

Peter Frampton- Comes Alive 50th Anniversary

Peter Frampton’s double concert album Frampton Comes Alive, released in January 1976, was so phenomenally successful, and his resultant fame so widespread, that it is hard to remember a time when Peter Frampton wasn’t a household name. I remember clearly my disappointment when Peter Frampton left Humble Pie, but was impressed that he wasted no time launching a solo career with the tasty 1972 release Wind of Change. Shortly after the release of the follow-up, Frampton’s Camel in 1973, I drove several hundred miles in a gas-guzzling Corvette Stingray (a risky thing during the Arab Oil Embargo) to see Peter Frampton open for the Edgar Winter Group in Massillon Ohio’s football stadium. Even with what looked to be about five feet of stage depth allotted and undoubtedly only half of the P.A. afforded to the support band, Frampton’s smartly-rehearsed live band exhibited the same energy, exuberance, and tightly arranged hooky songs that would be hallmarks of his record-setting Frampton Comes Alive three years later.

As you hear in my classic rock interview with Peter Frampton , the majority of Frampton Comes Alive! including “Show Me the Way”,”Baby I Love Your Way”,”Lines on My Face”, and “Do You Feel Like We Do?”came from a San Francisco concert in Bill Graham’s Winterland September 17,1975 , and one of the thousands of fans in the audience that night would later travel to New York City as a budding comedic actor, join the cast of the legendary Saturday Night Live, develop an ongoing skit with cast member Mike Myers that was expanded into a feature-length film, and invite Peter Frampton to do a cameo appearance in the movie. The hit film was Wayne’s World, and the fan from the actual Frampton Comes Alive! concert is Dana Carvey.

Now this is the way to start a new year: Peter Frampton In the Studio on the golden anniversary of his game-changing Frampton Comes Alive! Don’t miss my definitive interviews compiled over the decades regarding the ever-continuing story of the cultural phenomenon that is Frampton Comes Alive! – Redbeard

January 4, 2026
Peter Frampton- Shine On Early Best

The sub-title of this classic rock interview, originally in conjunction with the early best-of Shine On, should probably be “Frampton Barely Survives”. Everybody knows that young Englishman Peter Frampton revolutionized the recording industry in early 1976 with his record-setting live double album Frampton Comes Alive. But where did those now-iconic songs like “Show Me the Way”, “Lines on My Face”, “Baby I Love Your Way”, “All I Want to Be (Is By Your Side)“, and “Do You Feel Like We Do” originally come from? Peter joins me In the Studio to trace the days after he left Humble Pie, his struggles with four solid but woefully under-exposed solo studio albums, his phenomenal transformation into pop superstardom with the live album, and the tumultuous years immediately after, trying to survive it all.

Peter Frampton had the Cinderella story of Frampton Comes Alive two years earlier turn nightmarish by early July 1978. Personal and professional betrayal, infidelity, exhaustion…it all came crashing down, literally, and it almost cost Frampton his career and even his life. But Peter’s current health concern with a progressive degenerative muscular disease, which prompted 2019’s farewell tour, is certainly not his first crisis, as you will hear in this in-depth frank classic rock interview. The guy was the first post-Elvis Seventies superstar, but you won’t find him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – yet. But this is the year that glaring omission gets rectified. It is inexplicable why he has been denied Rock Hall induction until now, and any attempt at a plausible answer short of blacklisting is an exercise in futility. Instead Peter Frampton tells his unique dramatic story here In the Studio. –Redbeard

April 14, 2024
Scorpions- Blackout- Klaus Meine, Rudolph Schenker

Blackout was the March 1982 big breakthrough in the US for the irrepressible Scorpions. Over the decades, I’ve had countless famous musicians claim that rock & roll had become their life, but only two, John Kay of Steppenwolf and the members of The Scorpions, knew that expressing the freedom inherent in playing rock music could literally cost them their lives. While Kay was smuggled out of Communist East Germany at the age of six, The Scorpions all grew up in West Germany in the ominous “Iron Curtain” shadow of the Soviet Union and its totalitarian satellites. In these Eastern Bloc countries, rock & roll was as synonymous with American and British Western ideals as Old Glory and the Union Jack.

For the last sixty years, rock & roll could be the ticket out of socio-economic prisons of poverty and racial bigotry in North America, UK, and Australia, providing an express elevator to the penthouse of fame and fortune … if you were lucky. But for the Scorpions, simply listening to rock music beaming out of the pirate radio stations in the North Sea, or buying a Beatles record on the black market for an entire month’s wages, or wearing long hair and blue jeans, or attending an underground rave…any of these could get them surveilled, detained, interrogated, or worse. Much worse. The East German Stasi secret police didn’t rock, but heads did roll.

(Scorpions bass player the late Francis Bucholz, left, with singer Klaus Meine)

While we watched the televised reports of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc states in December 1989, the Scorpions and my guests Klaus Meine and Rudolph Schenker were actually there, experiencing it firsthand in real time. With enough nuclear weaponry to annihilate every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth 26 times over, the largest peaceful revolution in history happened, not with guns but with guitars.(Matthias Jabs left, Klaus Meine) –Redbeard

April 3, 2022
Peter Frampton- All I Want to Be is By Your Side- Dallas 2-94

As I watched on CNN as Peter Frampton explained that his upcoming farewell tour is due to the progressive muscular degenerative disease Inclusion Body Myositis ( IBM ), I flashed back almost thirty years ago to a time when Frampton was equally concerned that he would have to stop, not because of health reasons but because of changing tastes in music. But he and I witnessed an event that dramatically helped convince Peter that rock and roll never forgets. Working without a net, unrehearsed and totally impromptu, surrounded by wall-to-wall fans crammed like sardines into a Dallas bar/restaurant in February 1994 for my Friday afternoon remote broadcast on Q-102, Peter Frampton obliged his loyal subjects with the appropriate “All I Want to Be is By Your Side”, originally on his first solo album Wind of Change in 1972 after leaving Humble Pie. –Redbeard

May 5, 2019
Peter Frampton- It’s a Plain Shame- Austin October 2011

Been spending more and more on concert tickets but enjoying it less? This may be the best value of the entire Summer classic rock concert season, as two ageless guitar monsters team up for great songs performed by great bands: Peter Frampton and Steve Miller! For an example, here is Peter Frampton in Austin TX in 2011 performing a white-hot “It’s a Plain Shame“, a song from his first solo album Wind of Change. – Redbeard

May 14, 2017