Peter Frampton Is Surprised And Honored He’s Being Inducted Into The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame

Peter Frampton has been a rock legend to fans and fellow musicians for decades, but now he’ll get his official designation in October. The British rock guitarist, who now calls Nashville, Tennessee home, learned this week, he’s being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

“It’s all a bit crazy,” he says with a laugh. “I’m still halfway through my assimilation into accepting it.”

This was Frampton’s first nomination, although he’s been eligible since the late 1990’s.

“To be honest,” he noted during a phone interview, “I’d archived it as something that would never happen, because I was eligible more than twenty years ago. So, I’m overwhelmed by the response by the fans, and the voting and everything.”

It’s interesting to note, he got the good news one day before his 74^th birthday.

“Yeah, all my birthdays came at once this week.”

Frampton began singing and playing guitar as a teenager, joining his first group at 16, then Humble Pie in 1969. He left two years later to pursue a solo career. He released a number of albums in the early 70s, but it was Frampton Comes Alive that made him a superstar. Released in 1976, it’s one of the best-selling live albums of all time with megahits “Show Me the Way,” “Baby I Love Your Way,” and “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

The album introduced his use of the Talk Box which allowed him to blend his voice and guitar through a plastic tube and create entirely new sounds. Other artists like Stevie Wonder and Joe Walsh had done something similar, but Frampton worked to create his own unique style and signature sound.

“Obviously since autotune and the different sounds you can make with a computer, people are more used to that sound, but mine is still analog, it’s not a digital anything,” he explains. “It’s a physical thing that works. And I think that’s why it’s so much more appealing, because I can talk to the audience through it, and they love it.”

When he’s inducted into the Rock Hall this fall, he’ll be part of the Performer Category that includes Mary J. Blige, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Foreigner, Kool & The Gang, Ozzy Osbourne, and A Tribe Called Quest.

Frampton has been busy touring, and he’s working on both a new album and a documentary. It’s been five years since he announced he’d stop touring due to a diagnosis of IBM IBM (Inclusion Body Myositis, a degenerative muscle disease that worsens over time. It’s already affected Frampton’s legs. He now walks with a cane and sits down when he performs. And while he can feel it a bit in his hands and fingers, the guitar great is still going strong.

“When I sit down and pick up a guitar, my fingers know what to do. It’s just that they have a little less strength than they used to, and I have to adapt in as much as certain fingers need to be taking over the job of another finger.”

And while Frampton may pick up on those little nuances, fans who come to hear him play can’t tell any difference at all. He’s still at the top of his game.

He’s grateful for the ability to keep playing the music he loves and thrilled to become a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame later this year.

“I’m honored to have been chosen to be inducted along with so many incredibly talented people who have gone before me,” he says. “We’re talking the Beatles, the Stones, and Elvis…It’s all pretty heady to think I’ll be inducted into the same place and have a plaque on the wall just like them.”