{"id":10574,"date":"2015-04-23T21:12:12","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T01:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=10574"},"modified":"2015-04-24T10:18:04","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T14:18:04","slug":"maine-state-pier-comes-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/maine-state-pier-comes-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Maine State Pier Comes Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 2015 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Frampton shows ME the way.<\/h3>\n

Interview by Colin W. Sargent<\/p>\n

\"Peter-Frampton-May15\"<\/a>Maine State Pier will vibrate on June 27 with an open-air concert featuring two class acts: Peter Frampton and Cheap Trick. Frampton is in town more than you\u2019d guess and is looking foward to it.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll be performing outdoors when you come here, ducking seagulls. Any adjustments?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m used to it. In 2014, I wrote the title song and six others for the [pas de deux ballet]\u00a0 Hummingbird in a Box. <\/em><\/em>It was unusual, because I played onstage while dancers flew around me. The only other time I\u2019d performed with dancers was with David Bowie on his Glass Spider Tour, where there were as many dancers as musicians. In the middle of \u201cLet\u2019s Dance,\u201d a dancer stepped on my pedal and turned me off. Another time a dancer stepped on my distortion pedal and blew my sound completely [makes a looping, squelching sound].<\/p>\n

But I enjoy coming to Maine. I\u2019ve come up many times, because Bob Ludwig is in Portland. Once we were playing in the Man With Golden Ears tour, and I brought my whole band over there. Since the mid- to late-1980s, he\u2019s done all of my mastering.<\/p>\n

Do people try to fit you into a gorgeous box called Frampton Comes Alive? <\/em>Is Hummingbird in a Box<\/em><\/em> a response to that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before my brother was born, when I was under five, we\u2019d go to my grandparents\u2019 for afternoon tea and cake. My grandfather had been in the navy for two world wars. One day, he took out a very decorative wooden box. \u201cI have something I want to show you. It\u2019s magic. Open it.\u201d It was a solid block. Sealed. There was no way to open it. I held it up and turned it around, looked at the wooden panels. \u201cYou have to learn the secret of opening it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to make the right moves.\u201d He slid one little piece of wood one way, then another. Inside the secret interior was a little drawer that concealed [a false] bottom. When he slid that open, there was a stuffed hummingbird. That was the prize. He\u2019d picked it up during his travels to Asia. Later, I taught my brother how to open it. Now my brother has the box.<\/p>\n

The songs in the ballet are full of reveals, too. So with you there\u2019s no sense of, \u201cOh, no, he\u2019s going to play his \u2018new\u2019 material.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always wanted to write something that would be different from anything I\u2019ve ever written before. It\u2019s a selfish thing. I want to break new ground. It\u2019s funny, they call it The Merchandising Moment when a musician plays new material. Or the T-shirt Moment. \u2018Time to get a beer, hon.\u2019 My audience knows they\u2019re going to get at least one or two new songs whenever I come onstage.<\/p>\n

You explore silences in \u201cThe Promenade\u2019s Retreat.<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Silences are the best notes you don\u2019t play. They make the notes you do play so much more important. Especially with \u201cPromenade\u2019s Retreat,\u201d there\u2019s a tension, an expectation, and you\u2019ve just got to wait for it. A repetitive little riff just builds and builds and builds. Out of nowhere comes the chorus.<\/p>\n

Speaking of boxes, your Huffington Post<\/em> interviewer suggested \u201cThe seventies was sort of the beginning of teen idols\u2026\u201d Were you wondering, what about Elvis, Ella, Frankie\u2026Wolfgang?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mozart\u2019s a good example of a teen idol. Yeah, we\u2019re always going to have that. We\u2019ve had Justin Bieber.<\/p>\n

When, musically, did you become you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m always evolving, but I think Humble Pie was when I became me.<\/p>\n

What do you like to read?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading Stephen Hawking\u2019s book. Not A Brief History of Time, <\/em>but the one that came after that, The Universe in a Nutshell. I\u2019m sort of geeky. I tend to read manuals.<\/p>\n

Ringo lists you on his 2015 album. What\u2019s he like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always fun playing with Richie. Because I played with him on All Things Must Pass,<\/em> I\u2019ve known him since I was 21. You used to go into the studio and work with him, but now his studio is at home. Him and an engineer and me and an amp, and there it was. He had the tracks already done. \u201cDo you want to play on this one? How about this one?\u201d I play on two of the songs. He\u2019s one of the good guys.<\/p>\n

What can you do now that you could never have done in 1975 or 1976?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Go out of my house. Depends on whether it\u2019s 1975 or 1976. In 1975, I wasn\u2019t really known that well. In 1976, I couldn\u2019t go anywhere because it was a military operation if I wanted to get somewhere quickly. One day you\u2019re nobody. Next day you\u2019re a piece of meat. And I\u2019m a vegetarian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 2015
\nPeter Frampton shows ME the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10581,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-10574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-may-2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10574"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10617,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10574\/revisions\/10617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}