When David Bowie offers you to be his guitarist for his next tour, you jump at the opportunity and thank your lucky stars that a chance like this has landed on your doorstep. That is precisely what Peter Frampton did when Bowie asked him to come and be his guitar player for the Glass Spider Tour after recording a track together.
“I did a record for Atlantic called ‘Premonition,’” began Frampton, disclosing to Guitar World how Bowie knew about his works. “It still wasn’t a great record. It had much better material but wasn’t where I should have been. That’s the album David Bowie listened to. He would check me out and said, ‘Can you come and play some guitar for me?’”
Bowie had his eyes set on Frampton, and he offered him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only record a song together but also be his guitar player on tour. Peter noted, “That’s when I went to Switzerland, and we recorded ‘Never Let Me Down.’ Then he asked if I would be one of the guitar players on the Glass Spider Tour, which blew me away. Finally, having been on the same stage the same evening many times before, I was going to be Dave’s guitar player.”
“He could have chosen anybody,” said the guitarist. He also added, “He’d had Stevie Ray Vaughan on the album before, but he chose me. I can never thank him enough for that. Before I knew what he was doing for me, he knew what he was doing for me. It was a Dave plan.”
Recording with someone as iconic as Bowie was one notable career highlight any guitarist would dream of. Frampton, who has experienced his fair share of success with the Herd, Humble Pie, and his solo albums, is now on his farewell tour to wrap up a lifetime of incredible moments. This is your last chance to see the guitarist live before he can no longer be on stages after his inclusion body myositis diagnosis that has forced him to retire sooner rather than later.
