Wednesday, June 13, 2018

"Phinex" (sic)

Worked a concert last night that re-introduced a story that I had forgotten about.  One that involves one of the rock world's most famous guitars.  A story that, for at least for a brief note in time, I became a part of.

When I was sixteen, I, along with pretty much everyone I knew, purchased the album Frampton Comes Alive by British rocker Peter Frampton.  For months, it never left the turntable.  And you couldn't listen to the radio for more than a couple of songs without hearing one of the multiple songs that made the charts:   "Show Me the Way", "Baby, I Love Your Way", and "Do You Feel Like We Do."

I remember being inspired to find a few of his earlier albums at the local used record store run by a guy named "Fats," but they were all a bit of a let-down from the dynamics of that live album.

On that album cover is Frampton with his favorite guitar, a custom1954 Gibson Les Paul.




Turn the page (or sheet music) 42 years to last night and I'm backstage working the Peter Frampton and Steve Miller Band concert.  Fortunately, I got positioned outside the dressing rooms where I got to at least say a couple passing hellos as they all walked back and forth.

Back to the guitar.  Seems that that very guitar was presumed destroyed in a 1980 cargo plane crash.  Presumed destroyed, that is, until 2012.

It turns out the guitar did not burn up in November 1980 when a cargo plane crashed on takeoff in Caracas, Venezuela, on its way to Panama. Instead, someone plucked it from the burning wreckage, sold it to a local musician, and it had been there all along.

The story of how Frampton originally got the guitar and how he got the "Phoenix rising from the ashes" back is worth the research.

But for now, back to last night.  After Frampton finished and while Steve Miller was playing, I was reassigned by our security team supervisor . . . (I use "security team" and "reassign" here because it sounds much more impressive than "lowly-paid old man wearing an ill-fitting issued polo with "security" heat pressed on it and has hints of rarely being washed -- the shirt, not the old man).   Anyway, I was assigned to the loading dock where I was introduced to the stage manager.   Nice guy.  Told me to watch a crate.  THE crate that contained all of Peter Frampton's electric guitars with him on tour.  Holy shit.  There it was.  The "Phinex" as Frampton has labeled it.

"Don't leave," he said, "I'm going to get the last one."  My eyes never left the crate.

So, here comes the stage manager with the last, a 1960 Les Paul burst.  He starts to put it in the crate and stops, glares at me and says, "One is missing!"  My first thought was, I bet he does this cheesy prank on every stop.  Only, I noticed the concern in his eyes and it was real.  "One. Is. Missing!"    I did everything to assure him that I had not let my eyes off of the guitars.  Still, I started to feel guilty.

Fortunately, after a search, the missing guitar was found in the wrong crate and I was off the hook.

So, now I'm off to learn a little more about one of rock's greatest guitarists with some of the most tragic to "phoenix rising" to tragedy guitar stories in history.  Stories?

Turns out that he -- along with hundreds of other musicians -- lost a large number of instruments in the 2010 Nashville flood.  That's another tragic story of perhaps the largest loss of historic instruments in one day.  I'll let you research that for yourself.

The lesson of all this?  To paraphrase Peter Frampton, things happen and you just do what you have to do to keep playing.

Carpe diem Life,
David Kuhn

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