45 years after releasing I’m In You — his followup to 1976’s Frampton Comes Alive! — Peter Frampton admits he still has regrets. Despite both the title track and album both topping out at Number Two, Frampton recalls the entire experience as one bad decision after another.
Frampton looked back at attaining worldwide fame with the classic double live album, telling Guitar World, “All of a sudden I realized that I had a lot of friends that I didn’t have before. Everybody had their two cents to put in, especially the people that were rubbing their hands together like this because I suddenly became the hen that laid the golden egg.”
He admits that he was stressed out upon hitting the studio to start the I’m In You sessions — even while Frampton Comes Alive! was still hot on the charts: “I knew that I couldn’t follow it. That album took me six years to write; it was a live ‘best of’ up until that point. There is a number from Humble Pie — ‘Shine On,’ I cherry-picked (the) Wind Of Change, Frampton’s Camel, (and) Somethin’s Happening (albums). . . That was when I think I started to over-imbibe and wanted to numb myself. The golden hen was now constipated.”
Looking back now, Frampton knows what he could’ve done to at least level the playing field for the followup album: “I should have probably commissioned every great writer there is and sat down and written with all of them. That would have been the only way to have dealt with that situation. I didn’t want to make I’m In You. I didn’t even want to hand it in. I didn’t like it. I knew it wasn’t good enough, but everybody was ‘rush, rush, rush.’ Everybody, one by one, would come to me with their own hidden agenda and say, ‘The longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be,’ and all that stuff. I wanted to wait until I had the best material I could come up with, however long that would have taken. It could have taken a year, it could have taken two years.”
All told, he remembers I’m In You as a mistake: “Various things happened. I lost a cassette tape that had a load of ideas on it — that was devastating to me. I remembered some of them but not all of them. The bulk of my new material that I had up until that point disappeared. It was a painful record to make.”
During the I’m In You period, Peter Frampton addressed both his and Fleetwood Mac‘s massive success a decade into their respective careers: “I think that Fleetwood Mac and myself are probably the two best examples of if you are good and you stick at it long enough, obviously that experience that you’re going to gain. . . I mean, I started playing in front of 200 people and now it’s 95,000, y’know? But, I think if you do have talent and you’ve got a good luck line and you stick around that long and you keep at it, In think you’re going to make it.”