Scrambling to cash in on Frampton-mania, the young Englishman with the funny-sounding guitar voice thing was suddenly playing to over 100,000 rabid fans, resulting in a disaster straight out of the USO show in Apocalypse Now.
Right when we started to tour in the summer of 1976, which ended up being the big Frampton Comes Alive tour, there were some shows that had already been booked that weren’t up to capacity because it was before the album really took off. I had played to huge audiences before in Humble Pie, but never as the headliner. Humble Pie supported Grand Funk Railroad at Shea Stadium, which was huge. We played before the Beatles. After I left the band, I started back at the bottom, so to speak. I was playing to 10,000–15,000 people, and almost overnight, it was 120,000 people in Philadelphia. That’s a big audience, and so much preparation has to be involved. It was madness. For this one show in Austin, the outside area was only conceptualized to accommodate 10,000–15,000 people comfortably. It was a horribly built stage, and 80,000 people turned up. The mixing board was connected to a walkway off the side of the stage, so there were people climbing up on that. No one in charge had any idea what the hell they were doing. We had to be helicoptered in because there were so many people, as we couldn’t drive in.
When we finally got on stage, the power was really bad because the grounding was horrible. Every time I touched the microphone, I got a bad shock. It was one of those “Oh shit” situations. All of a sudden, during the first encore, we heard this awful, cracking sound. It was people literally tearing apart the stage. They had pulled away the barricade with their bare hands because they were being crushed against the stage. Suddenly, there were all these people beneath us, and the stage started rocking, as if we were on some giant ship. It was about to collapse, and we were rushed off stage to the helicopter. Our girlfriends and wives were there waiting, but there was only room for us four guys and the pilot. The wives and girlfriends were not happy.
We squeezed in, and the pilot said, “Well, where are you going?” We screamed, “What do you mean where are we going? Isn’t there some drop-off point? Get us the hell out of here!” The pilot responded calmly, “No. Sorry,” and just took off. Obviously, we weren’t from Austin, but we remembered that we took off from some kind of shopping center in town. At 1,500 feet, we were all trying to work out where the hell we were going as the stage was being destroyed below us. We were still in our stage clothes and were sopping wet. The pilot said, “How bout I drop you down here?” It was just the first supermarket parking lot he saw. We got out and said, “What do we do now?” We didn’t have our road manager or security in contact, so we were just baffled.
The pilot just said, “I gotta go back and get more people.” He took off, leaving us standing there with towels around our necks. Shoppers were staring at us like we’d just landed from the moon. We had to flag down a guy with a pickup truck. We climbed in the back and gave him the name of our hotel. He yelled, “Frampton! I don’t believe it—I just saw you play!” Our wives and girlfriends eventually got back to the hotel, and believe me, they were pissed. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured. The area got five times the amount of people they were expecting, and it was just built on a local level. You don’t get that with Live Nation now. It was my Altamont moment.
The most embarrassing thing that’s happened to me on stage was in ’77. We were playing Hartford, Connecticut, and that whole summer we had been playing outside during the day with a reflective stage. All our instruments were white, so there were no lighting rigs involved. After a short break, we switched to nighttime gigs. We were playing a racetrack in Hartford, and there were about 45,000 people in attendance. For our first nighttime show, we did what we always used to do. I would run onstage first, wave to the crowd, and pick up a guitar for three acoustic numbers. Then the band would come out. We did it the same way that night, and as I was not used to running on stage in the dark, the bright lights hit, nearly blinding me. There was no white line on the edge of the stage in front of the barricade.
I ran right on, and right off, the stage. I landed on the crash barrier as the crowd audibly gasped, “Ohhhhh.” I finally got up and turned around, and my manager’s brother ran on stage to pull me up. I put one foot on the front of the stage, and as he pulled me forward, my satin pants split from seam to seam. Because I wore them so tight in those days, there was nothing underneath. The crowd went from “Ohhhh,” to “Ahhhhh,” as I gave 45,000 people a proper mooning. I scrambled on stage and had to find some new pants. I was scraped from head to toe, but the show went on. That was my wardrobe malfunction moment…in a big way.