Bankrate: The pressure to follow it must have been enormous.

Frampton: The more it seemed to grow, the greater the pressure became to turn in something incredible for the next one, which is very difficult to do when you are now the biggest selling record of all time. Nobody realized that six years of material went into that record. It's very difficult to then recoup. I always admired the Eagles because they would always wait three or four years between albums and longer because they wanted to put out something that was good, and it takes a while to get good material. Unfortunately, that wasn't put into practice. And being the biggest selling record of all time, until you put that next record out, you're still on that level. But as soon as you put that next record out, that's going to change people's perception of you.

Cameron Crowe was asked once to describe what happened to Peter Frampton, and he said, "It was like he was strapped to the nose cone of a rocket and he broke through the ceiling of the sky and when the rocket came to rest, he got off and Pete looked around and he said, 'There's nobody else here.'" And that's basically it, you know? There was no one there except myself. No one really knows what that feeling was like.

Bankrate: There couldn't have been many musician friends who had been in that situation to turn to for advice.

Frampton: I spoke to Ringo at the time and I remember him being very comforting. The thing that it made me realize was, he had three other guys who were in the bubble with him. It was just me and my own bubble.

Bankrate: From that height, it was almost certain there would be a precipitous fall.

Frampton: It was a very crazy period. There were a lot of things being asked of me and I was being protected by management, but I think a lot of the decisions that were made were anti-productive and detrimental. You didn't need to hype this record, and I felt that we sort of went ahead afterward and it was like we were doing a publicity tour on an unknown record. It was already its own entity and was gathering momentum moment by moment. It was just mishandled, the whole thing.

Bankrate: Did you have any sense of your finances at that time?

Frampton: No. I wish I'd been a little bit more hands-on in that area. It had never been about the money for me, it was always about the music. As long as I could cover my bills and could live, I was fine. I'd been very lucky inasmuch as I never had to go and get a day job or anything; I'd always managed to support myself. But we went from just supporting one's self to this gross national product! (laughs) What you have to realize is, the money was coming in obviously, but when you make a record or do a tour that are both very successful, there's a lot of money coming in all at once. Unfortunately, the direction that it went wasn't straight to my business manager -- it went somewhere else first. And that was the problem, because I wasn't set up. I had just let everybody else, like management, take care of everything, because there was no money to steal before. I wish I'd been a little bit more on top of that for many reasons.

It was almost like "This is the way things are done," and who am I to argue at that point? I was doing very well personally. I was making a lot of money, but not realizing that that wasn't all that should have been going to me. By the time you realize all that, a lot of money has gone elsewhere. It's like when you go back to some of the original R&B and blues guys and if they complained about their recording contracts, the record company would send them a car and they would go, 'Oh wow, they like me!' They didn't realize that they could have bought a hundred of those with the amount of money that was owed them.