Bankrate: Did you work as a kid?

Frampton: The only thing I ever did was just a weekend job in a music store, funnily enough, so I couldn't keep away from it. In fact, it's ironic -- when I was 14, I would go down to this local music-come-record shop, mainly guitars and singles with some pretty decent guitars, and I go in there and, lo and behold, Dave Jones (nee Bowie) is working on Saturday helping the owner. And I'd go in there every week just to hang and one day he said, "Look, I can't do this job anymore because we're doing gigs on Friday nights with this band The Conrads. You want to take my job?" So I said yeah. That's how I got my first job. Usually what I earned I put right back in the till for a new set of strings.

Bankrate: You went, as Spinal Tap might put it, from zero to 11 with "Frampton Comes Alive!" What was it like?

Frampton: It was craziness, one big step right after another. It just didn't ever seem to stop. We sold like a million copies in one week; I remember that week. Originally, it was just one single album; "Show Me the Way," "Baby, I Love Your Way," all the acoustic stuff, none of that was on there. That's when Jerry Moss, the M of A&M Records, heard it and said, "Where's the rest?" We said, well, we didn't want to spend too much money and we didn't think you'd be up for a double one, and he said, "But I miss 'Wind of Change,' I miss 'Baby, I Love Your Way.' You'd better go out and record some more." That was the first sign that we were onto something, because he was very excited.

Bankrate: Could you ever have imagined such overwhelming success?

Frampton: No. I don't know why it got so huge. To be perfectly honest, it would have been terrific if it had not been quite so large, because when you become the biggest of anything, it just brings with it extra baggage. I'm very grateful for all the success, and I've had an amazingly long career and I'm not finished yet, but there were things about that ... I mean, when you can't stand to turn the radio on because it's on again. (Laughs) I hear myself saying that now and I'm like, well, that would be nice now, wouldn't it? It got to be overkill, and this country is so large that it takes a while to just saturate the market, as they call it, and it just became too much for a lot of people. Obviously it was good because so many people bought it, but it turned into this sort of wretched animal.