After being diagnosed with a degenerative muscle disease, Peter Frampton announced this weekend that he is retiring from music… but not before one last farewell tour and a final burst of rapid-fire songwriting.
“Between October and two days ago, we’ve done like 33 new tracks,” the guitarist said on “CBS This Morning.”
“I just want to record as much as I can, you know, now, for obvious reasons.”
Frampton, 68, was first diagnosed back in 2015 with inclusion body myositis, a rare and incurable inflammatory condition which causes muscles to weaken slowly. He said that his condition has accelerated in recent months, and that he’s calling it quits now before the disease takes over his fingers.
“I’m a perfectionist and I do not want to go out there and feel like, ‘Oh I can’t, this isn’t good.’ That would be a nightmare for me,” he told the show’s cohost, Anthony Mason. “I’ve been playing guitar for 60 years. Started when I was eight and now I’m 68. So, I’ve had a very good run.”
“The reason I’m calling it the ‘farewell tour,’ again, is because I know that I will be at the top of my game for this tour and I will make it through this and people won’t be saying, ‘Oh you know, he can’t play as good.’ I can. But we just don’t know for how long.”
The four-month nationwide tour will begin in Tulsa on June 18 and will end in San Francisco on Oct. 12. Frampton’s career has spanned over five decades, peaking in 1976 with the live album “Frampton Comes Alive,” which topped the charts for 10 weeks.