NASHVILLE (CelebrityAccess) Peter Frampton, who has just announced his farewell tour, revealed today on “CBS This Morning: Saturday” that he has had to stop touring because of a rare degenerative muscular disease.
The musician announced his final tour yesterday and told co-host Anthony Mason that he has been doing as much recording as possible since he was diagnosed with inclusion body myositis, a rare and incurable inflammatory condition that causes muscles to weaken slowly.
“Between October and two days ago, we’ve done like 33 new tracks,” he said. “I just want to record as much as I can, you know, now, for obvious reasons.”
“Going upstairs and downstairs is the hardest thing for me,” he said. “I’m going to have to get a cane … and then the other thing I noticed, I can’t put things up over my head.”
Frampton said he was diagnosed three years ago after he fell from a stage and, although the disease progresses slowly, he felt its effects speed up last fall. He decided to do his farewell tour after a bad fall while on vacation in Maui.
“What will happen, unfortunately, is that it affects the finger flexors,” he said. “That’s the first telltale sign is the flexors, you know. So for a guitar player, it’s not very good.”
Frampton added that he can still play guitar just fine.
“But in a year’s time, maybe not so good … 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 said. “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 tour this summer includes some of the venues that were part of his history, back when he was one of the top live touring acts of the ’70s, like the Forum and Madison Square Garden.
“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.”
Meanwhile he is participating in a new drug trial at John Hopkins.
“If this is the farewell tour, then maybe if the drug trial works, there’ll be the miracle tour … I wish but I’m realistic, too, so that’s why we’re really – this really is the farewell tour.”
Video available here.
