DO YOU FEEL LIKE I DO?

The British guitar legend looks back on a long ride in rock ’n’ roll.

“I never really wanted to be the front man; I just wanted to get in a band that was successful and be the lead guitarist.” So writes Frampton, a professional musician since his early teen years—and, to hear Charlie Watts tell it, a good drummer as well. The author’s by-the-numbers story, told with the assistance of music journalist Light, is like many a British rocker’s: He fell in love with the Beatles and set out to become a star—or at least the lead guitarist in a decent band. He went to art school, where his teacher father had an especially promising student named David Jones. “Later, of course, everyone called him David Bowie, but I always called him Dave, because I knew him as Dave at school,” Frampton recalls in a datum that probably didn’t need to be committed to print. Armed with a battery of guitars, one of which figures as a framing device for his memoir, Frampton played in a series of bands and almost wound up in the Small Faces. Instead, Steve Marriott left the group to form Humble Pie with him. A couple of years later, that band broke up, and Frampton found teen idol–dom with radio-friendly songs such as the one that lends its title to this book. Success came at a cost: The author gamely looks at the sexual politics of going from rocker to rock star, with the girls up front and the resentful original fans, the guys, in the back of the room, glowering. Frampton has few regrets apart from appearing with the Bee Gees in the film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (though, ever the fan, he notes that “meeting George Burns was a thrill”), posing shirtless for Rolling Stone, and falling prey to substance abuse.

Middling, as rock memoirs go, but a pleasure for die-hard fans.