Peter Frampton's cherished 1954 Gibson Les Paul Custom guitar, famously featured on the cover of his 1976 album 'Frampton Comes Alive!', has been recovered after being lost for 30 years. The guitar was thought to have been destroyed in a 1980 cargo plane crash in Venezuela, but it was later discovered that it had been salvaged from the wreckage and sold to a musician on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao.
According to a 2012 New York Times report, the guitar was returned to Frampton in Nashville after a two-year negotiation involving the local musician, a customs agent who repairs guitars in his spare time, a diehard Frampton fan in the Netherlands, and the head of the island's tourist board. Frampton expressed his astonishment, saying, 'For 30 years, it didn't exist - it went up in a puff of smoke as far as I was concerned. It's all I ever used for 10 years. That was it. That was part of me.'
This is not the only 'Black Beauty' guitar to be reunited with its famous owner. In 2016, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page was reunited with a 1960 version of the same guitar, 46 years after it was stolen from an airport while the band were on tour in 1970.
