The 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony in Cleveland on Saturday (Oct. 19) meant a lot to everyone involved, of course. But you can consider Peter Frampton among, if not the most, delighted people in the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.

Long considered one of the Rock Hall’s great snubs, Frampton’s induction was particularly poignant in light of his nearly decade-long battle with Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative condition that was expected to take him out of commission shortly after he revealed it six years ago and went on what was supposed to be a farewell tour. Yet he’s still playing — including at the induction ceremony, joined by his band and guest Keith Urban — and was beaming after his time on stage at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.

“It was fantastic,” Frampton told Billboard. “It went better than I thought, which was wonderful.” He did note, however, that “halfway through the speech, as I looked down at my family… I needed a drink of water at that point. It can be a tear-jerker. It’s very emotional having everybody here. All my children are never all here together at a show. There’s always one here, one there or whatever. So it was wonderful.”

Given, like other inductees, just seven minutes of performance time, Frampton originally planned a shortened version of his signature hit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” a song — featuring a Talk Box solo — that can stretch to 20 minutes during his concerts. “That’s the one everybody wants to hear,” Frampton noted, “so we edited that down, and that includes jamming with Keith as well. But then (show producers) said, ‘We feel really bad you’re doing just one number.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got the same amount of time as everyone else.’ They said, well, can you do another one for two minutes?’” For the “bonus cut” he chose “Baby (Somethin’s Happening)” from his third solo album, Somethin’s Happening, which turned 60 this year.

“The actual playing part, which I was most concerned about, obviously, because I’m the stupid perfectionist person and I worry about every little tiny detail… it just had to be great. That’s what made me nervous,” Frampton explained. “Or excited. Keith said, ‘Don’t say nervous. Say excited.’”

Urban, for his part, was excited to jam out with Frampton, even in an abbreviated fashion, on “Do You Feel Like We Do.” “When he called and asked me if I’d play that song, of all songs, I was very happy to get to do it,” Urban, who subbed for Bryan Adams at the 2021 Rock Hall inductions in Cleveland, told Billboard after the performance. “It was amazing getting to play with Peter. He’s just got such a control over sensitivity and dynamics and intents. He makes to look easy, but it’s really hard to do what he does. He’s like a black diamond (trail) skier making it look like a green. It’s insane.”

Frampton and Urban spoke of their Nashville history, meeting up during the ’90s after they’d both moved there and before Urban’s career took full flight. “I was living in an absolutely awful, crap house in a pretty gloomy part of town at the time,” Urban recalled, “and my manager called and said, ‘Hey, do you want to write with Peter Frampton? I’m like, ‘Holy s—, yeah! Where are we gonna write.’ He goes, ‘He’s gonna come to your house.’ I Go, ‘No, no, no. He’s not gonna come to my house. But sure enough he came over to my dwelling and we spent the day just playing music and writing.” Nothing came out of the session, however. “It was one of those strange, mismatched moments, musically. I wasn’t in a good headspace. I don’t think either of us was in the best place we’ve been in — but I was glad we got a good, solid friendship out of it.”

Another friend on hand Saturday was the Who’s Roger Daltrey, who delivered the induction speech for Frampton, who had opened for the Who on his first tour with his band the Herd. Daltrey also led the humorous revelry in the press room after the induction, joking that the original tour was “the pinnacle of your (Frampton’s) decline. No wonder you joined up with [Humble Pie], because you needed to be there. You were gonna be forever stuck in the Who — if being in the Who is forever stuck.”

Daltrey also gushed about hearing Frampton and Urban playing together at the ceremony.
“It was fabulous to hear the sound of real guitars instead of all the fuzz box s— that they put out these days, detuned…,” Daltrey noted. “It’s not rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not music… and it was wonderful to hear Peter’s guitar sound and Keith and the band work together, and the sensitivity in (Frampton’s) voice… Your secret is everything you do comes from the heart and it’s always been that way and it’s always affected me… And I mean it! I’m not blowing smoke up your ass, or blowing it on the way down. I really do mean it.”

Frampton, who partied after the ceremony with family and friends back at the Four Seasons hotel, recently finished a short late summer concert tour and said he’s hoping to go out again next year. In the meantime he’s working on completing both an album of all-new songs as well as a documentary that’s being directed by his keyboardist Rob Arthur.

Sarcastically noting that answering questions is “my favorite thing to do,” Cher answered a few from the press backstage at the 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Saturday (Oct. 19).

After taking the Rock Hall to task during her speech for waiting 35 years to induct her after she became eligible, Cher acknowledges that, “I have a kind love hate relationship [with the Rock Hall], because I thought, ‘What do I have to f–king do , y’know, to be inducted into this place? What do you have to do to be a part of it?’”

Though tempted to tell David Geffen, who she said wrote a letter to the Hall of Fame Foundation on her behalf, to “please take it back,” Cher said that in the end she was happy with the way things turned out. “I felt good. I can say that I’m happy that I’m in,” she says. “If I didn’t [think] it, I wouldn’t be here.”

Reflecting on a 60-year career dating back to work with her late ex-husband Sonny Bono and sessions with Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew, the singer said that she struggles with thoughts of legacy. “I [didn’t] have perspective, exactly — I just was busy living my life, so I wasn’t like thinking about it at all,” she says. “I was thinking about it from minute to minute, thing to thing. I thought of myself as a bumper car and when I hit a road I would just back up and turn in a different direction, because I wasn’t going to stop doing what I loved.”

And what about Sonny & Cher making it to the Rock Hall one day? “I think that we deserve it, ” Cher tells Billboard. “Even if we weren’t exactly rock ‘n roll, we represented music. I know it’s not like … we were corny, but we were very avant garde for what was happening at the time, so, I don’t know. I didn’t expect to get in. I just thought, ‘They’re never gonna let you in, b–ch.’”

During her speech, Cher made sure to send a message to all of the women watching around the world: “The one thing I have never done, is I never give up,” she explained. “And I am talking to the women, okay … we have been down and out, but we keep striving, and we keep going and we are somebody. We are special.”

With her induction into the annals of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday night (Oct. 19), Cher made sure to set expectations early on: “This speech is gonna be such a crapshoot — I wrote it the other day, and then I rewrote it tonight, and I’m dyslexic,” she declared.

A crapshoot it was not — across her presentation at the annual ceremony, Cher stunned the crowd at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse with renditions of “If I Could Turn Back Time” and “Believe” — the latter featuring special guest Dua Lipa — before cedeing the stage to Zendaya, who introduced her idol with aplomb. “Where do I even begin?” the actress said, dressed in an outfit inspired by one of Cher’s many Bob Mackie looks. “There is not one person in this room, in this country, and pretty much in this world who doesn’t know the name of the artist I am here to honor tonight. She’s so iconic, she only needs one name.”

In a video tribute, stars appeared to pay tribute to Cher, including Cyndi Lauper, Shania Twain and P!nk, with the latter making it abundantly clear that the mononymous singer was a “f–king rockstar.”

But once into her speech, Cher made it clear that her induction was never guaranteed: “It was easier getting divorced from two men than it was getting into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” she cracked. “I want to thank my guardian David Geffen, because he wrote a letter and sent it to the directors, and now, ha ha, here I am!”

While the singer made sure to occasionally make fun of herself (“I’m a good singer, not a great singer,” she cracked), she didn’t shy away from acknowledging her impact throughout her decades-spanning career. In one particular highlight, the star looked back on how her biggest songs nearly didn’t happen.

“[With] ‘Believe,’ I changed the sound of music forever, and it was an accident. My producer and I were having a fight, with my producer saying, ‘Cher, do it better,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Dude, if you want it better, get a different singer.’ He called me later and said, ‘Cher, I’ve been playing around with the pitch machine, and I think I’ve got something.’ I went back and listened to it, and when it was over, we both jumped up and high-fived each other. And then the head of my record company said ‘we can’t do that because no one will know it was you.’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s the deal! That’s the great part!’”

Cher also recalled the advice that she had been given by her mother from a young age that guided her career to where it is today. “She said to me, ‘You might not be the prettiest, you might not be the smartest, you might not be the most talented, but you’re special,’” she said. “She kept instilling it into me: ‘If you’re down and you’re out, you get up again.’”

Smiling at the crowd, Cher made sure that the women in the audience had heard her. “The one thing I have never done, is I never give up. And I am talking to the women, okay — you guys are on your own,” she offered with a smirk. “We have been down and out, but we keep striving, and we keep going and we are somebody. We are special, as my mother would say.”

Cher was just one of the icons honored at Saturday night’s event — fellow inductees included Mary J. Blige, Ozzy Osbourne, Kool & the Gang, A Tribe Called Quest, Dave Matthews Band, Foreigner and Peter Frampton.