Rock music has many iconic guitars: “Lucille,” BB King’s Gibson ES-335; Eric Clapton’s Fender Stratocasters “Brownie”; and “Blackie,” Bo Diddley’s homemade rectangular guitar.

One guitar in that rarefied class of instantly recognizable instruments, “The Phenix,” is Peter Frampton’s heavily modified 1954 Beauty Les Paul Custom. With mother-of-pearl fingerboard inlays, hand-wound Seymour Duncan humbucker pickups and custom “switch-washer” electronics, The Phenix can be seen and heard on Frampton’s 1976 smash album, “Frampton Comes Alive!”

With its warm, fat tone pumped through swirling Leslie speakers — not to mention the musician’s mastery of the Heil Talkbox — the guitar was as familiar as Frampton’s flowing blond hair. He and his guitar were inseparable — until The Phenix was lost and presumed destroyed for more than 30 years.

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“Frampton Comes Alive!” hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in April 1976 — so it’s a good time to look back at how the British musician and his signature instrument were reunited.

It was love at first strum.

In 1970, Frampton was playing with Humble Pie at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. He’d been struggling with his guitar, which erupted into howling feedback at the slightest provocation, making solos a nightmare. Local musician Mark Mariana approached Frampton and offered to lend him a Gibson Les Paul he’d modified himself — its solid body wouldn’t resonate or give feedback like the semi-hollow body he’d been playing.

It was love at first strum. The guitar’s slender neck fit Frampton’s smaller hands perfectly, and its Honduran mahogany body made it lighter than most Les Pauls, which tend to be heavy. Frampton offered to buy the guitar, but Mariana insisted on giving it to him.

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Fast forward to 1976: Frampton had played the guitar almost exclusively with Humble Pie and Frampton’s Camel; in sessions with musicians as varied as Harry Nilsson, Jerry Lee Lewis, George Harrison, and John Entwhistle; and of course in his solo career — which had skyrocketed thanks to hits like “Baby, I Love Your Way” and “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

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“Frampton Comes Alive!” spent 10 weeks at the top of the charts and was the best-selling album of 1976. It went on to sell more than 18 million copies and is still one of the best-selling live albums of all time.

The rock star was on top of the world — making his decline all the more painful. His next album, 1977’s “I’m in You,” went platinum with three million sold, but it was considered a flop after the runaway success of “Frampton Comes Alive!” In 1978 he appeared alongside The Bee Gees in the dreadful musical “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band,” followed by a near-fatal car accident in the Bahamas. His popularity was falling even faster than it had risen.

But another disaster was yet to come.

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In 1980, after appearing in Caracas, Venezuela, Frampton and his band were scheduled to play in Panama, but their cargo plane crashed and burned on takeoff. The accident killed the flight crew and destroyed all the band’s stage gear, including Frampton’s beloved Les Paul. After four years of setbacks, it seemed Frampton had truly hit rock bottom.

Undaunted, he forged ahead. Frampton continued recording and performing throughout the ’80s and began a comeback in 1987, when childhood friend David Bowie invited him to play guitar for his “Glass Spiders” tour.

Frampton stayed busy throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, winning a Grammy in 2007 for his album “Fingerprints.” As 2010 approached, he was consulting with Gibson’s Custom Guitar shop on the construction of a signature-edition Les Paul that replicated as closely as possible the one he’d lost in 1980. As far as he was concerned, the original Les Paul was as irretrievably gone as his famous long, wavy locks.

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But Frampton was in for a shock. Someone — no one knows exactly who — had plucked the Gibson from the plane’s flaming wreckage and sold it to a local musician in Curaçao, who had been using it ever since, not knowing its true identity. In 2010, a guitar repairman was astounded to realize the instrument he’d been asked to patch up was Frampton’s iconic guitar. After nearly two years of negotiation — in December 2011 — a Venezuelan customs official named Ghatim Kabbara delivered the guitar to Frampton in a Nashville hotel suite.

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Gibson’s master luthier eagerly refurbished the guitar, which Frampton had dubbed The Phenix, including new electronics, pickups, and other hardware. But Frampton nixed any talk of refinishing it, saying he considered the scorch marks on the neck and other cosmetic damage to be battle scars. And in February 2012, he performed with his beloved guitar in New York’s Beacon Theater for the first time in 32 years.

“My career started to ebb; the guitar went away,” Frampton told CBS Sunday Morning in 2012. “Things have been going remarkably well over the last few years, and I get my guitar back. It’s almost like the guitar said, ‘OK, you’re worthy again.'”

And he’s vowed never to lose The Phenix again.

“Now that I’ve got it back,” Frampton told Guitar World in 2012, “I’ve insured it for $2 million — and I’m never letting it out of my sight!”