On September 25, former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley discussed a wide range of topics during a “live conversation” at Hollywood’s Musicians Institute.
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On his new album, “Spaceman”:
Ace: “It’s one of the best records I ever recorded, and that’s not coming from me — that’s coming from everybody who’s heard it. I’ve done about 50 interviews, and all the interviewers said, ‘Ace, this is one of the best things you’ve ever done.’ I wanted to call the album ’40 Years Later’, because the first solo album I did with ‘New York Groove’ was 1978. I was doing a ‘Vault Experience’ in Miami with Gene [Simmons], and we were doing a Q&A. I polled the audience and I said, ‘What should I call the next album — ’40 Years Later’?’ I got a lukewarm response, and then Gene [said], ‘Ace, you should call the album ‘Spaceman’.’ I said, ‘Okay. Coming from you? Great. I don’t want Tommy Thayer knocking on my door going, ‘I’m the Spaceman.’ I don’t think so.'”
On growing up in the Bronx:
Ace: “I got involved with a gang because I got tired of getting beat up. When you’re in a gang, you have protection — you’re walking down a street and somebody wants to pick a fight with you, and his buddy will go, ‘Don’t pick a fight with him. He’s in the Ducky Boys.’ That’s pretty much why I got involved with the gang scene, even though it wasn’t something that I really was excited about or really wanted to do. I just wanted protection. As I got older — I joined the gang when I was about 13, and that’s around the time I picked up a guitar, so by the time I was 14, I was already in bands and performing on weekends at, like, church dances, so on and so forth — wherever we could play. By the time I was 15, I was really into it and working almost every weekend, and I’d be getting calls from guys in the gang going, ‘Hey, we got a fight tonight in a schoolyard. Bring a switchblade.’ I’d say, ‘I can’t go — I got a gig.’ Music kind of got me out of that whole gang scene and saved my life.”
On the bands that inspired him in his youth:
Ace: “THE BEATLES and THE [ROLLING] STONES. When I was 13, I remember getting the single of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. They had those matching suits with no collars. [I was a] huge fan of THE ROLLING STONES — actually, more so than THE BEATLES. I’m attracted to bad boys.”
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On the classic bands he’d encourage rock fans to listen to:
Ace: “I don’t like to be a dictator and tell people listen what to listen to and what not to. What I would say to up-and-coming guitar players and bands [is], listen to LED ZEPPELIN. Listen to CREAM. Listen to Jeff Beck. Listen to THE WHO. Those are the guys that influenced me, and I got my guitar style by copying their solos and their songwriting. I never took a guitar lesson, and just about every day, somebody comes up to me and says, ‘If it wasn’t for you, I never would have picked up a guitar.’ I feel guilty because I never took a guitar lesson. I go, ‘You’re idolizing an idiot.’ [Laughs] I don’t even know what I’m playing half the time. I can’t verbalize it — it just comes out of the speakers.”
On the late comedian John Belushi:
Ace: “I was with John two weeks before he passed away. We were partying together. We used to go on three-day coke runs. We had fun. I’m not promoting drugs, because they can kill you, real quick. I was just lucky. I was one of the few people that could make John Belushi crack up. He told me that, and I was very flattered. Before he left to got to California to finish up the movie he was working on, he said to me, ‘Ace, you’re going to be in my next film. You have to be.’ We all know what happened at the Chateau Marmont. Tragic. I never knew John to use needles. The fact that that girl shot him up with a hot dose of ups-and-downs… John never did that. Leave it to your imagination. I’m not accusing anybody, but I never knew John to stick a needle in his arm, and I spent a lot of time with him.”
On KISS‘s much-maligned 1981 album “Music From The Elder”:
Ace: “I want to give you my two cents about ‘The Elder’. [Producer] Bob Ezrin flew into Connecticut. A lot of it was recorded at my home studio in Connecticut. It was a professional studio — I spent about a million dollars on it. During the recording process, I kept telling all those guys — Bob, Paul [Stanley] and Gene — I go, ‘This is the wrong album for this period of time. I think fans want to hear a heavy hard rock album.’ They just had a deaf ear to me. I said, ‘It’s not going to work,’ and of course, the album bombed. I guess I had a handle on what was happening. Those guys never had any street sense. It’s no fault of their own — Gene grew up in Israel, and Paul grew up in Queens, but he wasn’t a guy like me who hung out on the corner and got into fights and did crazy stuff. I always had my pulse on what was going on, and I knew at the time — I would have bet a million dollars that the album was going to fail. I didn’t want it to fail, and actually, if you take that album out of sequence with the KISS records, it’s not a bad record. I did some great solos on it and there’s some really good songs, but it wasn’t the right record for the time. I was doing an interview with Billboard magazine, and they said, ‘What would happened if ‘The Elder’ never happened, and you went from [1980’s ‘Unmasked’] to [1982’s] ‘Creatures Of The Night’?’ I thought for a second, because I like ‘Creatures Of The Night’ — it’s heavy, it’s powerful, it’s everything I said we should be doing when we recorded ‘The Elder’. I may not have quit the band, but you can’t rewrite history unless we go into a time warp or a black hole.”