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Ace Frehley - S/T |
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"Now I'm much too high..." In
1978, all 4 members of superstar rockers KISS released their
own solo records. Believe me, it was a HUGE event. I mean, I can’t
even begin to tell you the ENDLESS discussions the pre-Teen
Sleaze and his idiot snot-nosed friends had about these dumb records.
Kiss, being the manipulative motherfuckers that they were, knew
that Kiss fans were gonna buy ALL 4 anyway, so they released
‘em at Xmas time. And just so you HAD to break the bank on this
creative endeavor, each one came with an interlocking piece of a poster
puzzle, and you had to have ‘em all to complete said poster. You
may be saying “What?!” to yourself now, but I was 9 years old in
1978, and shit like that was important then. I wasn’t really the incisive Sleazy Rock Journalist back then that I am now, but even in ’78 I coulda tolda ya that Ace’s solo was the, uh, Ace-est of ‘em all. Peter Criss’s was regrettable mush, Gene’s was self-indulgent garbage, including a duet with then-girlfriend Cher and a cover of “When You Wish Upon a Star”, and Paul’s was a disco record. Ace didn’t have any TV star duets or Disney songs or pussy ballads or fuckin’ disco, baby. Ace, being a rock n’ roller, made a rock n’ roll record. ___________________________________________________________________________________ |
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Ace only sang a cuppla songs in
Kiss (the best ones, by the way - “Shock Me” and “Cold
Gin”) because he never felt confident in his singing voice. Which
makes sense, cuz he can’t sing. Somehow, this doesn’t matter on his solo
record, where his Noo-Yawk accent and drunken slur is the perfect
complement to his squealing cock n’ roll guitar. Unlike the fire-breathing
stadium gunk of his day-gig, Ace’s solo songs are up close n’ personal
roadhouse rockers, fueled by Chuck Berry and the Sweet in
equal doses, and they sound dirty and off-kilter cuz they’re SUPPOSED
to. With a back-up band consisting of drummer Anton Fig and bass player Will Lee (Fig would later be in Frehley’s Comet, and, later, both Fig and Lee would be in Paul Shaffer’s band on the David Letterman show), Ace recorded these 9 songs at Kiss Superproducer Eddie Kramer’s house in Connecticut. Amazingly, besides the rolling thunder stuff on Fig’s drums, Kramer cools it on the arena rock bullshit, and just lets Ace do what he does best- ROCK. |
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_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Opener “Rip It Out” might be the first official flash metal riff on record- an instantly recognizable bit of ham-fistery that sounds like a ball of fire in slow motion. When Fig’s cowbells kick in, well, that moment is pretty much the basis for Motley Crue’s entire first album. You didn’t really believe that shit about Mott the Hoople, didja? Fact #1: before Ace’s solo record, Flash Metal did not exist. Fact #2: Everyone who was EVER in a Flash Metal band owned this record. Simple. Anyway, “Rip It Out” is still one of the best highway speed-songs ever, and Ace’s phlegmy delivery is just fuckin’ perfect. And the singalong chorus- dumb as it is- RULES. A classic, this one. “Speedin’ Back to My Baby” sounds more like a Kiss song, only the biker-boogie Kiss that the Godz hadda invent, once Kiss started to pussy out, ya know? Lotsa cowbell, handclaps, black chick back-up vox, thrumming engine sound effects, a creaky backwards guitar solo…this song throws in every gimmick possible. For whatever reason, it sounds an awful lot like a “Welcome to My Nightmare” era Alice Cooper song to me now, but Ace hadda have HIS influences too, right? |
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“Snowblind”, which cops a Deep Purple riff and adds a whole lotta kink and
menace to it, is, besides “New York Groove”, the song most people remember
about this record. And no wonder- this is the Ace that we all thought was
lurking behind the silver greasepaint. It’s sorta panicky, it’s most
definitely disoriented, and it’s ripped to the tits on chemicals. It’s got
a funky acid-metal groove, and it just sounds like TROUBLE. Cocaine
is a hell of a drug, man. Then there’s “Ozone”. Fuckin’ “Ozone”. Ask Soundgarden about “Ozone”, man. As if inventing Flash Metal wasn’t enuff, Ace went and invented grunge while he was at it. |
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___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The vocals on “What’s On Your Mind” sounds like Ace was attempting a downtown hipster thing, channeling his inner Lou Reed or somethin’, which is sorta at-odds with the bubble-gummy rhythm of the song, but whatever. Not a bad tune, really, just not all that ROCK. Didn’t stop Alice In Chains from coppin’ the opening riff for “I Stay Away” tho. “New York Groove”, a slinky, glammy pop n’ roll song originally by Argent frontman Russ Ballard, became the hit of this record, and despite bein’ kinda easy and breezy for a space-case like Ace, it's still a total, uh, groove, daddy-o, and if you were actually around in ’78, it’s sure to bring you right back there. For better or worse. “Wiped Out” is a grand drunken mess of a song. Possibly influenced by the Sweet’s “Blockbuster”, it’s verse is funky and kinda Latin-sounding, and then it suddenly bursts into this crazed, echo-ridden heavy metal chorus. “I was wiped out (Wiped out! Wiped out! ), I was all out (All out! All out!) and it was lights out (Lights out! Lights out!) cuz I was wiped out!” It’s insane and loud and sounds like what it is, Ace driving in a blackout. You can practically see him swerving down the highway at some crazed speed, a bottle of gin sloshing away in his lap. “Wiped Out”, unlike anything on the other Kiss ‘solo’ records, actually SCARED the 9 year old Sleazegrinder. “Wiped Out” said, “10 years from now, motherfucker, THIS is gonna be your reality, so I hope yer ready for it.” And goddamn, if I didn’t perfect the art of driving blind ten years later. _____________________________________________________________________________________ |
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| Closer “Fractured Mirror” is a 5 minute instrumental fulla druggy space-guitars. Although it is amusing to hear Ace try to be “deep”, it’s hardly the haymaker of a finish that you’d hope for in such an endeavor. After all, soon as it was over, Ace hadda go back to work on playing “Christine Sixteen” for the 6,666th time and writing guitar lines for that “Music for the Elder” jive, so you’d think he’d want to write a punchy finish that’d bury any notions that he was really, like, “involved” with those chumps he worked for. But what the hell, Randy Rhoads obviously liked it, since he nicked the main riff for “You Can’t Kill Rock n’ Roll”. Dunno if Snowy White also copped it for Thin Lizzy’s “Angel of Death” or not, but probably. Like I said, EVERYBODY has heard this record. |
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At any rate, even if it does kinda go out like a lamb, “Ace
Frehley” is a monster of a record, and, if not THEE first
Flash Metal album, certainly one of the
blueprints for the entire movement. So, where's the
Flash Metal Suicide come in? Well, Ace
still stuck around the Kiss camp for another 4 merciless years
after proving, with this record, that he was the only REAL rock n’
roller in the entire operation. Suicide is slow with liquor, man. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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After suffering through their short-hair/disco era, which, while pretty
fuckin’ horrible, was still not as awful a fate as bein’ in Kiss during
their “unmasked” Flash Metal era, Ace
finally escaped from Paul and Gene’s
clutches in ’82 (they tossed him, blaming his drinking- he just shrugged
and collected his last paycheck) and formed a loony
flash metal band all
his own, Frehley’s Comet, who signed to Megaforce/Atlantic in ’87, and
released a slew of overwrought guitar-hero records in the following few
years. The band split in ’89, and Ace did a solo record, the bloozy
“Trouble Walkin’”, which featured former Kiss drummer Peter Criss on
“percussion”. I dunno what that means. Maybe he ALMOST played the drums on
it. At any rate, Ace and Peter briefly toured as “The Bad Boys of Kiss”
in ‘89/’90. Then, I reckon, Ace did a whole lotta drinkin’ for the next few
years. He’s prone to that, ya know.
In 1996, “Kiss” did that “MTV Unplugged” jive, and somehow or another, Gene and Paul managed to bully Ace and Peter back into the fold. You know the rest, right? The Kiss “Farewell” tour madness kicked in, and Gene and Paul treated Ace like a bitch, hiring and firing the fucker at will, for the next 5 or so years. |
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Quite expectedly, once they were finally
through with him, Ace went into seclusion. These days, he’s mostly
going to AA meetings, and quietly recording a new solo album in his
home studio. He’s also appearing in an upcoming “Film Noir”-styled
thriller,
Remedy. Which ain’t bad for a guy that’s been fuckin’ RUINED by his band mates half a
dozen times over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, Paul and Gene are selling Kiss coffins and making billions of dollars. But Ace’s solo record STILL rocked way harder then their pussy efforts, and that’s really all that ought to matter to cats like you and I anyway. ____________________________________________________________________________________ |
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-Sleazegrinder
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