Face the Music: A Life Exposed by Paul Stanley

I'm not just a member of Kiss.
I'm a member of the Kiss Army.

Paul Stanley has released his autobiography:

Despite his booking a steady string of ongoing media appearances to promote it, the book's release was overshadowed by the induction of Kiss into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which finally happened last week.

The RRHOF has an odd policy of dictating to the band it's inducting which specific members it considers worthy for inclusion. Gene and Paul (quite rightly, from where I'm sitting) said they couldn't in good conscience reward such a ridiculous policy with a live performance, as it would be a dis to the other members of Kiss. Whereupon the web exploded with much vitriol. It was immediately perceived as yet another example of Gene and Paul depriving Ace and Peter of their due consideration.

I'm actually surprised people vented anger at Paul and Gene for this one. Shouldn't all the members, past and present, of the band being inducted be included in the band's induction? I mean, why on earth wouldn't they be? And why on earth would the Hall of Fame think they get to dictate anything like that to the actual band or their fans?

The day after induction, Paul referred to Jann Wenner et al as "spineless weasels," citing the inconsiderate treatment they received at the event.

I can understand some fans' disappointment at not seeing one last performance from the original members. But really, how many times have these four guys played "Rock and Roll All Nite?" Can anyone seriously be justified in feeling deprived of one more? Especially at the (at least metaphorical) expense of Eric Carr et al.? Say whatever you want about Tommy Thayer or Eric Singer or whomever (I do it all the time;) they all are or were legitimate members of the band. Acquiescing to the RRHOF's presumptuous demands does not seem a proper way of celebrating the band's legacy.

Regarding the "at Peter's and Ace expense" business: there are plenty of times where I've speculated about some shady behavior on Gene's or Paul's parts vis-a-vis their former bandmates, but it must be acknowledged that that road has also extended from the former to the latter just as often. How would Peter act, say, if the shoe were on the other foot? (Ace probably wouldn't give a crap.)

Anyway - they all had nice things to say about one another at the induction, which was nice to see. (And that intro by Tom Morello was pretty rock and roll.)

Morello is also in Flight 666, come to think of it, professing his love for Maiden. I guess he and I'd be fine taking turns with the tape deck on a road trip.

Paul's book (segue!) has some nice things to say about everyone - probably about the same amount as you find in Gene's, Peter's, or Ace's books - but when he's not being nice, he's really not being nice. Particularly about Peter. He unloads an awful lot on Peter, but - at least the way he tells it - this is all a long time in coming.

It's one thing to put up with somebody who's a virtuoso and a prick. It's quite another to put up with somebody who can barely play their instrument and is also a prick.

Zing! Fair? Maybe. The playing on the last couple of tours with the original members was indeed pretty shoddy on Peter's and Ace's parts. I will say: of the 4 books, this one definitely seems the most self-aware. Perhaps due to what Peter wrote in his book: "I guess that's what talking to your shrink four hours a day for 20 years gets you." He meant it as a swipe, but there's some truth in that. Paul is pretty candid about his own narcissism and insecurity and jealousy issues and seems to have emerged from it all to a happy place.

It clocks in at 462 pages, making it the longest of the Kiss bios. (I'm sure someone from Peter's camp will see that as an over-compensation.) I chuckled a few times at some of the things from other books (Paul's compulsive cock-doodling, the band's lawsuit against Polygram in the 80s, etc.) that weren't mentioned. (Paul even laments that the label "did fuck-all" for the band in the 80s; well, no kidding. You called them Nazi sympathizers and brought them to court.) Mainly, it was nice to finally read a history of the band from just Paul's point of view. It's a lot easier to see how things played out the way they did, now that I've done so.

Paul, then and now.

I've avoided reading any reviews of the book, so I honestly don't know what others have been saying about it. I imagine reactions have been minor variations of the same reviews for the other Kiss-books.

Did I learn anything new? For the most part, no, but I've been a fairly gluttonous consumer of Kiss product over the years and particularly over the past few months, looking stuff over for these blogs. I wasn't surprised, therefore, to discover he's got complicated feelings about his longtime friend and business partner.

(Gene's) being the default spokesman of the band would lead to countless more episodes of him using "I" instead of "we," subtly and not so subtly implying that he was the frontman, lead singer, and mastermind all wrapped up in one. He never attempted to clarify his role or refute media assumptions. Why would he? These false assumptions were based on Gene's own statements. I found myself scratching my head at his refusal to be honest.

But I was taken aback at the acuity of some of his insights into Gene and was happy to see some of my impressions reflected back at me.

Anyone can write a song in 5 minutes. The difference is since we had a record deal, Gene got to put his songs on an album, whether or not they were any good. (In the 80s) Gene denied his subpar and often nonexistent contributions to the group. (...) He was clearly going to do whatever he wanted to do, regardless of any objections from me or even his legal obligations under our partnership. (...) I had the choice of walking away or of doing the work of 2 people. The catch was that I had to share the credit, even if I did double the work.

Finally confronted about this during the Crazy Nights sessions, Gene owned up to his lack of involvement and professionalism and apologized by way of buying Paul a black Porsche. It can be seen in the "Reason To Live" video:

Which also features...

Eloise Broady, who married...

John Paul DeJoria, who took the place of Gene in Shark Tank when Gene passed on the show. (According to Gene, "the deal wasn't good enough." Whether this is true or just one of Gene's flights of fancy regarding his own business acumen, I have no idea.) All roads lead back to Kiss, is what I'm getting at.

I was apparently in error when I wrote in my review of Gene's book that he "was (and remains) the driving force behind Kiss's merchandising." According to Paul, this isn't even remotely true.

Gene's most successful venture in business was promoting the perception that he was a savvy businessman. That has been an undeniable success.

Back to Gene's songwriting, a subject I can sometimes get cranky about:

I was annoyed that he saw himself as operating at a level that qualified him to pass judgment on me, particularly because I hadn't thought much of his songs. The idea that he was judging me seemed arrogant, condescending, and ludicrous. (He) wrote a lot of very odd songs. Maybe it was because he was originally from another country? I wasn't sure. He had one called "Stanley the Parrot" and another called "My Uncle Is a Raft." He even had one called "My Mother Is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World." Uh, okay, (I thought.) That's weird.

I kind of like "My Uncle Is a Raft" as a title. But what do I know? I once named a song "Johnny Cash Goes to the Bathroom."

All in all, as he notes several times, he and Gene laugh at each other's quirks now and accept that they're just different people and count their (considerable) blessings. Still, some resentments linger. Paul doesn't bother hiding his antipathy towards Gene in a recent Rolling Stone overview.

Kiss' only enduring relationship is between Simmons and Stanley. "We've always seen each other as brothers," Stanley says. "What we seem to be at odds at is how you treat your brother. Gene's priority, by far, has always been himself. And he's not one to let anyone else's feelings or contributions get in the way."

The same article contains some really amusing interaction between Gene and Billy Ray Cyrus. ("You got any Matzo?") It's worth reading in full.

What's more surprising is Paul's commentary on his and Eric Carr's relationship. I had no idea it was as ambivalent as it was. Eric's side of it will sadly never be known, but Paul relays long periods of bad communication and hurt feelings and confusion. And expresses some real regret about it:

In the wake of Eric's death, I continued to spend a lot of time wondering whether I had handled things correctly. Though I thought I had made the best choices at the time, I began to realize I'd been wrong. We had cut Eric off in perhaps the worst way, by denying him what mattered to him most - his place in Kiss. (...) I should have seen that, since the band functioned the same way for me, and I wasn't even sick. I should have known.

Paul's referring to his and Gene's decision to exclude Eric from Kiss activity during his chemo and recovery period. (Gene doesn't seem aware of any of this. Outside of relaying a couple of anecdotes about paying his hospital bills - no small thing, certainly - and banging his girlfriend, Gene, tellingly, experiences no such regret in his book.) It's easy to see how doing what one felt was only right in the situation (i.e. stay home and rest, Eric; we'll handle the tunes) could have such unintended consequences.

Less surprising than his feelings towards Gene and Eric are his feelings towards Peter and Ace. 

If I even attempted to corral Paul's many Peter-is-just-an-idiot stories into this blog, we'd be here all week. Suffice it to say, Paul must have really been pissed about Peter's book, particularly Peter's assertion that "on Paul's best day, he could never out-sing me." (My favorite of all of these anecdotes was during the reunion tour, when Ace missed rehearsal because (he claimed) he had Lyme Disease from a deer tick. That's bullshit, said Peter, "genius that he is," Ace has never been bitten by a deer.)

As for Ace

you get the usual mix of bemusement and exasperation at his antics:

He would go through all kinds of contortions (to get more prescription drugs.) He even managed to get a superficial gunshot wound in Dallas. (...) While I traveled with one rolling suitcase, Ace was now traveling with 17 bags, including one that weighed more than 100 pounds. In it was a projector and cables so he could run an image of his face and Elvis's face morphing into each other on a loop in his hotel room.

Elsewhere:

A Russian oligarch offered us $1m to play for about 300 people at his 30th birthday. Ace wouldn't do it. He thought the whole thing was a dastardly plot to get him out of the country so Gene, Doc, and I could have him assassinated. That way, we could replace him with no problem. (But actually) replacing him was easier than all that.

Kiss was bigger than any of the individuals. And I do not mean "except for me." I have a high regard for what I do, but I don't fool myself by thinking I'm the only one who can do it.

I found this very interesting. One, you'd never hear Gene say anything like that. Two, of all the guys who have ever been in the band, Paul is easily the least replaceable. I'm not sure anyone can really do what Paul Stanley does, if I'm being honest.

Maybe Lady Gaga. Maybe.

Incidentally, the look on Paul's face here is hilarious.

I do appreciate his point - and I'm very curious what will happen to the Kiss brand once Gene and Paul retire or die - but it's just kind of funny that the guy most responsible for the band's longevity, its principal musician and songwriter, and harshest critic, is capable of making this observation.

He addresses the controversy of using the Catman and Spaceman make-up for Eric and Tommy.

The idea that we would stop using any of the four iconic images was as ridiculous as the idea that we would stop playing any of the songs. Interestingly, years before, when we decided to try and buy the rights to the Catman and Spaceman images, Peter and Ace dealt their characters away as if they had no value. To them, they were mere bargaining chips. That they so readily relinquished them showed me how little they cared for them. I was glad those guys couldn't start turning up at Halloween conventions signing autographs in tattered Kiss costumes and makeup. I valued the images and wanted to protect them.

 

I've been pretty critical of this in the past, but what he says there is certainly understandable. And to be completely fair to Paul, he applies the same reasoning to Gene when the need arises:

(Gene's) use of the Kiss logo and make-up and his self-promotion in the press escalated in the 90s and beyond. (...) He was no marketing genius. He just took credit for things. (...) After the Farewell tour, I saw sketches of a concept for a cartoon series Gene had sold. The cartoon was basically Gene in Kiss makeup. It was about a guy in a band. Hey man, that's a Kiss entity, I said. (Gene denied it.) That got settled real quickly. Fairness prevailed, but not by Gene's volition. Beyond the anger I felt each time he showed such blatant disregard for our partnership, my feelings were also hurt that the guy with whom I'd built all of this would treat me - when it served his purposes - with the same indifference I often saw him exhibit with people I knew he didn't care about.

Beyond his feelings on the other members of the group, there's a whole lot about Paul's romantic misadventures. Not, admirably, in a self-aggrandizing way (though of course there's some of that; this is a Kiss-related project, after all. Live! To! Win!) But he (and ghost-writer Tim Mohr of course) combine it all pretty well with the book's themes of self-discovery and overcoming the childhood insecurities resulting from lack of parental affection (that old chestnut) and his deafness/ ear deformity (since surgically corrected) that prevented him from meaningful interpersonal relationships.

So much of my life was about chasing approval, acknowledgement, and love. I was stunned (when I actually caught it.)

This translated to a progression common to many diehard narcissists: first maintaining only sexual relationships ("Room Service"), then only love triangles, ("Wouldn't You Like To Know Me?" "It's All Right," "Tonight You Belong To Me") and eventually to the sort of public-eye pairings expected of rock stars then and now, i.e.  actresses and Playboy and Penthouse models. ("Psycho Circus." Okay, just kidding. Probably "Bang Bang You.") Many of whom might not be recognizable names nowadays. Here's a partial list - whole lot of 80s hair coming your way:

There was Cher's sister, Georganne LaPiere.

Donna Dixon, who left Paul for Dan Ackroyd, and for whom Paul wrote (allegedly) "I Still Love You."

Lisa Hartman

Samantha Fox

then Pam Bowen, whom he married. (Without, as he laments later, a pre-nuptial agreement.)

Pictured here with son Evan.

Pam was mostly a guest star during her heyday.

Those of us with Cheers OCD may remember her from Season 6's "The Sam in the Gray Flannel Suit."

And no, sadly, I did not need imdb to help me with this one.

Paul's fairly candid about his own failures with all of the above, and it all ends on a happy enough note when he meets current wife-Erin, an attorney.

They've since added 2 more children to the above picture.

This sort of thing is a staple of any celebrity memoir. But I give Paul credit for not slagging off any of them, despite the manner in which many of the above have conducted themselves when asked about their relationships with Paul.

He touches on a few other things worth mentioning:

ON ANTI-SEMITISM

Our entrepreneurial ability wasn't a positive trait, but rather deceit or manipulation - because this wasn't rock and all, this was what Jews did.

I'm usually the first one to roll my eyes at criticism that is deflected into "Oh you're just saying that because I'm black / a woman / Jewish," etc.; all too often it's a misdirection away from any relevant consideration or the substance of the criticism. But this is certainly something I've noticed many times when Kiss is brought up. (Even from their fans.)

ON MEETING GUNS N ROSES

When Axl played me "Nightrain," I thought it was really good, but I told him that maybe the chorus could be used as a pre-chorus instead, and there could be another chorus afterwards. That was the last time he ever spoke to me. Ever.

I offered to help Slash get in touch with people who could hook him up with some free guitars - we were sponsored by all sorts of instrument companies, and I figured a young guy like him could use some help getting equipment to record with. 

Immediately after my interaction with the band, I started to hear lots of stories Slash was saying behind my back - he called me gay, made fun of my clothes, all sorts of things designed to give himself some sort of rock credibility. This was years before his top hat, sunglasses, and dangling cigarette became a cartoon costume that he would continue to milk with the best of us for decades.

The surprise came a few months later when Slash called me and wanted to follow up on my offer to help him get some free guitars. "You want me to help you get guitars after you went around saying all that shit behind my back?" Slash got real quiet. "You know," I said, "one thing you're going to learn is not to air your dirty laundry in public. Nice knowing you. Go fuck yourself."

AND SINCE HE BROUGHT IT UP...

Each member of the band included a note written from their personas (the Starchild, Demon, etc.) in the packaging for Alive. The Starchild's reads: "Dear Lovers, Nothing arouses me more than seeing you get off on me."

It could have been taken for heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual love. I wasn't threatened by any implications of the superficial aspects of sexuality or style.

Admirable a sentiment as that is, I feel the utter ridiculousness of the message is being obscured. But that's kinda what I love about Paul. He's so committed to his narcissism that the homophobic hang-ups common to many American heterosexual men never even occur to him.

Well. Usually:

Paul's much-maligned appearance in The Decline of Western Civilization, pt. 2: The Metal Years. He claims he was sending up his image, "it was all obviously just a joke."

Still sending it up, I guess! (With the LA-Kiss cheerleaders.)

ON THE 80S

The sections of the book dealing with the 80s are perhaps the most interesting. During this period, the band was more or less Paul's baby. Gene was pursuing Hollywood ambitions and half-assing his Kiss work, and Paul was in the driver's seat. Unfortunately, (rightly or wrongly) the car he/ Kiss was driving was following the other bands of the period rather than pursuing its own course. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lyrics and costumes of this period of the band's career.

 

He disses both the songs (which I think is unfair; "Rock Hard" is a great little Kiss tune. Catchy, melodic, and fun-silly as hell) and the videos (definitely fair, though they're not the worst examples of 80s videos) recorded for Smashes, Thrashes and Hits.

In the course of those 2 videos, I wrote the textbook on what not to do in a music video. I mean, I don't walk around on the street in tights with bicycle reflectors sewn on them or Body Glove tank-tops cut off just below my nipples. This was a whole new level of bad taste and judgment.

"Love's like a glove and it fits just right." There's a lot of literal-interpretation going on in these things. Everytime Paul sings the word "down," for example, Gene points to the floor and nods sagely.

He's a bit of a dick about the models hired for the videos. ("They look like underfed pelicans - no tits and no ass.") But if anyone's expecting more body-image-enlightened commentary from the author of "Let's Put the X in Sex" and "(You Make Me) Rock Hard," they may be debating in a vacuum, as Captain Kirk once said.

RAISE YOUR GLASSES

All in all, Paul Stanley's life and career is compelling reading. I wager that we all like a "I was blind and now I see" sort of story, and this certainly follows that trajectory. I leave you first with these typical-from-Paul-but-no-less-worthwhile sentiments from the end of the book.

What Kiss does is timeless. We sing about self-empowerment, celebrating life, believing in yourself - and sex. It ain't a crime to be good to yourself. 

Is there anything more truthful than that?

(Sounds better coming out of Paul than it does out of Gene, doesn't it?)

and lastly with these 45 glorious mind-warping minutes of time-stretched Paul Stanley stage banter. I agree wholeheartedly with the first commenter: "This piece is not just beautiful, but NECESSARY and INEVITABLE."

No Regrets by Ace Frehley

"This is remarkable. I've never met anyone with your resistance to tranquilizers."

"Well, Doc, being a rock star is a very stressful occupation."

The cover design is mostly fine, but the "A Rock N Roll Memoir" bit is a little silly, isn't it? I'd have put "The Spaceman Speaks!" on there somewhere. And maybe a fake-blurb from Toucan Sam: "Awk!"

As Ace himself readily admits, "let's face it, my memory isn't what it used to be." So even though we get the usual cross-section of early childhood details, rock star excess stories, drunken or drugged-up escapades, and the (more or less) happy ending common to most rock star memoirs, how much of it is as-told-to-the-author and how much of it is personal recollection is never quite certain.

On one hand, this means little, so long as the end product is entertaining. And although more than one reviewer thought this book should have been titled No Details, I can safely say that it is definitely entertaining. As Eric Singer notes, even the dullest Ace stories are crazier than anyone else's:

You'll never meet another person like him. Ace Frehley stories are the absolute best. Anyone who has ever worked with Ace will verify it. One night before a Kiss show, he actually took Viagra because he wanted his dick to be hard during the concert. When I asked him why, he said, "So people can see me get hard in the costume." He even tried snorting it once (...) He thought it would get into his system faster. So Ace snorted the Viagra... but his nose swelled up instead. True story! When I tell this stuff to people, they think I'm lying or embellishing. But it's all absolutely true. 

That story is not retold in No Regrets, but rest assured the stories we do get are all equally crazy. What I like about this one is Ace's motivation for snorting the Viagra. i.e. it's a great story that Ace snorted Viagra, but it's even better when you learn he was doing it "for the fans." I love that he (and Peter. And Paul and Gene, too, let's be honest) are so convinced seeing these guys get aroused in their costumes is part of what the fans want.

Hell, maybe it is. As for what this fan wants, erections, in-costume or otherwise, ain't it. But the general zaniness of Ace's approach to things definitely is. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line (as evidenced in the tell-all books published by former assistants and girlfriends) Ace's general zaniness was overcome by general addiction, and you can feel him straining, somewhat, to relay the stories without a whiff of regret. (Despite the title.) 

Put another way, while Ace may have learned "to live without regrets," he seems somewhat reluctant to embrace his own antics as wholeheartedly as he did, say, on the Tom Synder show.

That's probably a good thing, all around. But it lends a certain sadness to things. When you read about Ace's antics in Peter's and even Gene's books, there's a certain "Oh that rapscallion - what a loon" quality to the escapades. Not as much - though not absent altogether - in No Regrets. 

Would I have been more interested, say, in a mock-memoir of an alien from the Planet Jendell sharing his account of fifty-plus years of exile on Planet Earth? Sure. Might have been a harder sell for the public, though I suspect a younger Ace would have really gone for the idea, but it points to a different problem with the idea of a Space Ace memoir: the myth of the Spaceman overshadows even the real-life-craziness of Ace Frehley.

Space Tuba

Reconciling the two is no easy task, and in the final analysis, Ace wasn't quite up to it. We get instead this relatively breezy but not exceptionally insightful collection of anecdotes and musings. 

And info on the Frehley's Comet years (and Kiss reunion tour) is similarly thin.

The most discoverable moments come when he talks about his early days, running around the Bronx with the Duckies (a street gang immortalized - or as immortalized as something can be in a nearly-forgotten film - in The Wanderers) or sneaking backstage to hang out with John Kay and Jerry Garcia and others ("For awhile there I was the Leonard Zelig of the American rock scene, popping up randomly alongside the biggest stars in the business.") or seeing Cream and The Who at the RKO Theater. It's easy to see the formation of his personality and  outlook during these passages. 

Long hair was a political statement and threatened people in authority. To be perfectly candid, I was blissfully unaware of issues of any greater significance than how to get chicks out of their clothes. I was hardly a political dissident. Any hippie tendencies I might have exhibited were strictly a matter of convenience and lifestyle. I wanted to get laid, get drunk, get high, and play in a band. I wanted a certain look onstage, and by achieving that look, I found myself getting bundled in with war protesters and demonstrators.

Despite this disclaimer, Ace's "hippieness" comes through loud and clear in other passages, particularly anything involving guardian angels or the number 27. (Gene wrote a bit about Ace's obsession with the number 27. From Gene's perspective, it wasn't so lucky, and he recommended Ace get a different one.)

Passages like these: 

You never know what life might bring… or when it might come to a screeching halt.

And it’s best to act accordingly.

Life as a rock star at the highest level is weird beyond words. It’s great in a lot of ways, obviously, but it’s disorienting, too. You very quickly begin to realize that you are part of something much bigger than yourself. Everything you do is designed to help the machine keep moving. (…) After awhile, the make-up became almost like a prison.

comprise an awful lot of the reading. On one hand, it's relevant insight. On the other, it's the sort of insight you can come up with on your own without having lived Ace Frehley's life.

But since it is Ace's life we're talking about...

INTO THE VOID

Ace was well on his way to being an alcoholic before he joined Kiss.

Alcohol, mainly beer, made me a different person, and I kind of liked that person. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Not only that, but he was smooth as silk when it came to dealing with girls. It all goes hand in hand. Women like guys who are confident, funny, cocky. A little bit dangerous. I was all of those things in a single package. I’d found girls and alcohol to be a great combination. The rock and roll would soon follow.

It wasn't until Kiss hit the big time (around the time of Destroyer) where he was introduced to cocaine, and he discovered this put him "in a whole different league as a drinker." Cocaine enabled him to stay up drinking for days at a time. He discovered this led to nuclear-war-sized hangovers, so he started gobbling tranquilizers and painkillers to mitigate them. As he points out, this wasn't quite that out of place in the anything-goes atmosphere of late-70s New York. Finding doctors to prescribe weapons-grade pharmaceuticals (and accept uncut cocaine in lieu of payment) was relatively easy.

These years are dealt with (for the most part) honestly. (I say "for the most part" because he's somewhat cagey - and it's understandable - about the amount of time he spent pretending to be sober or "working on it," when he was still quietly feeding his demons. Again, in spite of the title, you get the sense he'd rather his life story was defined a bit more by his successes than his decades of addiction.) The reader gets a contact high as Ace pals around with Belushi or heads to Studio 54 with models on his arm, snorting lines with Mick and Bianca and whomever else in the office, and the contact-jitters as he realizes he's incapable of stopping the neverending party on his own.

Being addicted to Betty * occupies a lot of your time. I’d get a large prescription of antibiotics from my doctor and make sure they came in a capsule form. Then I’d empty out a dozen capsules and very carefully refill them with cocaine. After the capsules were reassembled, I’d mark them with a tiny dot so I could tell them apart from the rest. If anyone tested the capsules for illegal drugs, the chances were better than 6 to 1 in a prescription of 90 pills that the coke wouldn’t be discovered. This type of insane planning surely sounds obsessive to a normal person, but if you’re strung out, this amount of meticulous preparation for a trip is almost commonplace.

* "Betty White" was Ace's sobriquet for cocaine.

OZONE (I'm the kind of guy...)

I have a reputation for being one of the world’s worst drivers, but that’s not entirely well deserved. I’m actually a pretty good driver; I’m just a really bad drunk driver. Trouble is, from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, whenever I got behind the wheel of a car, the odds were pretty good that I’d been drinking.

Ace's vehicular misadventures are somewhat legendary. I'll only focus on three here.

The first: After a multi-day bender, he was attempting to leave a bar in the city and head back to Connecticut when a cop spotted him love-tapping the parked car behind him as he pulled out into traffic. What followed was, as Ace recounts it, "a real life game of Grand Theft Auto where I led the police on a chase through Westchester County." Pushing his DeLorean to the limit, he managed to lose the cops - multiple times - but was busted when he pulled into a diner to use the pay phone to report the car stolen. (The car was billowing smoke, and he was battered and bloodied from the chase. But he didn't think anyone would notice, nor did he himself notice the phalanx of squad cars that surrounded the diner as he made call after call, trying to sort it out.) Needless to say, this did not end well for the Spaceman, and he spent the next day and night suffering through an agonizing withdrawal and hangover (not to mention a dawning awareness of the mess he was now in.) Cell #27, ironically enough.

Also ironic: This was how he met his AA sponsor, who was one of the cops chasing him. "If you ever want to stop living like this," he said, giving Ace his card, "call me." Eventually, Ace did, and the two have been friends ever since.

In a way I was fortunate. Had this been 25 years later, the fallout would have been much worse: mug shot on TMZ.com, video clips of my courtroom appearance on CNN, and cellphone footage of the car chase on YouTube.

The second: He and Anton Fig (drummer for many an Ace project, as well as Kiss's Dynasty and Unmasked albums) went out fishing and got wrecked, and he totaled the car on the way back. They walked away from this one (first fishing out the coolerful of trout from the trunk) and only discovered the extent of their injuries hours later at home. Reluctantly agreeing to go to the hospital, his mood brightened when the doctors sent he and Anton home with two huge bottles of Percocet.

"Jackpot!"

The third is another escaping from the cops story, this one ending with his making it home to his mansion in Wilton, CT and calling his lawyer to (somehow) get the cops who started surrounding the place to "back off." What this entailed he doesn't describe, but once he discovered that they had left, the party continued. He got out his .357 Magnum and walked out into the driveway amidst other houseguests.

I was interested in figuring out how many times a .357 Magnum bullet would ricochet off concrete walls before coming to a halt. I felt I was being scientific, figuring out the trajectory of the bullet, where it would strike, and the geometry of the angles its paths would follow. 

Although nothing bad happened as a result of these scientific inquiries - besides scaring his guests back into the house - a similar incident involving an uzi that blew up in his hand led him back to the hospital. (Apparently, the right combination of firearms, pills, coke and booze brought out his inner Sid the Science Kid.) The doctors discovered pieces of bullet shrapnel had embedded themselves in his chest.

The other: with the docs and the bullets in his chest after the uzi jams. “At one point, the surgeon asked a nurse for a magnetic probe to help locate the fragments. “I don’t think that’ll work,” I slurred. “Excuse me?” the doctor said. “Bullets are made of lead, right? How you gonna’ find ‘em with a fucking magnetic probe? Lead isn’t magnetic."

It's got to be something to be medically corrected by Ace Frehley.

SAVE YOUR LOVE

Perhaps tellingly, you end up learning more about his buddies and their antics than you do about any of the ladies involved in the Ace Frehley story. Outside of a few obviously heartfelt passages involving his daughter Monique,

Despite almost killing her as an infant when he crashed his truck through the wall of her nursery, stopping inches away from her crib. She wasn't in it at the time, but still.

not much is revealed about his personal relationships, whether with his wife Jeanette 

or with his other daughter Lindsay (fathered while he was still married to Jeanette.) We learn a bit about Jeanette's family (all Teamsters, whose extracurricular methods of persuasion he'd offer up to Kiss management when they ran into trouble) and that their first maid Ellie once vacuumed up "Mr. F's happy powder" while cleaning. That's about it. Virtually nothing is said of his time with Wendy Moore, who penned the tell-all Into the Void.

Given that book's contents, perhaps this last omission is understandable.

He has more to say about his relationships with other Kiss members, though.

Gene was a 50 year old accountant in a 23 year old body… (He) was incapable of loosening up to join the fun, even in a setting that clearly called for some spontaneity and horsing around. How seriously can you take yourself when you’re sitting there in a superhero costume and full face makeup? I love the guy, but he never, ever got it.

Gene is a sex addict in much the same way that I’m an alcoholic. He’s had a lot of unkind things to say about me over the years. Some of the criticism is legitimate. In sobriety you embrace accountability, and I can’t deny that my drinking and drug use eventually became highly disruptive and problematic. But some of the personal jabs have been harder to take, partly because we were all friends at one time, and we did do something remarkable, but also because Gene wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with. (…) He lived in a state of perpetual infestation. (…) What can I say? Gene is eccentric. Always has been.

That "we did something remarkable" bit makes me a little sad. Because it's true. It'd be nice if these guys could have just worked it out, if only on the strength of that. I mean, wouldn't it? Isn't that what any fan of any band wants, their heroes kicking back and happy about what they accomplished and the tunes they brought to your life?

But that's a rarity in the rock band world, not the routine. He trashes Gene in a few places, but (even now) he's a lot nicer about the guy than Gene ever is about him. Equally understandable, perhaps, but it's too bad. 

He sums up Gene's solo album rather amusingly: "Fucking Helen Reddy, Gene? Really?"

"Paul? I don't know. Paul basically just became Paul - a glamorous singer with sex appeal."

In other interviews, Ace has expressed some confusion about Paul's more recent assertions that the two of them were never really friends. 

"Peter, well, he had a thing for cats. What can I tell you? He became my best friend in the band and is a really sweet and sensitive guy and I miss hanging out with him."

His thoughts on Kiss are pretty much what you'd expect them to be. The long and short of it:

I can sum up the Kiss situation in five words: What goes around comes around. No matter what happens, I’ll be fine. 

That being said, in reality, I think they’re just a bunch of dirty rotten whores. Awk!

SHOT FULL OF ROCK

As aforementioned, those looking for some insight into how all those great Ace tunes came to be will get very little. There's an extended sequence on the writing of "Rocket Ride" with Sean Delaney (SPOILER ALERT: lots of coke was involved,) as well as a lot of (fun) technical details on the making of the 1978 solo album. 

He does mention how miserable a time he had during the making of Destroyer on account of Bob Ezrin, who by all accounts was a drill sergeant in the studio. Whereas Paul and Gene accepted Bob's aggressiveness as necessary to take Kiss to the next level - and perhaps it was - his attitude had the opposite effect on Ace. I can relate to this one. 

Whenever I read about a Bob Ezrin type and hear how "effective" his methods are, all I see is a bullying asshole who'd be even more effective with a shovel to the face. (Same goes for Bill Parcells.)

Bob's drug use never seemed to bother Paul and Gene funnily enough. “This was one of the things that bothered me most about Paul and Gene – they were very selective in their moral indignation.” This still appears to be the case. Despite his miserable time making the record, "if I take a step back and try to judge it objectively, I’d say it’s one of Kiss’s best studio efforts." I disagree, but what do I know? I think "Torpedo Girl" is the best song Kiss ever recorded. 

Ace adds little to the public record about Attack of the Phantoms (“I thought it was a natural step in the devolution of Kiss. We got exactly what we deserved.”) But he does write about how they had the entire amusement park to themselves and how he'd ride around at night on his motorcycle, all by himself, not a soul around, just him and the statues and the rides and the shuddered stands.

Unsurprisingly, he crashed it.

After Peter was fired, Ace found himself outvoted on everything and retreated even further into isolated drinking and drugging. The final straw was Music from... The Elder.

I knew it was a collosal mistake in judgment. Paul, Gene, and Bob didn’t get it. They went forward with the whole ridiculous concept. As anyone who knows rock and roll can tell you, concept records can be career killers for the most talented bands. The problem is instead of ending up with a masterpiece like Tommy, you could end up with Saucy Jack, Spinal Tap’s unproduced rock opera about Jack the Ripper. (…) Didn’t matter, though, I was outvoted. 

Ezrin has willingly taken considerable heat for that album over the years and admitted he was doing a lot of drugs at the time, which clouded his judgment. Dammit! I was doing a lot of drugs, too, but I could still see the project was going to be a flop. At one meeting after another, I went on record against it, but the other guys insisted on moving forward.

Ace walked away from the $15 million dollar deal Kiss's management had arranged with Polygram just to get away from having to deal with Gene and Paul. It's difficult to tell how much he made from the reunion tours, but it's probably somewhere around there. So, I guess he got it back in the end. 

I Live Five Days To Your ONE...

While No Regrets was not my favorite expose on rock star living nor a particularly revealing look at one of my all-time favorite guitarists or Kiss as a band, it's definitely fun reading. And his friendships with the other members aside, it all ends happily enough. Ace is by all accounts clean and sober these days, engaged, touring, giving interviews, and recording. I sometimes worry all of these reports are bullshit, as so many of them have turned out to be over the years. (The 20 year gap between Trouble Walkin' and Anomaly featured semiannual assurances that Ace was clean and that the new album was coming out "next spring.")

Regardless, Ace's place in the rock and roll history books is well-earned and will always be attended to with great affection by yours truly.

AWK!