"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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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...
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.
* "Betty White" was Ace's sobriquet for cocaine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's got to be something to be medically corrected by Ace Frehley.
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,
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.
He has more to say about his relationships with other Kiss members, though.
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?"
In other interviews, Ace has expressed some confusion about Paul's more recent assertions that the two of them were never really friends.
His thoughts on Kiss are pretty much what you'd expect them to be. The long and short of it:
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.
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. 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 |
 |
| And info on the Frehley's Comet years (and Kiss reunion tour) is similarly thin. |
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!" |
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. |
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. |
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." |
 |
| "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.) |
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! |
