Ace Frehley’s wild Kiss moments: “A smoke bomb ignited too early inside the cavity of the guitar, and it melted my asbestos costume to my thigh”
If rock ‘n’ roll had a safety manual, Ace Frehley clearly never read it.
From rocket-firing guitars that nearly roasted Gene Simmons to electrocution incidents that came dangerously close to disaster, the former Kiss guitarist’s onstage antics often felt more like scenes from an action movie than moments from a rock concert.
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Speaking to MusicRadar, Frehley begins by sharing a more grounded (literally) hazard of the job: performing in platform boots.
“I used to fall a lot in those boots,” says the guitarist. “A lot of times. Paul [Stanley] would cover for me by walking over to me like it was part of the show. He made it look like it was choreography or something.”
“If nobody realised I’d fallen, I play on my knees and get back up. It was just part of the show!”
In the ’70s – and again when Kiss’s original lineup reunited in the ’90s – Frehley would intentionally drop to his knees during the outro solo of Black Diamond. While planned, it was no less painful: “I screwed my knees up doing that,” he says. “I would drop to my knees, and the weight of the Les Paul really killed them.”
“During the Reunion Tour, I ended up chipping a bone in my knee, and the doctor said, ‘Listen, you gotta stop doing that, or you’ll end up in a wheelchair.’”
“We ended up putting a pad under the carpet where I’d fall. I tried to hit it—and if you look at old videos, you can see that I’d go down one knee at a time.”
But Ace’s legendary mishaps weren’t limited to his knees. His famous rocket-firing guitar also had a tendency to go off-script.
“I fired one of those rockets at Gene and it almost fucking hit him,” the musician recalls with a laugh. “It flew right by his head. It would have burned him pretty bad.”
Image: Paul Natkin / Getty Images
Unfortunately for Frehley, his trusty prop wasn’t always so forgiving: “I burned my leg real bad once back in the ‘70s, man. A smoke bomb ignited too early inside the cavity of the guitar, and it melted the asbestos—which our fucking costumes were made from—to my thigh.”
That said, nothing topped the night in 1976 when the guitarist was electrocuted mid-show in Lakeland, Florida. A grounding issue left a staircase rail live with electricity, and the incident nearly killed him.
“I should have been dead that night,” he admits. “The fact that I got electrocuted and didn’t fall forward was a godsend. There must have been angels pushing me back. I was standing on top of four Marshall cabinets on a staircase when I got shocked. I had a heavy Les Paul around my neck, and my body should have fallen forward—but I didn’t.”
“If I fell forward, I would have broken my fucking neck,” Frehley says. “But I fell back, and the road crew dragged me back off of the staircase. I had no feeling in my hands for five to ten minutes.”
Incredibly, he powered through and finished the show. “But I maybe had feeling in half of my fingers by the time it was done. It was crazy shit, man, but I did get Shock Me [the song Frehley made his lead vocal debut with on 1977’s Love Gun] out of it. So, I guess it wasn’t all for nothing.”
The post Ace Frehley’s wild Kiss moments: “A smoke bomb ignited too early inside the cavity of the guitar, and it melted my asbestos costume to my thigh” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
