“Ace plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, and I said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out’”: Gene Simmons recalls Ace Frehley’s Kiss audition
First impressions matter, and Ace Frehley absolutely made an unforgettable one on Gene Simmons during his audition for Kiss back in the day.
Looking back on Kiss’s early days on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast, Simmons reveals how the band’s original lineup – featuring drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Frehley – had come about.
Sharing his first impressions of Frehley, in particular, Simmons says [via Blabbermouth]: “He immediately tore open the doors of what could be, what should be, because we were in a rat-infested loft, maybe twice as big as this room, with egg crates that we stuck on the wall that still had some cracked eggs. And, of course, at night huge dinosaur cockroaches would come out. Oh, it was horrible. There were no windows and everything. But we didn’t care. We were doing this thing and, ‘Wow,’ we’re hearing that sound.”
READ MORE: “The body of what we constitute as the standard rock act… is by and large, over”: Twisted Sister guitarist explains why he thinks rock music is dead
According to Simmons, the band was deep in the middle of a discussion when Frehley walked in, plugged in his guitar, and started playing without a care in the world – a move that did not sit too well with the bassist at the time.
“We auditioned players… And Ace [comes in and] plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, and I walked up to him and said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out. What are you doing? We’re talking.’”
“He was oblivious that there was another meeting going on, that he had to sit there civilly and wait for his turn,” Simmons says. “And when he got up, we said, ‘Okay, listen, pal, we’re gonna do a song called Deuce. Here’s the riff. We’ll do two verses, bridge. When the riff starts, I’ll point to you. You’ve heard it enough, and you do a solo based on the riff.’”
“He said, ‘Ah, okay.’ And he talked like that. And we’re going, ‘Boy, he’s a weird guy. He’s got one orange sneaker, one red sneaker. Just pigeon toed and all. Oh, boy, this guy is gonna be…’”
Everything changed, however, when Frehley started playing: “And then he dug in. And his head, like he’s on stage, just that rubbery thing. And Paul and I looked at each other, ‘Wow!’ And you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you certainly know when you hear it and see it. And… it just kind of happened.”
The interview also has Simmons praising Frehley’s work ethic as a guitarist, as he recalls how Ace would go home and diligently learn his solos, perfecting them to the point where they sounded identical to the studio recordings when played live.
“He would play note for note with the right vibrato and everything. That’s when he was committed to it, and that’s one of the things live fans kept pointing to. ‘Wow, it sounds just like…’ You bet it is, ‘cause he cared enough to learn his own solos,” says the musician. “His influences spoke loudly: [Jimmy] Page and [Jeff] Beck.”
The post “Ace plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, and I said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out’”: Gene Simmons recalls Ace Frehley’s Kiss audition appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
