It would be fair to assume that, if a guitarist is successful in their audition to join a band, things must have gone rather well – but although Ace Frehley ultimately passed his try-out for Kiss in 1973, his relationship with Gene Simmons got off to a rather rocky start.
The blood-gargling bass player recently relayed the tale of Frehley’s fiery audition during an appearance on Billy Corgan’s new YouTube series, The Magnificent Others.
Naturally, throughout the chat, much ground is covered. But it’s Simmons’ words on Frehley’s playing – and what it meant for the success of the band – that especially stands out, along with the story of an audition that almost became a physical altercation.
“He immediately tore open the doors of what could be, and what should be,” Simmons says of Frehley’s impact on the band. “We were in a rat-infested loft with egg crates on the wall that still had cracked eggs inside. At night, huge dinosaur cockroaches came out, but we didn’t care. We were doing this thing and we auditioned players.”
Simmons, Paul Stanley, and drummer Peter Criss had already formed an allegiance by this point. A second guitarist was to be the last piece of their face-paint-wearing puzzle.
“This guy comes in, plugs in, and starts playing, while we’re talking to another guy,” Simmons exclaims. “I walked up to him and said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out! What are you doing?’ He was oblivious that there was another meeting going on, and that he would have to sit there and wait for his turn.”
The tension in the room soon cooled off. When it was Frehley’s turn, they quickly ran him through Deuceand the auditionee was teed up for a guitar solo in the mid-section.
Before Frehley played a note, Simmons looked the guitarist up and down: “He’s a weird guy,” he remembers. “He’s got one orange sneaker, one red, pigeon-toed, and then he dug in (on the guitar). Paul and I looked at each other like, ‘Wow.’
“You don’t know what you’re looking for, then you hear it, and see it.”
After the audition, Frehley’s dedication to his craft continued to impress his new bandmate.
“Ace was so serious about his guitar playing that he would go home and work out the guitar solos so he would play them note-for-note, with the right vibrato,” he tells Corgan. “Live, that’s something fans kept pointing to: ‘Wow, it sounds just like the record.’”
Frehley would leave the band in the early 1980s, only to rejoin for a second stint between 1996 and 2002. Since then, their relationship has soured.
As Frehley readied the release of his latest solo album, 10,000 Volts, in late 2023, he said: “Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons have tried to destroy my reputation over the years. 10,000 Volts is going to make them look like imbeciles.”
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