Matt Porter

Feyyaz Ustaer | Metalhead Zone

During in a recent interview with SmallCapPower, KISS bassist Gene Simmons talked about why he became involved with Canadian cannabis company Invictus MD Strategies Corp.

He said that he was wrong about cannabis. Here’s the statement:

“Historically, I have to say I was completely wrong about the entire space. I thought cannabis was for stoners and losers and all that, and slowly but surely, over the years, the amount of research that I saw just blew me away. Seeing little girls who suffer from epilepsy rubbing a salve, not on the inside but outside of their body and seemingly miraculously getting cured made me take stock.

Big Pharma [the global pharmaceutical industry] is not fond of this space, because cannabis, in its various forms, is actually gonna help people. That’s what researchers are telling me. And I’m telling everybody else there are a lot of new companies, especially in Canada, and good for them.

Some of them are solid, some of them are garbage, and it’s up to you to find out what it’s all about. I happen to believe in Invictus, and all I urge anybody to do is to go to Invictus-MD.com and do your own research.

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Michael Brandvold

Jody Havenot

Feyyaz Ustaer | Metalhead Zone

Back in November, original KISS guitarist Ace Frehley has returned to the band during an acoustic set for 2018’s KISS Kruise.

During in a recent Q&A sessions, Ace Frehley has revealed the story behind KISS reunion show. He said:

“I had fun. At the last minute, Doc [McGhee, KISS manager] came into my cabin and said, ‘Do you wanna do that acoustic set with the guys?’, which was the first show on the cruise.

So it was really haphazard. We threw it together. They said, ‘What songs do you wanna play?’ Then they handed me this guitar that really had heavy-gauge strings on. I said, ‘Could you put lighter-gauge strings on, so I can maybe play a little lead?’

So they switched the strings, but it was still really hard to play lead on that acoustic. And then, after that, I didn’t see the guys for the rest of the cruise.”

Two months ago, he spoke in an interview with Loudwire and explained his thoughts about returning to KISS for their  “End Of The Road”  farewell tour. He said that his return to the band depends on promoters. Here’s the statement:

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Donna Ferguson | This is Money

Gene Simmons of rock band Kiss grew up so poor he could not even afford to buy toilet paper and worked as a garbage collector and dish-washer.

He now lives in a mansion valued at £30million, owns a comic book collection worth £3million, but has never forgotten that money is hard to come by.

Next year, Kiss will bow out with its ‘End Of The Road’ tour and will be performing in the UK in July. Tickets are available from website kissonline.com/tour.

What did your parents teach you about money?

My father left me and my mother when I was six. My mother was Hungarian and at age 14 was transported to a concentration camp in Germany.

She provided for us by the sweat of her brow and taught me to have a good work ethic.

We moved to America when I was eight and she worked in a factory making coats. It was not unionised so they paid her whatever they wanted – half a cent for every button sewn on a winter coat.

Was money tight in your family?

Yes. If my mother did not work hard enough we did not eat. When living in Israel we had little, lived in one room and the toilet was a hole outside.

I never knew about toilet paper and could only dream at the thought of blowing your nose on a piece of paper and throwing it away after using it only once.

I have never forgotten that money is hard to come by. I now have a big house but I could have one in many countries. I could own a fleet of jets, but I do not want any of that. I live comfortably.

What was the first paid work you ever did?

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Greg Prato | Vintagerock.com

There was a point where it seemed that Ace Frehley had closed the door on his solo career. After all, there was not a single new Ace solo offering between the years of 1990 – 2008 (I know, I know — he was part of the Kiss reunion from 1996 – 2002, but still…).

However, over the past ten years or so, Kiss’ original lead guitarist/creator of the famous “spaceman” character and make-up design has come back with a vengeance – issuing several albums (2009’s Anomaly, 2014’s Space Invader, and 2016’s Origins, Vol. 1) and consistently touring.

And in 2018, Ace added another entry to his solo discography, with the arrival of the appropriately titled Spaceman. The man with the literal smoking guitar spoke to Vintage Rock on the day of the album’s release (October 19, 2018).

The thing that strikes me about the arrival of Spaceman is that it is your fourth album since 2009. Is it safe to say that you’re making up for lost time?

Yeah. What completely blew my mind was I got sober, and then I started working on a record [Anomaly], eventually got a record deal with eOne, and people are telling me, “You haven’t put out an album in 20 years.” I had no idea it went by that fast. [Laughs] So, I’m making up for lost time — yes, I am.

Has getting sober fueled your creativity?

Oh, it’s changed my life. I’m focused, I show up on time, and I’m much more creative. And I like remembering what I did the night before, when I wake up – whether it be at home or on tour.

You’re playing guitar better than ever — especially on tunes like “Mission to Mars” and “Quantum Flux.”

That’s interesting that you said those two. It seems like everybody I talk to has a different favorite.

Let’s discuss “Quantum Flux,” which closes the album and is an instrumental.

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Michael Brandvold

Michael Brandvold

Jody Havenot

Mark Strigl | Talking Metal

Jody Havenot

Matt Porter

Rolling Stone

Walking the Floor goes to space this week, with special guest Ace Frehley — known to Kiss fans as the Spaceman — joining podcast host Chris Shiflett. Together, the two ignore the show’s Americana-leaning format and, instead, geek out over guitar pickups, soloing techniques and Kiss lore.

“Ace Frehley is, without question, the single most important reason why I play guitar,” Shiflett admits during the episode’s pre-interview segment. Perhaps that’s why today’s episode is so spirited. Below, we’ve rounded up some highlights from the pair’s conversation, followed by the episode’s full premiere.

“Cold Gin” was technically co-written by Ace Frehley and Gene Simmons, although the former bandmate received sole writing credit. 
“I wrote that on the subway going down to rehearsal,” Frehley says of the song, which appeared on Kiss’ 1974 debut. “I came up with that riff in my head and I put it together, and actually, Gene wrote the breakdown section, but he never took credit. He said, ‘Ace, it’s your song.’” More than 40 decades later, Frehley remains grateful to Simmons for the vote of confidence. “I really wasn’t a songwriter,” he says. “I learned a lot from Paul and Gene.”

Growing up in the Bronx during the late Sixties and early Seventies, Frehley attended concerts by some of the era’s most iconic rock acts.
“I saw Cream’s first New York appearance,” he remembers. “I saw the Who’s first New York appearance. I saw Led Zeppelin’s first New York appearance, opening up for Iron Buttefly at the Fillmore East, and then half the audience walked out on the headliner.”

Although Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley often monopolized the band’s decision-making process, Frehley was often able to sway their opinions. 
“Some lighting director talked Paul and Gene into using this system where above us would be this big mirror, and the spot[lights] would be in the pit, and we’d bounce the spots off the mirror,” he remembers. “And I said, ‘What, are you kidding? You wanna pay for this? You want spotlight guys in the pit? I wanna be able to see the fans…’ They were gonna go with it, and I talked to Peter, and I said, ‘Look, we’ve gotta talk these guys outta doing this. This is a bad idea.’ And they listened to me.” That said, Frehley wasn’t always able to bend the ears of the band’s highly opinionated leaders. “When it came to The Elder,” he points out, “they didn’t listen to me.”

A longtime user of DiMarzio guitar pickups, Frehley used to deal directly with the gear manufacturer’s owner.
“Larry DiMarzio used to hand-wind pickups in his bedroom with this spooling device, and I used to meet him at the Staten Island Ferry and get the pickups,” he remembers. “I [still] have two or three of the pickups that he personally hand-wound.”

He prefers to improvise his guitar solos in the recording studio.
“Ninety percent of it is winging it,” he says of this approach to composing guitar leads. “In the early days, I used to rehearse guitar solos with Kiss on the first couple albums. They’d give me a cassette without a solo on it, and I’d play with it. I’d work out a solo, and I’d get into the studio, and they didn’t like it! So I said to myself, ‘Well, you just spent the whole afternoon working on something that somebody didn’t like.’ So as my career progressed and my playing got better and my confidence got better, I just decided to wing the solos.”

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Mitch Lafon

Ultimate Classic Rock

Ace Frehley revealed that non-sobriety was a contributing factor to the dismissal of his solo band in favor of the musicians Gene Simmons had hired as his own outfit.

Frehley, who struggled with addiction issues during and after his time with Kiss, before finally resolving them, admitted he’d put his former colleagues “through hell” and that he now had no time for people who hadn’t learned the lesson he’d finally grasped.

“I think Paul [Stanley] and Gene, when I left the group the last time and I was strung out on drugs and alcohol, they probably thought I was just going to fade away and maybe O.D. or disappear,” Frehley recently told the Juliet:Unexpected podcast. “What happened was I got sober, and I came back stronger and bigger than ever.” As an example, he added, “I just went to Australia with Gene, showed up on time, played well, sang well.”

Asked if his issues had contributed to the “toxicity” within Kiss, he said, “In the past, yeah. They were right about a lot of things. I mean, today I have no tolerance for being around drunk people. I put those guys through hell – if I do say so myself – but, I mean, I get it. But it took a while for me to understand.”

He continued, “I got sober a couple of times over the years… but invariably I’d relapse because I’d get on a bus with a bunch of musicians who were getting high, smoking pot and drinking beer and whatever. How long you gonna last on a bus before you end up saying, ‘Gimme a cold one’? … So, pretty much, my [addiction] sponsor said to me, ‘The only way you’re gonna get sober, Ace, is if you get rid of all the people around you who get high, and surround yourself with sober people… or at least with musician who keep it behind closed doors… You don’t want to see it, you don’t want to smell it. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”

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CJ News

The most popular rock act fronted by Jews, whose lightning-bolt Kiss logo has to be altered in countries that forbid Nazi symbols, announced its “End of the Road” farewell tour starting Jan. 31 in Vancouver, followed by multiple dates in Toronto and Montreal, among other cities. During their 46 years together the collaboration of Gene Simmons (born Chaim Witz) and Paul Stanley (born Stanley Eisen) generated plenty of topical tales.

Victory was delayed in Toronto

For their first concert tour, which kicked off in Edmonton, Kiss was originally scheduled to make their Toronto debut in April 1974 at the Victory Burlesque, the Spadina Avenue theatre initially built to show movies in Yiddish – except the show was cancelled. When they played the city that June, it was at Massey Hall, opening for the New York Dolls. The band made it to the Victory that September, where they also guested on Citytv’s music show, Boogie.

This visit was also when Kiss met Toronto-based record producer Bob Ezrin, who already made his name on albums by Alice Cooper. Ezrin was hired for the 1976 album Destroyer, which proved to be the band’s most successful. And in 1981, he oversaw their least-successful album, Music from ‘The Elder’.

Anti-Semitism divides the tribe

Simmons and Stanley originally worked with drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley. But they split into two factions due to what Stanley claimed  in his 2014 memoir Face the Music was an attempt to sabotage a band they felt was “unfairly manipulated by money-hungry Jews.” Criss and Frehley refuted the accusations, pointing to their own Jewish family members. But both of them were out of Kiss by the early-‘80s. For the 1992 Erzrin-produced album Revenge, the band – with the addition of Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer – were an all-Jewish lineup.

Helping hand of guitarist’s dad

The original four members reunited for MTV Unplugged in 1995 and, after a dozen years out of costume, went back on tour with painted faces. But tensions with Criss and Frehley resurfaced. Following a so-called “Farewell Tour” in 2000-01, they called Singer back to fill in as drummer wearing Criss’s Catman costume.

Frehley also ended up on the outs again, and Kiss employee Tommy Thayer filled his Spaceman boots, a part that he might have been born to play. Simmons boasts that his mother, Florence Klein, was among the 15,000 liberated from a concentration camp in northern Austria by a U.S. platoon led by his bandmate’s father, Brig.-Gen. James B. Thayer, who died at age 96 in September. Florence died on Dec. 6 at age 93.

The long road to artistic redemption

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Matt Porter

Gus | Backstageaxxess

40 years ago, the band KISS pulled off something that was unheard of at that time. Each member (Peter Criss, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley) all released solo albums on September 18, 1978. This hasn’t been matched before or since. KISS’ following tour which was Dynasty, had each member perform a song from each of their respective solo albums. Each of these albums sold over a million copies with selling the most. His also charted the highest and spurned a top 20 single in “New York Groove.”  None of the original KISS members have ever performed their respective solo album until now.  At this year KISS Expo at the Hilton in Parsippany, another chapter n KISStory took place.  Ace Frehley gave fans what they have been dying to see and hear, to perform his famed self-titled solo album in its entirety.

Recently, Frehley changed his entire band and enlisted the same musicians that his former bandmate Gene Simmons had in his solo band. They are Phillip Shouse on bass, Jeremy Asbrock and Ryan Spencer Cook on guitar, and former and now current drummer in Matt Starr. Having these players has upped Frahleys game to now try things he hasn’t been able to do in a handful of years. For starts, he recently tried to do a few rarities on this year’s KISS Kruise (“Save Your Love’ and “Dark Light”).  The results may have been mixed but mostly the consensus overall was that all KISS fans were glad that at least Frehley was brave enough to step outside the box.  Fast forward to December 8^th as fans from all over made the trek to see Frehley perform this beloved album in its entirety.  Frehley dedicated the performance to the memory of Gene Simmons’ mother who recently passed away at the age of 92.

They started the performance with what Frehley currently uses to open his set up which is the track “Rip It Out.” He talked about the next song which was about his ex-wife Jeanette Frehley (who was in attendance by the way) “Speedin’ Back to my Baby.”  Frehley talked very little in between each song as he let the music really do most of the talking.  Asbrock handled vocals on “Ozone” and” Wiped Out.” Those along with “I’m in Need of Love” were played for the 1^sttime ever live. In addition to this, Frehley had a small monitor to help on words for a few tracks. The band only played the album (which was 9 tracks) and no other songs were thrown into the set once the album was played in its entirety

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