Rock soldier.

The voice at the other end of the phone had a familiar Bronx honk.

"Hey Steve, this is Ace Frehley calling."

I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind.

"You've got to know how completely surreal that sounds to me."

He didn't. All the former Kiss guitarist knew was that he was supposed to call me for a telephone interview for Time Out New York to promote his current concert tour, which arrived at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square on Friday night.

There was no way he could have known that his work in a garish, hard-working upstart rock group from New York City had been the catalyst for pretty much the entire trajectory of my life for more than three decades.

I mean that in a very real way. Before I was introduced to Kiss, I was not an especially musical kid. Music was not something that my family was involved in. My earliest musical interest was Donny Osmond and the Osmond Brothers. After that came Barry Manilow.

Tommy Douglas, a.k.a. the bad kid down the street who I was not supposed to hang out with, introduced me to a lot of music during my later elementary-school years: Aerosmith (Toys in the Attic), Thin Lizzy (Jailbreak), Van Halen (the first one, which sounded like it was from another planet at the time), Rush (2112). I enjoyed it all.

But Kiss was different. Tommy played Destroyer and Rock and Roll Over for me, and I was hooked. I begged my mom for a copy of the newly issued Alive II for Christmas that year. Within two weeks, thanks to holiday cash from relatives, I had a complete collection.

Kiss was loud and lurid, a comic-book fantasy come to life. It was a band my mother hated: playing Kiss records loud, and papering my walls and half the ceiling with pin-ups, was arguably my earliest act of rebellion.

In a word, Kiss was liberation.

But me being the strangely literal-minded kid that I was, Kiss was also my gateway to serious music. I idolized Kiss drummer Peter Criss; therefore, it stood to reason that if I ever wanted to be as great a musician as he was, I needed to start taking drum lessons right away. Mom tried to persuade me to take up the oboe or French horn instead, but I wasn't having it. With my grandmother's help, I prevailed. I got my snare drum and glockenspiel, and commenced with what would ultimately be 11 years of formal percussion training and playing in school bands, orchestras, jazz ensembles and so on.

Being in school bands and orchestras exposed me to the classical repertoire; dirt-cheap Seraphim and Odyssey cassettes did the rest. But there was more: Peter Criss claimed to have taken lessons with swing-era drum titan Gene Krupa, so I required Gene Krupa records. Gene Krupa records being nearly impossible to find in League City at the time, I settled temporarily for Louis Bellson, whose LP Thunderbird retains an undying spot in my heart for precisely that reason, apart from being a great record in its own right.

Ironically, I never saw Kiss during its original glory days; I was too young and had no beneficent older relative to take me. I first saw the band on its tenth-anniversary tour, supporting the Creatures of the Night album. Eric Carr had replaced Criss some years before, and on this tour, Vinnie Vincent replaced Frehley. It was great, but it just wasn't the same. I caught the same band, sans makeup, on the Lick It Up tour, and some years later caught the Hot in the Shade tour with Bruce Kulick in the lead guitar slot.

The Kiss lineup with Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Kulick and Carr (and later, after Carr's premature death, Eric Singer) was unquestionably a more polished and proficient band than the original lineup had been. Still, for all intents and purposes I didn't actually see Kiss until 1996, when the reunion tour with Frehley and Criss came to Madison Square Garden. It sounds silly to liken something like that to a religious experience, but I will definitely state for the record that finally seeing my childhood heroes all together in action gave me a thrill like few I can describe.

Obviously Frehley didn't know any of that when he phoned me for our interview, and I didn't burden him with any of it. We talked about his newfound sobriety and its effects on his life and work; about his upcoming album due in late May, none of which he's playing on the current tour for fear of piracy and YouTube leaks; and about his feelings regarding the currently ongoing Kiss 35th-anniversary tour, in which Stanley and Simmons are touring with hired hands playing the roles of Frehley's Space Ace and Criss's Catman. (We also talked about the Dunkin' Donuts television commercial in which Frehley appeared last year, directed by actor Zach Braff, but that bit of the conversation didn't make the final cut.)

On Friday night, I took Dr. LP, more or less a Kiss neophyte, and our friend Josh, a fellow Frehley fan, to Nokia for Frehley's concert. His bandmates -- rhythm guitarist Derrek Hawkins, bassist Anthony Esposito and drummer Scot Coogan -- likely hadn't been born when Kiss got started. But they filled their roles with serious style and charisma. Coogan in particular was the type of big-rock drummer I love most: like the aforementioned Eric Singer, he's a hard-hitting player, technically accomplished but unflashy, and someone who positively glows with a palpable love of simply playing in a rock band. He was also a capable singer, taking parts in Kiss songs that would originally have been sung by Stanley.

The set list was a Frehley fan's dream: a strong sampling of classic Kiss songs, including practically every song Frehley wrote for the band as well as a pair of relative obscurities ("Strange Ways," "Love Her All I Can"), plus a handful of his stronger post-Kiss tracks. Frehley pulled out some of his old stage tricks: the Les Paul with the running lights inside, and the one with the smoke bomb and flash pot in the top pickup. His solos were, unsurprisingly, note-for-note recreations of the ones he played on the original records. (Think of them as cadenzas.) He played each one better than I'd ever heard it played before, live, on record or on video.

But the solo he played in "Strange Ways" was something more, a driven, titanic improvisation that fairly exploded with the joy Frehley must have felt in facing a huge, fanatical home-town crowd -- and knowing that he'd actually remember it the next day.

Set list: Rip It Out / Hard Times / Parasite / Snowblind - I Want You (tag) / Rock Soldiers / Breakout / Into the Void / Strange Ways / Medley: Torpedo Girl, Speeding Back to My Baby, Five Card Stud, Trouble Walkin' / Stranger in a Strange Land / New York Groove / 2000 Man / Shock Me / Rocket Ride // Encore: Deuce / Love Her All I Can / Love Gun / Cold Gin - Black Diamond (outro)

Playlist:

Los Horóscopos de Durango - Ayer, Hoy y Siempre (Univision)

Giya Kancheli - Night Prayers; Symphony No. 5 - State Symphony Orchestra of Russia/Mark Gorenstein (Taco)

Arnold Schoenberg - Violin Concerto; Jean Sibelius - Violin Concerto - Hilary Hahn, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen (Deutsche Grammophon)

John Adams - Harmonielehre - St. Louis Symphony Orchestra/David Robertson (Arch Media download)

Anders Hillborg - ...lontana in sonno...; Laci Boldemann - 4 Epitaphs; Hans Gefors - Lydias sånger - Anne Sofie von Otter, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Kent Nagano (Deutsche Grammophon download)

Philip Glass - Waiting for the Barbarians - Elvira Soukop, Richard Salter, Eugene Perry, Michael Tews, Opernchor des Theaters Erfurt, Philharmonisches Orchester Erfurt/Dennis Russell Davies (Orange Mountain Music, forthcoming)

Jacob Garchik Trio - Romance (Yestereve)

Napalm Death - Scum (Earache)

Kiss - Alive! (Mercury)

Burning Spear - Creation Rebel (Heartbeat)

Guapo - Elixirs (Neurot)

Comments

[Richard G.]

we all have our "Kiss"es. Mine was Danny Elfman's score to Batman which I discovered roughly around the same time as I discovered Beethoven...no one bothered to explain to me that one was inherently better than the other.
In any case, being a very enthusiastic armchair conductor at an early age changed the direction of my life and in no small way inspired me to work in music. How do I tell my symphony friends I was inspired to discover music and follow a life-trajectory thanks to works titled things like "Clown Attack" and "Final Confrontation?"

[Eric Skelly]

As soon as I read the first sentence of this blog entry I felt a rush of vicarious excitement, as I know what that must have meant to you. I'm so happy that you had that experience!

[pdf]

I had a very similar experience a few years ago, when I was one of the freelance contributors assembling the Ozzfest tour book, and Tony Iommi called my apartment. I was instantly 15 again.

As far as Kiss is concerned, I was never a fan as a kid, and I think you have to embrace them in childhood, with little or no knowledge of rock - that way, the showmanship draws you in as much as the music. I recently (like, a month ago) bought my first ever Kiss record - the 2CD Gold anthology, which covers the highlights from 1974-82. They play decent hard rock with lyrics in one of two modes: boneheaded single-entendre cock-rock, or goofy power-of-positive-thinking anthems. But they had some better than decent riffs and choruses, I'll give 'em that.

[Vincent Kargatis]

So awesome, Steve. Too cool!