Ace Frehley - Sister
Wait, what? It's my 59th birthday today? Well HBTM! That can only mean it's the 12th birthday of my page here.
Life nearing 60 being the physically shredded, emotionally draining exercise in overcatastrophized Back Nine that we always heard it would be, I think back to what I was doing at 12, when it all seemed so fresh and the possibilities were only outnumbered, in your mind, by the aspirations.
When I was 12 back in 1979, and about to be 13 on this day 46 years ago, it was the start of 8th grade in a few days and I was about to attend my very first concert.
On that 1st day of September in 1979, other than the recent discovery of what little frenulum the chopper had so graciously left me, there was nothing bigger on Earth -- especially to a boy my age -- than Kiss, a band that couldn't have been more suited to our age group if it had featured video games being played by naked, nubile girls onstage in time to the music.
So to close out Puberty Summer and the Seventies in style, a few friends and I were dropped -- unchaperoned, because that's how the 1970s, jointlike, rolled -- at the Nassau Veterans' Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale on Long Island, where Kiss were greasepaint-thick in several NY area Dynasty shows, with a few Madison Square Gardens wrapped around the lone Nassau we attended.
Now, amid our first whiffs of the Devil's Lettuce -- courtesy of the 20-something dudes directly in front of us, headbanging to Let Me Go Rock and Roll -- and our barely-developed male Troglo-brains, we were convinced we were witnessing The Greatest Thing That Could Ever Possibly Exist In Three Dimensions as it went on, with Gene Simmons taking flight across the ceiling to the lighting rig and today's (I can't believe he is dead) honoree wobbling around in his Space Boots as the rockets shot from his humbuckers.
Of course we had less than no idea that this was a bloated, doomed Hindenburg that had slid into the obsession with brand and lost most of the band part it was always one custom lunchbox from being eaten and shat out by. But when you're 12 and about to be 13, you're not really channeling your inner Robert Christgau yet and superheroes can still not just get you off, but seem real or at least possible.
I do know one thing that is eternally true, though. And I hope those two other Kissnessmen knew it too, as they traveled together to his funeral last week to pay their respects.
Which is that Ace Frehley, however self-destructively insane he may have been in those days or since, was the secret sauce that took their juvenile odes to fellatio and buttsex into jussssssssssssssst enough of a musical realm of Pure Rawk Power to legitimize what they did and enable it to become, for a moment before the '70s set in, The Hottest Band In the Land.
At 12/13, we always knew he was the most talented one with the coolest, most intriguing persona, who'd designed the logo and whose solos took the songs up notches whenever they exploded, super-novan and always memorably singable, from his sunburst Les Paul.
I don't not like Gene S. and will always have Dr. Love's number in my inner rolodex, but if he or you're wondering why Kiss was ever a thing, it's because of one thing and one thing only to begin with: it's because Paul Daniel Frehley and his mismatched Converse All-Stars ambled into Bill Aucoin's loft that day and plugged in. If that moment doesn't occur, those other guys have to get real jobs likely not involving 8-inch platform heels, bloodspitting demons, marathon Hyatt House orgies and rotating drum risers.
As we can perceive from 12 years of this shit, I grew up (OK let's not get out over our skis, I got older) to go way past the adolescent hipthrusty swagger of Rock and Roll Over --my favorite Kiss record still -- but those guys will always be my first concert. And Ace -- who at age 74 fell in his home studio in September, hit his head, and never woke up again until the doctors at last pulled the guitar cable from the plug October 16th -- will always be a special figure to me. Someone who, in his own spaced way, helped open a gateway for so many musicfolk of my generation, and projected us, like a wayward space beam from his guitar, into all our quantum musical journeys since.
Ace Frehley
The Strand
Providence, Rhode Island USA
5.28.1995
01 tuning
02 Watchin’ You
03 Shot Full of Rock
04 Love Her All I Can
05 medley: Insane/Trouble Walkin’/Rock Soldiers/Speedin’ Back to My Baby/Hard Times
06 New York Groove
07 Sister
08 2 Young 2 Die
09 guitar solo
10 Foxy Lady
11 Cold Gin
12 Strange Ways
13 Stranger In a Strange Land
14 Shout It Out Loud
15 Detroit Rock City
Total time: 1:06:48
Ace Frehley – guitar & vocals
Richie Scarlett - guitar & vocals
Karl Cochran – bass & vocals
Steve “Budgie” Werner – drums
320/48k audio taken from an HD YouTube post of the complete concert
extracted, converted to 16/44 CD Audio, repaired, edited, remuxed for instrument balance & remastered by EN, October 2025
444 MB FLAC/direct link
444 MB FLAC/direct link
I yakked this 30 year old show -- from the tour that ended up leading directly to the infamous 1996 Kiss reunion -- off a high definition YouTube clip, but don't run away just yet. For it goes losslessly potent all the way to 20 kHz, and once I muxed up the bass and made things a bit less drummier, it sounds pretty darn heavy if you ask me. These lads blow it up, with The Spaceman on excellent form with a selection of Kiss tunes and solo material including Sister, which I think is as great a cautionary song about drug use as The Needle and The Damage Done. There's also considerably less harmonica.
In celebration of my and the page's birthday, I am gonna death it up this week, with this being just the initial memorial post of several I have worked up in honor of recently-interred music luminaries. Luminaries like Ace Frehley, who made a lot of 12-year-olds -- and a lot of 12-year-olds who grew up to be 59-year-olds -- happy with air in his lungs and that galactic, pentatonic magic in his fingers.--J.
4.27.1951 - 10.16.2025