Ace Frehley states that he might not have quit KISS had they not put out ‘Music From The Elder’
Ace Frehley states that he might not have quit KISS had they not put out ‘Music From The Elder’
Former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley was recently interviewed during a “live conversation” at Hollywood’s Musicians Institute on September 25, 2018. The interview covered a number of topics including KISS‘ disappointing concept album Music From The Elder released back in 1981.
Frehley stated about The Elder (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “I want to give you my two cents about ‘The Elder’. [Producer] Bob Ezrin flew into Connecticut. A lot of it was recorded at my home studio in Connecticut. It was a professional studio — I spent about a million dollars on it. During the recording process, I kept telling all those guys — Bob, Paul [Stanley] and Gene — I go, ‘This is the wrong album for this period of time. I think fans want to hear a heavy hard rock album.’ They just had a deaf ear to me. I said, ‘It’s not going to work,’ and of course, the album bombed. I guess I had a handle on what was happening. Those guys never had any street sense. It’s no fault of their own — Gene grew up in Israel, and Paul grew up in Queens, but he wasn’t a guy like me who hung out on the corner and got into fights and did crazy stuff.
I always had my pulse on what was going on, and I knew at the time — I would have bet a million dollars that the album was going to fail. I didn’t want it to fail, and actually, if you take that album out of sequence with the KISS records, it’s not a bad record. I did some great solos on it and there’s some really good songs, but it wasn’t the right record for the time. I was doing an interview with Billboard magazine, and they said, ‘What would happened if ‘The Elder’ never happened, and you went from [1980’s ‘Unmasked’] to [1982’s] ‘Creatures Of The Night’?’ I thought for a second, because I like ‘Creatures Of The Night’ — it’s heavy, it’s powerful, it’s everything I said we should be doing when we recorded ‘The Elder’. I may not have quit the band, but you can’t rewrite history unless we go into a time warp or a black hole.”
You can read other excerpts from the interview with Ace Frehley at Blabbermouth.