More than anything else, I wanted to have a good time.
Just as they had at Our Saviour Lutheran, classes at DeWitt Clinton had a way of interfering with my prime directive, and before long I was on a first-name basis with everyone in the principal’s office. One day I decided to cut school. In itself, this was nothing out of the ordinary; I did it all the time. Usually I’d just hang out with friends, smoke some pot, have a few beers, play my guitar. Harmless, lazy, aimless shit.
On this particular day, however, there was a purpose attached to my truancy. I don’t remember the precise date, but it was somewhere between March 25 and April 2, 1967. During that week the legendary New York disc jockey Murray the K promoted a series of daylong concerts at the RKO 58th Street Theatre in Manhattan. “Murray the K Presents Music in the 5th Dimension” (that a radio personality received top billing gives you an idea of just how much power Murray the K wielded in those days) was a breathtaking collection of talent and diverse musical styles. Headlining the event, if the posters were to be believed, were Mitch Ryder and Wilson Pickett. These were the biggest draws: Ryder, newly solo and playing without the Detroit Wheels; and Pickett, one of the all-time great soul singers.
And that was just the beginning.
If you look at that poster now, it reads like a Who’s Who of rock ’n’ roll greats: Simon & Garfunkel, the Young Rascals, Phil Ochs, the Blues Project (featuring Al Kooper), and the two bands I most wanted to see: the Who and the Cream. (Yeah, that’s right, “the Cream.” That’s the way they were advertised.)
For a week straight these guys tore up the RKO, turning a midtown movie theater into a showcase for some of the greatest musicians in rock ’n’ roll history. I had to be part of it. Since shows started at 10 A.M. and ran pretty much all afternoon, school was out of the question.
That show was a life-changer for me. I was a month shy of my sixteenth birthday and in the early stages of trying to form some sort of artistic identity. I loved messing around with the guitar, and I’d played in bands with my brother and some friends. On some level I knew that I wanted to be a professional musician, but it wasn’t until that day, sitting near the front of the RKO Theatre, that it all became clear to me.
I wanted to be Pete Townshend.
I wanted to be Eric Clapton.
I wanted to be a guitar-slinging rock star.
Neither Cream nor the Who had ever performed in the United States prior to the Murray the K shows; in retrospect, it was an historic event. Not that I realized it at the time. To me it was just one hell of a show. I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but at some point I wound up near the stage with a few of my buddies early in the day, talking with Murray the K himself. I just walked up to him and began chatting about the show. Everyone knew Mitch Ryder at the time, but Murray was more interested in talking about the Who and Cream.
“These guys are gonna be huge,” Murray assured us. “Wait and see.”
The Who had already released a couple of albums, including My Generation, but they were still primarily a British phenomenon; same thing with Cream, a power trio with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. I was familiar with both bands, but I had no idea what I was in for that day. Watching Clapton handle the guitar so fluidly and effortlessly was mesmerizing. But what really got my attention was seeing the Who and the way they combined theatrics with incredible music and harmonies. Keith Moon fucking attacked the drum kit. And Townshend blew me away with his powerful chord work and showmanship. I was spellbound as they destroyed their instruments and left the smoke-filled stage in ruins!
It was raw, violent, and entertaining as hell.
These guys knew how to play and sing, and they knew how to put on a show.
I sat there (actually, I’m sure I was standing) in awe of the whole experience. I’d seen a lot of live music by this time, but not by any bands of this caliber. This was big-time rock ’n’ roll, and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted the whole deal: the giant amps, the special effects, the chicks screaming my name from the front row. But the funny thing is, I don’t recall feeling overwhelmed by it. I don’t think I ever felt like it was beyond my reach, or that I was dreaming too big. Sure, I idolized other musicians along the way, and I probably would have been too tongue-tied to speak with Pete Townshend if I’d had the opportunity that day in New York. But even then there was a little voice in the back of my head saying, “You can do this. You will do this.”
I never set my sights low. I’ve always believed most people are ruined by the limitations they put on themselves. I was never afraid to take that step, to see what I was capable of doing. Does luck play a role in success, particularly in a creative field? Sure it does. But if you don’t have the balls to give it a shot, you’re destined to fail.
Clapton?
Townshend?
Those guys had talent. They also had balls.
And though he wasn’t nearly as well-known, so did Jim McCarty, the lead guitarist for Mitch Ryder’s band. Funny the way things come full circle sometimes. That show served as my introduction to big-time professional rock ’n’ roll, and it made an indelible impression. A few years later, when I was about eighteen or nineteen, I ended up jamming with McCarty at a mutual friend’s house in the Bronx. Jim was in town, visiting our buddy, and they invited me over. Music was like that in the late 1960s, early ’70s. Paths crossed in the weirdest ways. There were so many people starting bands and playing gigs all over the country. It was a brotherhood.
Years later (decades, actually), when I was out on the road with my solo project, Frehley’s Comet, Jim McCarty’s band was my opening act. We’d sit around backstage afterward, tossing down beers and swapping stories. I always thought Jim was one of the most underrated American guitar players, and to be sharing a stage with him after all those years was a real trip.
You just never know how things are going to turn out.
Far as I could tell, there was no three-strike rule at DeWitt Clinton High School. By the middle of my junior year I’d already been caught skipping on multiple occasions and been suspended two or three times. What can I tell you? I was an incorrigible kid. And they were turbulent times. The Vietnam War was raging, and the music scene was changing rapidly. I’m lucky that I didn’t get in a lot more trouble than I did. I wasn’t a criminal, though; I was just a gigantic pain in the ass to some… albeit with a sense of style. See, by the time I was sixteen, I’d traded in my leather jacket and jeans for knee-high boots and ruffled shirts, like the guys in the Kinks or Paul Revere and the Raiders. I posed like a rock star and carried myself like a rock star, even though I hadn’t yet realized the work that was involved in actually becoming a rock star.
I just figured it had nothing to do with attending classes at DeWitt Clinton.
So one day my friend and I got some beer and pot, and hooked up with a couple of chicks. Again, nothing out of the ordinary, except one of the girls was lucky to have a mother who worked every day, so the family apartment was conveniently empty. By ten o’clock that morning our party was in high gear. We got drunk, paired off, fooled around, and generally had a much more interesting day than we would have had at school. But the chick’s mom came home from work early that day and freaked out. She caught us with our pants down and beer bottles everywhere. I zipped up my pants and ran out of the apartment with my buddy, while the chick’s mom was still screaming.
The next day she called the dean of students at DeWitt Clinton. For the other kids involved this was not a particularly serious offense. But for me it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In addition to poor grades and a history of truancy, I was found guilty of poor judgment when it came to personal grooming. In the mid-1960s, in Europe, you could wear long hair and pass it off as nothing more than a fashion statement. But in the United States of America, at this particular point in time, wearing long hair meant something else entirely. It was a political statement, and threatened people in authority. To be perfectly candid, I was blissfully unaware of is
sues of any greater significance than how to get chicks out of their clothes. I was hardly a political dissident. Any hippie tendencies I might have exhibited were strictly a matter of convenience and lifestyle. I wanted to get laid, get drunk, get high, and play in a band. I wanted a certain look onstage, and by achieving that look I found myself getting bundled in with the war protesters and demonstrators.
“Get a haircut, Frehley,” the dean would tell me.
“Come on, man. It’s a free country. Stop hassling me.”
And they did—by kicking me out of school. Now I was oh-for-two as a high school student, and my parents, not surprisingly, were beginning to lose their patience. Not so much my mom—I was her baby boy and she always had a soft spot for me, no matter how disruptive a force I might have become. Moms are like that. But my father by now was in his sixties and had neither the time nor the inclination to gently encourage me to clean up my act. As I said, Dad was usually a fairly benign and quiet presence in my life, but a second expulsion nearly drove him over the edge.
“Clean up your act,” he said one day, “or get out of the house.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m outta here.”
It was quite a dramatic moment. I grabbed some clothes and my guitar and left the apartment, slamming the door behind me. There was just one problem: I had no place to go. Shit, I was sixteen years old, with no money and no job skills. I couldn’t go live with any of my friends, because their parents would have tossed me out as well. Staring down the prospect of being homeless in New York, I was left with only one option:
Duke’s place.
Duke was a black guy who lived on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx. He was, to put it mildly, something of an unsavory character, though I didn’t really see it that way at the time. Duke was a musician in his early twenties and spent an unusual amount of time hanging out with high school kids. His father was the superintendent of an apartment building and Duke had a little one-bedroom place to himself in the basement. So he was on his own, but not really on his own, since Mom and Dad were picking up the tab. I’d gotten to know him a little bit through my musical connections. Duke always wanted to be in a band, but he wasn’t a musician, so his plan was to assemble a group to back him up while he manned the microphone. He couldn’t pay me anything, but the offer was attractive nonetheless.
“Tell you what,” Duke said. “Come and back me up and I’ll let you use my place whenever you want. Bring your girlfriend, have some beer, smoke some pot. Whatever you feel like doing.”
For a kid in his teens, this wasn’t a bad deal. Duke and I would play at the Veterans Hospital on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx and entertain the sick vets. Sometimes it would just be the two of us—me on guitar and Duke singing. Other times we’d get a bass or rhythm guitar player and a drummer as well. But it was Dukie’s show all the way. He was such a character. The guy was built like Hercules, and yet he’d move around like Mick Jagger. After the show we’d go back to Duke’s house and drink beer and hang out. The fridge was always filled, which was a bonus when you skipped school and brought a girl over.
Needless to say, this entire arrangement demonstrated incredibly bad judgment on Duke’s part, and I suppose it was just a matter of time before it blew up in his face. The cops busted a party at Duke’s apartment and pulled us all in for questioning. I can still remember seeing the father of one of the girls getting into a fight with Duke at the police station, screaming at him, “You leave my daughter alone or I’ll fucking kill you!”
The cops kept us there for hours, questioning all of us about Dukie and our relationship with him. They seemed less concerned about whether he had provided alcohol to minors than with the nature of his friendship with a bunch of teenagers.
Duke was nuts, though—completely off the hook. If he was frightened by his brush with the cops, you never would have known it. The party went on, with plenty of alcohol and underage girls. Eventually Duke disappeared from the neighborhood. I heard he was in prison, serving time for exactly the type of behavior that had gotten him into trouble in the past. By this time, though, I had long since parted company with Duke. I lived with him for less than a month, after which I made peace with my parents and moved back into their home.
Truth is, they were worried sick about me, and from that point on we coexisted in relative tranquility. By that I mean, Mom and Dad stopped hassling me about my budding rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and I tried not to give them too much cause for concern. On some level, I think, they realized I wasn’t a bad kid. I just wasn’t the kind of kid they wanted me to be. What shocked them the most was how much success I had with girls. I usually had multiple girlfriends. My father, of course, didn’t get it at all.
“What the hell does she see in you?” he’d say, shaking his head.
My mother, meanwhile, couldn’t believe that my girlfriends would stop by the house to clean my room! They’d make my bed, pick up my dirty clothes, and then hang out and wait for me to get home from school. I’d walk through the door and Mom would be standing there with a look of bewilderment on her face.
“Michelle is here.”
“Oh yeah? Where is she?”
Mom would point to my bedroom door and shake her head.
I think she was probably shocked on multiple levels, but she tolerated it. Maybe because it meant less work for her.
I don’t mean to brag, but I always did well with girls. I started fooling around when I was eleven or twelve and lost my virginity at fifteen. To me, girls weren’t all that mysterious. I wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world, but I never lacked for companionship, mainly because I knew how to talk to chicks and make them feel at ease. I was funny. I’d tell jokes, do magic tricks, and I could play guitar. What else do you need, man?
When I got a little older and started hanging out in bars and clubs, I developed a few strategies for picking up women. It’s silly, but you know what always worked? I would wear a T-shirt and suit jacket, and in the breast pocket of the jacket I kept a little teddy bear with its arms poking out. I’d go up to a chick, obviously after I had a couple drinks, and I’d say, “Hey, you want to meet my friend?” Then I’d open up my jacket and I’d have this little teddy bear, waiting to say hello.
Sometimes this would cause a girl to roll her eyes and walk away, but more often than not, the response was, “Awwwww, how cute!”
And then I’d be in the door.
If you’re at least halfway decent looking, and you’re funny and outgoing, all you need is that one little icebreaker. But most guys are too scared to even give it a shot. They don’t know how to initiate a conversation. We all have our insecurities, of course, and I sure had mine, but after a couple of drinks I could do anything, including hit on the hottest chick in the room. Eventually I got so good at talking to girls that I could set up my buddies as well, which is how I ended up with the nickname “Ace.”
“You know, you are such an ace, man,” one of them said one night, after I’d introduced him to a girl he’d been lusting after. “You really help us out with the chicks.”
That was that. The nickname stuck.
It’s a cliché that guys get into bands primarily to meet girls, but as with any cliché, there’s more than a little truth to it. The first time I played a church dance, when I was fourteen years old, girls gathered around the stage, staring at me and the other guys in the band. It had nothing to do with me, really, and everything to do with the fact that I was up there onstage, playing the guitar. Girls were drawn to it, like bees to nectar. They couldn’t help themselves.
Sometimes you didn’t even need the guitar; you simply had to act the part.
I was about sixteen or seventeen when I was hanging out one day with some friends near Fordham University. It was a busy weekend afternoon, with lots of people milling about, including tons of pretty girls. I was wearing my ruffled shirt and jeans tucked into knee-high boots. My hair was shoulder length: the rock star look.
“Hey, do me a favor,” I said to one
of my friends. “I’m going to go over near that group of girls, and I want you to walk up to me and ask me for my autograph.”
My buddy played it up beautifully, just walked into the crowd and thrust a pen and paper in front of me.
“Oh, man, thanks. I love your records!” Within seconds I was surrounded by pretty girls. They flirted, vied for attention, and coyly tried to figure out exactly who the hell I was, this rock ’n’ roll star in their midst.
It was intoxicating. And it was so, so easy.
MOVIN’ ON UP
Like a basketball player in search of a pickup game, I bounced from band to band. All I wanted was a chance to keep playing, and to improve, and to stand up there onstage in front of as many people as possible. I couldn’t tell you the exact number of bands I started or joined. More than a dozen, for sure. Maybe two dozen. Some never got beyond the first rehearsal; others endured for months. It wasn’t unusual for me to be playing in two or three bands at once.
Playing with your first real band, though, is like having sex for the first time: it’s sloppy, fast, and exciting, and it makes you want more. At the very least, you don’t forget the experience. Just for the record, my first “official” sexual partner was an aggressive and amorous chick named Jenny. I was fifteen years old and dating her friend Michelle (who, with high cheekbones, sunken eyes, and long, ink-black hair, looked for all the world like Cher, which was pretty cool at the time). Michelle was cute and fun, but she wasn’t interested in giving up her virginity to me, or to anyone else, for that matter. Jenny had different feelings on this issue, and she let me know one night when we were all together at a party.
“Give me a call,” she said, pressing a small piece of paper containing her phone number into my palm.
I did, and the very next day we got together at her apartment. One of us knew precisely what they were doing, and it wasn’t me. Jenny didn’t complain, though, and neither did I. When you’re a fifteen-year-old boy getting laid for the very first time, all you really want (or need) is a warm, inviting body, and Jenny was more than accommodating. My performance was irrelevant and best left unexamined. I got better—a lot better—as time went on.
No Regrets Page 3
