Imagine how honored I was to be invited by the Ace himself to write songs with him, at his house in Connecticut. When I first went there it was like another time-travel, space-continuum kind of deal. I told Jeanette, Ace’s wife, that when I was a kid in Canada I would dream about going to Connecticut and sitting in the bushes, looking out at his house, to see if I could see Ace walking around the yard or something. Jeanette told me that if I would’ve actually done that, they would have invited me to come on in and hang out. Mind-blowing stuff. Here I was with my hero. About to write songs with him?!?! How could this be real????
I had hired Richie Scarlet, Ace’s rhythm guitar player, for my solo band. Along with Richie and Anton Fig (the legendary drummer of KISS’s Dynasty, Unmasked, and more importantly Ace’s incredible first solo album), we all went up to Ace’s to put some songs together. Describing Ace’s house always gets a laugh. I knocked on the door, and it took about forty-five minutes to get an answer. After repeated calls on my cell phone, trying to make sure I was at the right house, Jeanette, Ace’s wife after all these years, answered the door in stack-heeled sky-high platform boots. This was in the mid-’90s. With a laugh, she welcomed me inside.
Immaculate, nice and normal on the upper levels of the house, on one wall was the KISS Monopoly Game from the 1970s that was famously presented to Bill Aucoin and all four band members only. But then, when one went into the basement, it was like some sort of crazy fucked-up drug-crazed man-cave. Knee-high in debris. Expensive debris. Laptops. VCRs. Computer cables. Videotapes, records, turntables, just all kinds of musician-computer-spaceman–related ephemera that you literally could not walk through without kicking a laptop, or moving a VCR off the couch. Wading through spaghetti rolls of wires, cables, busted-up CDs, shrink-wrapped copies of KISS Alive II.
Ace said, “Hey bubbe.” This was an old slang word for buddy that he called me, and a lot of other people. None of us had any idea what it meant. “You wanna watch a video?” he intoned in his Curly-meets-Shemp Three Stooges voice. I said, “Sure.” He walked over to the other side of the room, and there was a television set with RCA cables that were no more then three inches long. Ace had a VCR plugged into these RCA cables, which meant the VCR itself was dangling in midair. I had never seen this before. I said that if he used some of the longer RCA cables that we were kicking out of the way underfoot, he could put the VCR down on a shelf, or on top of the television set itself, perhaps. He goes, “Fuck that!,” grabs a porno tape, and puts it in vertically underneath the VCR. There were other things, amongst the debris, that were for the big kids only, if you know what I mean. I laughed as we did a couple of lines of coke and watched porn.
I couldn’t believe Ace had asked me to his house to write music. Skid Row had invited Ace to jam with us the first time we ever played the Meadowlands Arena, in 1989, opening for Bon Jovi. He got onstage in front of 20,000 people, as we did “Cold Gin.” It may have been the first time Ace had been on an arena stage in quite a while. He was our hero. We were tripping over ourselves to jam with him. We had become great friends in the Skid Row years, and even before, when I had first met Ace in 1987 at Rock ’N Roll Heaven in Toronto. When he was playing near me in his solo band, I would always go to his shows and hang out. Still, that was nothing compared to creating new music together with my childhood hero. To collaborate with the guy I had stared at on my wall when my family was breaking up. The guy who threw me his cup from the stage at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1979 while I was perched upon my father’s back for the last time. The guy I put all my hopes and dreams into. This was going to be the pinnacle of my career, of my life, for sure.
I went around the house and got all my song ideas together. My microcassette recorder that I hummed songs into. My notebook full of ideas, lyrics, titles, verses, etcetera. I began to specifically think of Ace himself, writing an album, and I started putting more ideas together that I thought would be great for the Ace. Inner Space/Outer Self. My cousin Kevin was in town. We loaded up the car and went up the turnpike to Connecticut. I jammed on the ideas on my cassette recorder the whole way up there. We were so excited! Here we were, two card-carrying members of the KISS Army of the ’70s, going to Ace Frehley’s house. This was a fairy-tale dream come true.
A rock ’n’ roll fairy tale, that is.
We kicked the computers out of the way and began to rock. I guess in the lore of ancient KISStory, this should be called the ACEment. Anton Fig in one corner, me in another, Richie on bass guitar over there. Ace, although we were huddled together in a wood-paneled, suburban basement, had a full arena-sized Marshall Stack setup, at pretty much full volume. Although it could’ve been on one, with the proximity I had to it, it was completely deafening.
The Ace was ready to rock. “Sebastian! What do you want to do?” With this, he played a sequence of two chords, which happened to sound a lot like the first chords of the Mötley Crüe song “Shout at the Devil.” Richie and I looked at each other. “What else do you got?” He played the exact same sequence, only now the very last chord was different. It went one chord higher. Which happened to be . . . ummmmm . . . the exact second two chords of “Shout at the Devil,” if I wasn’t mistaken. “Is that it?” Ace goes. “What would you sing over that?”
I wanted to say, “Shout at the Devil?”
But instead, I closed my eyes and went to the microphone. Pressed record on my microcassette and put my voice into Ace mode. More specifically, the first Ace Frehley solo record. Released in 1978, I bought it the day it came out. Went to Artspace, with the biggest speaker in the whole city. Dad let me play the record through the full system as I lay down on my back. From the opening crack of the snare drum into the first riff, this was the heaviest album I ever heard. Anton Fig’s monstrous drum fills.
Rip it out
Take my heart
You wanted it from the start
Some of the heaviest music of all time. I closed my eyes and imagined that.
I started singing a melody line over the three chords he had. I let the melody flow out for the vocal in the verse of the song. Ace and everybody in the room loved it. We had nowhere else to go, musically, in the song. The three chords he had lasted all of about six seconds. But he liked what I was singing, so we worked on it. “What do we do after that?” We looked around the room. Ace goes, “I got nothing, Bubbe.” We all start to laugh. It was funny.
This was gonna be a pretty short song.
“What do you think?” We jammed on what we had. Again, I thought back to the album Slave to the Grind. When I wrote the riff for the title track of that album, I was just looking for something fast. What this song needed was something sleazy and cool for the chorus. I tried to feel what would fit.
Back in Skid Row, in Rachel’s parents’ garage in Toms River, we used to talk about the early KISS albums and how they would go Pa-whooooom!!! Ace, Gene, and Paul would run their fingers from one end of the guitar neck, low on the frets, up to the high part of the neck, as a bridge to another section in the song. We thought this was so cool, to the point where we would try and put as many Pa-whoooooms into Skid Row songs as possible. We were also very fond of what could quite possibly be the coolest instrument in the world, the Cowbell. Yes, I capitalized that.
Right after the verse, I hummed out the guitar riff I heard in my head. To everybody in the room. I sang it to Richie and Ace. “Hey Anton! Try this!!” I hummed the riff again. Anton played a beat, then I suggested he slow it down and put the almighty cowbell behind the snare beat in the chorus. This was very much like the song “Creepshow” on Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind. We now had that kind of sleazy vibe, on that record, that I was trying to inject into this Ace song.
I hummed the whole chorus’s main guitar riff to Ace, very specifically. It contains a chugging section that Ace first played with up-and-down strokes on the strings. I explained that the riff needed to have all down strokes on the chugging part, to give it the aggression it needed. Like Johnny Ramone of the Ramones.
/> Once Ace and Richie did the down strokes together, the song had a machine gun–sounding style. With the cowbell part behind the beat, it was really badass and sleazy. Once we had the music down, Ace pulled out this incredible book, full of lyrics and ideas, all in his inimitable handwriting style, that he had since the ’60s. We sat on the couch, did blow, and went through the book. Stopped on a page of lyrics with the title at the top, “You Make It Hard for Me.” We laughed. That was the best title we saw, so we called the song “You Make It Hard for Me.”
You make it so hard
To see
Not the best lyrics. But we came up with the tune, right there and then, and it really was badass. I recorded it on my microcassette, and Kevin, my cousin, Richie, Anton, Ace, and myself were all very stoked. We wrote other songs as well. But “You Make It Hard for Me” was the one we all really dug.
I could not have been happier. To make a kick-ass song with my ultimate guitar fantasy hero, in his house??? With my friends, and my cousin even, all right there with me??? This was a night I would never forget.
There was something else there that evening. The most cocaine I ever saw in my life.
After the session, sitting on the couch amongst the debris, Ace says, “Hey. You want some of this?” Underneath the coffee table, in front of us, he pulled out a large mirror already filled with cut lines of coke. We inhaled the flake and enjoyed the new song on tape. About an hour and a half later, I find Ace in the other room, next to the VCR dangling from the TV set. He had a clear plastic bowl-like kind of thing. With a rotating crankshaft grinder on the top. I had never seen something like this before. Was it for cooking? I queried. Not really.
Ace cranked the shaft, around and around, as we both grinded our lips. Then I saw what was inside. Giant rocks of coke, the size of softballs. The lever, on top, attached to a circular blade, which ground the coke into powder. Ace, chewing his teeth, as I was, in anticipation of the outcome. The sun would be up in a bit. Here we were, in the basement, turning boulders of cocaine into pure powder.
This was my dream come true. This was what it was like to really make it.
One time, I recorded in the studio with Ace, in the city, in an extreme snowstorm. A classic winter nor’easter, the drive from New Jersey to Manhattan and back would not be easy.
“Ace, are you sure we’re gonna do this?” I gulped over the phone. It was around Christmas time.
“Of COURSE we are doing this, Bubbe!! It’s time to ROCK!!”
“But it says on the radio that the highways are going to be shut down. They are saying to keep off the roads!! Are you sure we can’t do this tomorrow? Or another time?”
“No, we gotta do it tonight. The studio is booked. I already got a car set up. I’ll see you in there!”
“Okay,” I stammered.
My car at the time was a silver-blue Jaguar XJS. Which was about as heavy as a skateboard. An extremely light vehicle, the Jag was not made for snow or the icy conditions the nor’easter was dumping upon the whole eastern seaboard on this day. But, the studio was booked. I said Fuck it, this is the Ace-man. This is my hero. I would do anything for this dude. Would I die for him? For rock ’n’ roll? Umm, I guess! What a great last memory. Dying for the Ace. This was everything.
I bit my lower lip and grit my teeth. Drove an hour or so up the parkway to Manhattan. The snow/sleet/rain on the way was ridiculous. But I was in a silver-blue Jag, going to rock ’n’ roll. What else matters in life? Of course, nothing. Not even life, really.
I was glad I had made it to the studio in one piece. There was Richie, and a bunch of studio cats, along with the producer. Some tiny studio in the city. We had a bunch of beer, and weed, and almost as much snow as was on the streets outside.
This is rock ’n’ roll.
As the nor’easter continued to dump on the city, we rocked and rolled and partied long into the night. When it time came to leave, in the wee hours of the morning, I looked out the window and was aghast at the conditions I saw. Facing my journey home. I told Ace, “Hey man. There’s no way I can drive in this.”
“What do you want to do, stay?”
“Yes. Just let me crash here in the studio. Till the roads clear. I want to stay here.”
“You can’t. The studio’s going to close. We all gotta go.” And that was that.
Oh my God. But, what’s the worst that could happen? I was a good driver. Even though I was drunk and high, I had to make the trip home. No matter what. I had no choice.
The next hours are among the most scary I can recall in my whole life.
I steered the Jaguar, through the snow, so high on coke, I was like one of those guys on steroids who tries to bend the steering wheel. I white-knuckled it to the point (or so I thought) that my fists were going to break. I clenched my jaw, and chewed my lips to the point of injury. I was by myself. The snow was pummeling the northeast relentlessly. I drove through the city wanting to die. Maybe tonight, I would get my wish.
As I exit the Lincoln Tunnel, already in the car at least an hour, I realize the great mistake I have made. In my twenty years of living outside of New York City, this is the only time I can remember where only one lane on the Garden State Parkway was open. The snow was piled up as high as it could go, on either side of the one open lane. The only other time in my life I have ever seen snow like this, was on tour in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the distance, all you could see was the grim flashing light of the snowplow. There were no cars to be seen hardly anywhere in any direction. Except for the idiot high on blow, and drunk in a silver Jag with no snow tires. That idiot was me.
I fixated my eyes upon the one, endless, snowy lane, and began to cry. I remembered in my coke-induced haze, that if you stay below 55 mph, your tires will not spin out of control on the black ice, and you should be okay. So, let’s do that. I kept my car under 55 mph for the whole drive. This was a long drive. From Manhattan to Red Bank, New Jersey, is about forty-five minutes with no traffic . . . doing 70 mph. Or 75 mph. Driving 55 mph, in the snow, would take excruciating hours. Which it did. I cried the whole way, with my heart jumping out of my chest. This is the last time I will ever do something like this, I swore to Christ, as an exchange for me possibly getting home.
The drive was pure torture. But somehow, I made it close to home. I couldn’t believe it. I had the windshield wipers cranking the snow out of the way. I have been on the road for hours. Out of my mind. Barely seeing a car. But, somehow I was approaching my exit. This is looking good. I was going to make it. I was going to rock ’n’ roll with Ace Frehley, and live to tell the tale. Or so I thought.
As I saw the first sign for my exit, about two miles away, I burst into peals of rapture and joy. My tears turned into laughter. I felt like I cheated death that night. I looked at my speedometer. I was going about 50 miles an hour. The vehicle was in control. I had done it, man!!!!! I had made it home high on coke and drunk on booze. Way to go, rock ’n’ roll!!!!
Dude, Where’s My Car?
I saw the sign for my exit and said, fuck it. I dared to press down on the gas. So excited that this nightmare was over. So excited to be home. The car went from 50 miles an hour, to a little under 60. I came down a hill, on the other side, in the one lane surrounded by snow. And then it happened.
What?
The back of my Jaguar started to sway. Gently, at first. From side to side.
swish
I actually didn’t think it was a big deal at first. Only a couple blocks away from my house? There’s no way I could’ve made it through hours of snow and slush only to crash within walking distance of my home. Or was there?
swish swish
I’ll just slow down the car. Thinking, that’ll straighten it out. Easy peasy!
swish swish swish
But it did not.
swish swish swish swish
Back-and-forth. Into a full 360 loop.
I was now doing 360s, one after the other, on the Garden State Parkway in the snow. I started going aro
und and around, screaming, crushing the steering wheel, fearing for my life. This was it. For sure.
Luckily, there were no cars around me.
Smash!!!!
There is no sound like that of a silver-blue Jaguar, crumpling, into a heavy metal guardrail.
Crinkle
Like a chandelier dropping from a cathedral ceiling, a piece of silver tassel snapping on Christmas Day, Pshhhhhhhhhhhhhhtttttttt goes the ornate vehicle. I imagine the sound of a dump truck, in a collision, would be different than that of a Jaguar.
Luckily, by the grace of God, I hit a guardrail, which are not on the whole of the Garden State Parkway. This could’ve easily happened on another part of the road, where there was no guardrail. Where I could’ve gone spinning off the side, into the woods below. Instead, I smashed the front end of the Jag, somewhat like an accordion. But I was alive.
After the crash, the car was not moving. The engine was off. I looked up, and to my horror, I was now facing the opposite way on the Garden State Parkway. And, for the first time in the early morning, I can now see cars.
Which are headed right towards me.
I turn the key in the ignition. The car refuses to start. Pitter-patter. Nothing was happening. I turn the crank one more time. Then, all of a sudden, the car miraculously starts. With smoke bellowing from under the hood, I loop it around so I am pointing the right way on the parkway. I pressed the gas. I was moving. And crying. This really sucked.
I get to my driveway, somehow. The driveway, unplowed, had at least three feet of snow on it and was impossible to drive onto.
But I had had enough.
I cranked the car to the left, and went as fast as I could. Straight into the snow. Hoping I could move it, with the momentum of the destroyed Jaguar. No such luck. I hit the snowbank, and the poor car went off the side, into the woods below. Hit a tree. Fuck this.
What a long night. I got out of the car, and left it there, smoldering in the snowbank.
18 and Life on Skid Row Page 21
