"GMYH, I'm merely a millennial. I've like heard of this KISS, but what are these solo albums you speak of?" I'm glad you asked, young child. You see, on September 18, 1978, KISS did something completely unheard of: each band member simultaneously released his own solo album. Whether this was brilliant or not, at that point, there were four egos in the band that needed to do their own thing.
They each used different musicians to play on their respective albums. While Gene used a virtual who's who of rock and roll to help him out on his album (including Bob Seger, Cher, Joe Perry, Rick Nielsen, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Donna Summer, Janis Ian, Helen Reddy, and established session musicians Elliott Randall and Allan Schwartzberg), and even Paul and Peter had some pretty established musicians featured on at least a few of the tracks on their albums (Carmine Appice and Bob Kulick for Paul, and Steve Lukather, Elliott Randall, and Allan Schwartzberg for Peter), Ace basically only used two other musicians, who were relatively unknown at the time. Obviously, Ace played all guitar parts on all of the songs, but he also played bass on all but three of the songs. All of the songs are backed by session drummer Anton Fig, and three songs are backed by bassist Will Lee, both of whom would go on to be longtime members of David Letterman's Late Show band. Fig also played some uncredited drum parts on a couple later KISS albums.
The albums range from meh (Peter) to excellent (Ace), although each album eventually went platinum. Despite what Gene and Paul might say, Ace's solo album is inarguably the best of the bunch. It went platinum first and is the highest-selling of the four solo albums.
On top of that, this is probably my favorite KISS album, to the extent you can consider it a KISS album, since Ace is the only member of the band to play on it. Either way, it's a really good hard rock album and proved that Ace had come into his own in all three phases (singing, guitar playing, and songwriting). What's crazy is that, up to this point, he had only sung lead on one KISS song ("Shock Me"), so this really was Ace's chance to be front and center for the first time in his career.
There is not a bad song on the album. All of the songs are hard-hitting rock songs, which certainly cannot be said for the other three members' albums. This album represents the direction KISS should have gone, rather than the band's ill-fated venture into disco-rock and cheesy late-'70s/early '80s soft rock that plagued their next few albums (thanks, Gene and Paul). The unfortunate side effect of that is that Ace saw the success of his solo album as an indicator that he didn't need KISS anymore, so he left the band a few years later.
The album reached #26 on the Billboard album charts, and "New York Groove" was a Top 15 hit in the U.S., going to #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 -- which was higher-charting than all but one of KISS's songs to that point ("Beth" hit #7 in 1976).
And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of my greatest post-college weekends in Bloomington was for my golden birthday, when I dressed up as Ace Frehley (along with two others who dressed up as Paul and Gene) and pretty much didn't pay for a drink the whole night. Ace Frehley may have blacked out that night.
Favorite song from Side 1: "Rip It Out"
"Rip It Out" is the first track on the album, and it sets the hard-rocking tone for the entire album. The song is a fantastic hard rock song, with a driving beat and a message of scorned love to the narrator's former mate.
Favorite song from Side 2: "I'm In Need of Love"
I think this was the first song I ever heard off of this album, on Pandora when it was in its infancy, and it's no wonder it piqued my interest. The song is spacey, which make sense give the Space Ace persona. There are some weird guitar effects that make this song very cool.
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