ACE FREHLEY
NAVIGATING WITH THE SPACEMAN
How was it working with different engineers on various parts of the record?
Ace with his doubleneck tracking “Fractured Quantum.” Photo by Rich Tozzoli.
I met Anton around the time I was putting songs
together for my first solo album when I was with
Kiss. He had only been in the country for a few
years, because he’d grown up in Cape Town,
South Africa, and had been around that amazing beat his whole life. Eddie Kramer heard his
demos and asked if he wanted to work with me.
Ironically, I had another friend, Larry Russell, who
also heard Anton play and came to me independently and said he had a great drummer for me.
To me, that’s karma, so I jumped at the chance
to jam with him. We’ve been close friends ever
since. The greatest things about Anton are his
fills and the space he leaves. He doesn’t try to
fill up everything, and I really like the fact that he
plays slightly behind the beat, à la John Bonham.
A lot of drummers play on the beat, and when
they get excited and the adrenaline is pumping
they play ahead of the beat, which gives some
songs a nervous feel. I like to have a relaxed feel,
and Anton always holds the song back with a
solid rhythm. Me and Anton have been playing
so long together we almost have this telepathic
communication, where I’ll think something and
he’ll do it, or I’ll just look at him and he’ll know
what I’m thinking. Things come together so
quickly, and it’s just a joy to work with him.
bass player and added a lot to these songs, as
did Anton Fig. Then we moved up to Ace In
The Hole Studios, and it was a whole different
mix. Derek Hawkins, who plays guitar with me,
helped a lot when we started tracking there.
He helped me think through a lot of the parts,
and he showed me the dropped-D tuning for
“Outer Space.” Derek also did the slide runs on
that song, which sound great. He laid down the
original bed track of that song and really helped
with it. Scot Coogan, who also plays drums with
me live, sang background on “Pain in the Neck.”
He really helped me with “Sister,” which he also
played drums on and sang on. Scotty is more of a
live drummer, and he really bought that track up.
Sometimes you liked to track in the control room and sometimes in front of the
amps. Why?
Well, you play differently when you’re standing
in front of an amp and are bombarded with
the sound, especially if it’s loud. It’s great, but
sometimes you struggle with hearing the track
in the headphones. Actually, sometimes I don’t
care if I can hear the track, as long as I can hear
the beat. But, most of the solos I chose to track
in the control room, because I wanted to hear
what was going into the computer. It’s a little
less insane, too. There are advantages to standing with the amp, but there are advantages to
sitting in the control room, if you know that what
you hear through the speakers is the real sound.
When you’re out in the room, you’re not exactly
sure what the recorded sound will be.
The basic tracks were recorded at my live bassist Anthony Esposito’s Schoolhouse Studios on
27th Street in New York. It’s really live feeling
in there, and Jay Messina did those tracks.
Working with Jay is always great, because I’ve
done so many projects with him, going back to
Destroyer and so on. He always adds something
with the way he mikes things, and his room
miking technique with drums gives you more
flexibility when you’re mixing later on. So that
was a great way to kick off the album. Then I
moved everything up to my studio in New York,
which is a different room sound, with different
gear and so on. That’s when I started working
with you and Alex Salzman and Tim Hatfield. All
of you guys added something special. When it
came to tracking guitar solos, I thought working with you was probably the most exciting,
because when I started playing great solos
and getting great sounds it made you excited,
which would make me more excited! It was a
good marriage there, and you kept pushing me
to do more takes. Those were probably some of
my best solos. Marty Frederiksen also mixed the
record and did some engineering, in addition
to playing bass and singing backgrounds on
“Fox On The Run.” He really helped the guitar
parts breathe better. But everybody did a great
job. I learned so much by watching you guys
on Pro Tools. It’s the best education I could
have gotten. It’s not only a good feeling to be
more knowledgeable now, but it also helps me
because now when I go into a studio with an
engineer I’ve never worked with before, I know
whether they’re doing it right or not! When I
think about editing, say back with Eddie Kramer
and Bob Ezrin, it was all on two-inch tape. We’d
have to slice the tape and put it back together
to see if it worked. If it wasn’t cut exactly where
we wanted, we’d end up with little slices of tape
all over the machine. It was such a nightmare.
Now, it’s amazing. I really appreciate how great
it is to edit with programs like Pro Tools.
You recorded some tracks on the record by
yourself, too, right?
You used some of the players in your live
band on the record as well, didn’t you?
Yes. When we first started tracking at
Schoolhouse Studios, Anthony was a big part
of putting this all together. I developed a lot
of these songs with him. He’s a real strong
On “A Little Below the Angels,” I actually
didn’t like my original vocal. I redid them
because I felt like I was singing with almost
a country twang. The more I thought about
it, the more I wanted to change it, so I took
the AKG mic one night at 5 a.m. and ran it
through an Avalon preamp—I actually engi-
neered it myself. It came out very natural and
not pushed, because I was really relaxed. I
