The artist Slash called the last 1970s guitar hero: “He’s the real deal”
There have been precious few musicians who are able to establish a vibe as well as Slash can within a few seconds of playing guitar.
Despite being one of the most silent stars of his generation, hearing those bluesy bends against that mane of curly hair and top hat is forever going to be etched into the minds of kids whose lives were set on fire when they first heard tunes like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. But for all of the showmanship that went into every single lick he played, Slash never considered himself someone who needed to go down in rock and roll legend.
He was merely a student of the kind of rock guitarists that came before him, and when you listen to the way he plays, you can really hear why. Every now and again, there will be sections of his songs that are indebted to the blues, and no matter how many times he puts his own stamp on a record, you can hear pieces of everyone from Eric Clapton to Joe Perry to Jeff Beck in pieces of his solos.
That is, if all of those guitarists had a more punk-rock ethos about them. Slash was never afraid to push the energy a couple of notches too far whenever he played, and his stage persona might as well have been the modern incarnation of Johnny Thunders with a few more lessons under his belt. But even with all that energy, Slash felt that some artists were trying a little bit too hard to get attention.
Because while the young guitarist did eventually try out for the guitar slot in Kiss, he wasn’t exactly their biggest fan most of the time. Rock and roll was all about the music as far as he was concerned, and once the theatrics and the face makeup became their entire image, it was hard to look at them as anything but comic book caricatures of what rock stars were supposed to look like.
If there was one saving grace in the mix, though, it was Ace Frehley. Compared to Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons writing a majority of the songs, Frehley was the maverick punk-rock spirit of the group that never bothered to take himself too seriously. All he wanted to do was rock out, and the image of him playing his guitar until smoke bellowed out of it was what really struck a nerve once Slash saw him.
There were plenty of great rock guitarists from his youth, but Slash felt that Frehley was one of the true originals who stayed true to himself throughout his career, saying at the time of his death, “I’ve recorded with him a couple of times, and I’ve gotten on stage with him a couple of times. He’s the real deal, one of the great ’70s rock guitar heroes, one of the last of them, anyway. It’s sad that he isn’t here. I haven’t even fully digested that yet.”
While guitarists like Jimmy Page are still around doing good work, Frehley was the kind of artist who never seemed to stop being inspired. He was nowhere near the same level as Kiss was during his solo career, but even when he came back to the band decades after the fact on the record Psycho Circus, ‘Into the Void’ was exactly the kind of heavy cut that the band had been missing for all those years.
It’s easy to mock the original version of Kiss for being nothing but a bunch of guys in stage makeup playing mediocre rock music, but Frehley was always the one who gave them a bit of an edge. Not every kid was going to be wearing massive platform heels and watch their guitar soar into the sky at the end of one of their solos, but that spark that Frehley gave kids is what made people fall in love with the instrument for life.
