“Watching every move”: Why Ace Frehley thought Eddie Van Halen ripped him off
There isn’t a single 12-year-old kid circa 1975 who didn’t think that Ace Frehley was one of the coolest rock stars in the world.
Although Kiss is far from the most mature version of rock and roll, it’s hard not to look at the guy shooting rockets out of his guitar and playing the tastiest solos in the world and not want to do the same thing when you grow up. Frehley may have been a one-off in rock and roll history, but it’s not like he couldn’t see a fair bit of bands taking influence from him as well.
Granted, how the hell were you supposed to steal from someone that was from another planet? The whole concept of the band made them look like rock and roll superheroes in many respects, so the idea of having someone else with similar makeup becoming one of the biggest stars would never have worked out. If you look at the raw notes he was playing, though, it was easy to parse out where Frehley was getting a lot of his ideas.
A lot of his lick library feels like it’s directly lifted from the Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page school of rock and roll guitar, and while he does put his own stamp on it a lot of the time, it’s easier for people to look at the his technique and draw a straight line between him and the early days of The Yardbirds and Zeppelin.
What mattered more with Kiss was the spectacle, and that resonated with a couple of kids from California looking to make it. The Van Halen brothers had already begun woodshedding their craft when putting together their band Mammoth, but when they changed their name with David Lee Roth onboard, catching the ears of Gene Simmons turned out to be the biggest break they could have asked for.
They even managed to give Kiss a run for their money at times, but Frehley did admit that Eddie was paying a little too much attention to his fingers during a few shows, saying, “Before Van Halen became famous, Gene discovered them. But all I can tell you is, when I was doing my guitar solo at Madison Square Garden before they became famous, Eddie was down in the pit watching every fucking move I made.”
While what Frehley was doing did involve tapping the neck of the guitar, he did admit that he was nowhere close to anything that Van Halen was doing, saying, “Eddie probably got some ideas from me, just like I got ideas from other guitar players. But he perfected it.” And if Frehley indeed did introduce Eddie to the idea of tapping, it didn’t take long for the student to become the master, either.
It could have easily been another piece of showmanship when Frehley played, but no one made the kind of compositions that Eddie did with the technique. Hearing ‘Eruption’ or ‘Spanish Fly’ was enough to confuse every guitar player wondering how the hell a band hired a guitar player with four hands, but what Eddie was doing all came from years of practice rather than any cheap trick.
Because whereas most of Kiss’s show was the kind of spectacle that felt like going to a musical circus half the time, Eddie could produce the same kind of theatrics that he did onstage while sitting next to you with no real problem. Frehley may have claimed to be from another planet, but given how closely Van Halen worked with Kiss in their early days, it’s safe to say that ‘The Spaceman’ witnessed an actual musical alien.
