It’s always a bit strange when a famous person dies, and you realize that you have a unique personal connection to him. I thought of that recently when “Ace” (Paul Daniel) Frehley died on October 16. Frehley was the lead guitarist for the iconic rock band Kiss — and I once owned an electric guitar that he once almost owned.
OK, that’s going to take some explaining.
Let’s go back about 25 years, to the day I went into a music shop, hoping to sell a black Les Paul electric guitar that I owned.
It was a guitar I never actually wanted in the first place. I already had an electric guitar, but I didn’t have a case for it, and because I was in a blues band that played regularly in unruly bars, I thought that carrying my guitar naked to every gig was courting disaster.
I found a great guitar case at a resale shop, but inside it was a beat-up black Les Paul style electric guitar that I didn’t want or need. I asked if I could buy the case alone.
“No, sorry,” the man said. “Either both or nothing.”
But he was asking only seventy bucks for the guitar and case together, and I figured that the case was worth that much alone. At least it was to me. So I bought them both.
It wasn’t an original Gibson Les Paul guitar, which would have been valuable, just a cheaper knock-off. It looked great, so I tried it out to see if I might like it, but it didn’t play well. It sounded fine when I played chords near the headstock at the end of the neck, but when I played anything farther up the neck, it sounded horrible. It’s a thing called “intonation,” and it would cost more to fix it than the guitar was worth.
In short, it was a guitar worth every bit of seventy bucks — if you threw in a nice case.
But I thought that somebody might be willing to fiddle around with the project, so I brought the guitar to a music shop I frequented often, hoping to sell it for any amount they might offer.
“Oh, man, I wish you had brought this in last week,” the man said as he examined the guitar.
“Why?” I asked. “What was so special about last week?”
He told me that Kiss was in town as part of a nationwide tour, and their crew was checking with local music shops, looking for a cheap black Les Paul guitar — exactly like mine sitting on the counter in front of us — to use for one of their Chicago shows.
“But Kiss would never use this guitar,” I told him. “It’s a knock-off. And it’s lousy. The intonation is all wrong.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “They smash a black Les Paul at the end of the last song of every show. It’s a prop to them, and the cheaper the better. This is exactly what they were looking for.”
It was a tradition that began in 1975, when Paul Stanley closed a show by smashing his guitar at the end of the song “Black Diamond.” The crowd went wild, and it became a regular part of the act, with either Stanley or Frehley — or both — doing the demolition. To date, they have smashed more than 1,700 of them, and fans pay who-knows-how-much for the shattered remains to mount on the wall of their man-cave.
And some of that adored dilapidation could have been mine, if I hadn’t been a week late.
“Can you contact them?” I asked the man, excited about the idea that Paul Stanley or Ace Frehley might be playing my guitar tonight or tomorrow night — even if only briefly before smashing it to flinders.
“They’ve moved on,” he said. “They’re sniffing around for crappy guitars in some other city today.”
But it turns out that a crappy guitar still has a bit of value in a busy music shop, if for no other purpose than as a decoration, or for parts to salvage, or as a reclamation project for a bored guitar technician, so he offered me seventy bucks for the guitar, then and there.
I sold it to him, happy that I had broken even in the end. I even came away with a free guitar case, which was all that I really wanted in the first place.
But still, how cool would it have been if I had shown up with my guitar at his shop the week before! What a great story to tell my musician friends: “Yeah, I used to have a nice little black Les Paul, but Ace Frehley took it from me and busted it up onstage in Chicago to 20,000 screaming Kiss fans. You can watch my guitar die in a video I found online.”
So close. So close.
So this is my story about how close I came to actually having a worthwhile story to tell: I once owned a guitar that the late great Ace Frehley almost owned, if it weren’t for bad timing.
I know it’s not much of a story, but it’s all I’ve got.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
