10,000 Volts

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a live wire. Over on THE ZOO, the hippie and rock and roll biker DJs have "10,000 Volts" by Ace Frehley cranked for the Zoo Freaks, the title cut off the album of the same name. This one hits like a power line on a hot night, a swaggering rocker about a woman who knocks a guy sideways the second he sees her face. Ace used to say he usually started a lyric with the title and worked outward, and he could knock out a whole set of words in half an hour if the idea held together. On this one, Trixter guitarist Steve Brown brought the rhythm guitar part over to the house, and Ace said it blew his mind. They thickened it up, Ace rewrote a big share of the words because he figured he was the better lyricist, and he insisted the tune needed a bridge. Brown asked what he meant. Ace told him it was great, but it needed a bridge. They rewrote it in a day, no drama, and the song was finished.

The track went out as the first single, with a video directed by Alex Kouvatsos, on November 28, 2023, a few months before the album landed on February 23, 2024. Ace picked it as the single after he played rough mixes for the women around him and listened to what they liked. He loved the way the chorus kicked in, that chant of getting hit with ten thousand volts and feeling like he was in space. In a Guitar World visit to his home studio, the handwritten lyrics were still sitting on a music stand by the control desk. He also tied the song straight back to the scare that gave Kiss "Shock Me." On December 12, 1976, at the Lakeland Civic Center in Lakeland, Florida, during the opening number of a Rock and Roll Over show, he touched an ungrounded metal staircase railing and took a jolt he later put at about 220 volts. He fell backward, which he figured saved him from going off the stage, got knocked out, burned his fingertips, and lost feeling in his hand for the rest of the night. The show went on after a delay. Out of that came "Shock Me," his first lead vocal on a Kiss record, sung while he was lying on the studio floor because he was nervous about his voice. Years later he told interviewers that "10,000 Volts" was just a kick-ass rock and roll song that was fun to play, and that he still loved "Shock Me" but might like the new one even better.

The album itself came out of a hookup Ace credited to his fiancée, who told him he had to work with Brown. They had crossed paths over the years, but this time the chemistry stuck. Brown sent over a song with one line about walking on the moon buried in the chorus. Ace, the Spaceman, said that line had to be the hook and the title, so Brown came over and they rebuilt it. For a while they were going to name the whole record Walkin' On The Moon, until "10,000 Volts" came out so strong they switched. Ace told Eddie Trunk he had written and recorded five new songs in six days, which was unheard of for him. He called the finished album one of the best he ever did, right up there with the 1978 solo record everybody still treats as the high-water mark, and he hoped radio DJs would hear more than one hit on it. He gave "10,000 Volts" its live debut on January 25, 2024, at the Grand Theatre in Frankfort, Kentucky. Later he got aggravated when Brown, on the Three Sides of the Coin podcast, was heard saying he had brought about 97 percent of the writing. Ace said that shocked him, that he rewrote choruses and at least half the lyrics on songs Brown brought in, and that the guitar work and the new elements were a joint job. However that split gets told, the record is pure Space Ace: moon walking, a cover of Nadia's "Life of a Stranger" from The Transporter that was his idea, the old demo "Back Into My Arms Again" written with Arthur Stead decades earlier, and "Blinded," which he steered away from a panic-attack idea and toward the perils of artificial intelligence.

Before any of that voltage, he was Paul Daniel Frehley, born in the Bronx on April 27, 1951. His father, Carl, was an electrical engineer who designed transformers that ended up in the rover on the Moon, so Ace liked to say his dad's work was still up there. His mother, Esther, kept a house full of music, and both parents could play piano. The first guitar was a cheap Japanese model, something like twenty-five dollars, and the story he told was simple. He hit an E chord with the amp turned all the way up and it was love at first hearing. He never took a lesson. He learned by sitting with records and copying solos from the players he loved, Hendrix, Page, Beck and the rest, note for note. A birthday electric around age fourteen, a rough Zimgar with bad action according to his brother Charles, pushed him the rest of the way. Friends at DeWitt Clinton and Theodore Roosevelt High started calling him Ace because he was good at lining up dates for a shy drummer in his weekend band. The nickname stuck, and it came in handy later, because there was already a Paul in Kiss.

He dropped out when his band Cathedral started getting paid gigs, then went back for the diploma. After that came the usual Bronx run of short jobs, mail carrier, furniture delivery, messenger, cab driver, liquor-store runs. He played in local groups, including Molimo, which cut about half an album for RCA in 1971. In late 1972 his friend Chris Cassone spotted a Village Voice ad for a lead guitarist with flash and ability, placed by Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss. Ace showed up at 10 East 23rd Street, above the Live Bait Bar, wearing one red sneaker and one orange sneaker. He did not look like much, but the playing got him the job about three weeks later. By January 1973 the band had the name Kiss. Ace drew the double lightning-bolt logo, which Stanley cleaned up, and when the face paint came in he put silver stars around his eyes and became the Spaceman. That Bronx kid with the mismatched shoes and the engineer dad is the same guitarist whose title track is rolling through the Zoo Crew speakers right now. Zoo Freaks who want the rest of the story can start at his official site, Ace Frehley, and follow along on Facebook, Instagram and X. Turn it up. The Spaceman still knows how to light the fuse.