During his guest appearance on Jay Jay French’s podcast Beyond The Music, renowned producer and engineer Eddie Kramer discussed his career and collaborations with KISS and Jimi Hendrix.
In addition to producing Ace Frehley’s 1978 solo album, Alive II, Love Gun, Rock and Roll Over, KISS Alive!, and Alive III, Kramer also produced KISS’s debut demo.
“At Electric Lady [Studios], I would see Gene [Simmons, bassist] and Paul [Stanley, guitarist, frontman] up and down the hallways, doing their thing,” Kramer recalled of creating the first KISS demo. Their producer, Ron Johnsen, was also, I believe, the manager of the Electric Lady Studios at the time. “Listen, Gene and Paul, they got this idea,” he said when he called me following the Wicked Lester album’s debacle, which ended up in the bloody toilet. Would you do a demo for me? They want to perform as a rock ‘n’ roll band.
“So, one of those memories was simply witnessing Gene, Paul, and Ace enter the studio on the scheduled day. Ace was really thin when he entered the studio. In the Bronx, he was operating a taxi. Additionally, he was so thin that you couldn’t even see him if he turned sideways. But what a sweetheart… Ace was the true essence of who I was. I believe that many people undervalue this extremely talented guitarist.