The Night Jimmy Page and Ace Frehley Broke Every Rule in a New York Studio D

The night Jimmy Paige and Ace Freilley broke every rule in a New York studio. Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village had been built by Jimmyi Hendris in 1970 in the basement of a building that had previously housed a nightclub. and it carried in its walls and its infrastructure and its particular quality of soundproofed silence the specific atmosphere of a place where music had been made seriously and at a high level for long enough that the seriousness had entered the material itself. Hris had died before he could use the studios he had spent his own money building. And in the years since, the studios had been used by the musicians who understood what they were in the same way that Hrix had understood what he wanted them to be, which was not a commercial operation optimized for throughput, but a space where the music could happen at the pace and in the manner that the music

required. In October of 1977, Electric Lady had two sessions running simultaneously on a Thursday night that had begun separately and would by 3:00 in the morning become something that neither session had planned for and that neither of the two musicians involved would speak about clearly for decades afterward.

Studio A contained Jimmy Page. He was there without a band and without a producer, which was how he was spending a portion of the time between Led Zeppelin’s American tour and whatever came next. The tour had ended and what followed the end of a tour was a particular kind of silence that Jimmy had learned over the years to use rather than simply endure.

He came to studios, he brought instruments, he played without agenda, without the framework of what a recording was supposed to produce. simply to find out what was in his hands when there was nothing required of them. The engineer for the night in studio A was Danny K, who was 28 years old and had been working at Electric Lady for 3 years.

Long enough to have developed the specific competence that the studio required and long enough to have understood that the most important skill the work demanded was knowing when not to interfere. He set up the room the way Jimmy wanted it, which was simple to the point of austerity.

And he sat at the console and attended to what was in front of him. Jimmy was playing acoustic. He had the 1959 Les Paul with him, which was not an acoustic instrument, but he was not playing it through the amplifier. He was playing it unplugged. The way you play an instrument when the sound you are looking for is between the string and the body of the guitar.

the sound before amplification, before projection, before the electricity that transforms what the instrument does into something that can fill a room of 15,000 people. He was looking for something smaller than that, something that was just the note, just the wood, just the resonance of the string against the frets and the hollow of the body.

He had been playing for about an hour when he heard the knock. In studio B, 30 feet down the corridor on the same floor. Ace Freilley had been working on his solo album since 10:00 that evening. The four members of Kiss had been assigned separate solo albums to be released simultaneously in 1978, which was a commercial decision that the band’s management and label had arrived at for their own reasons and which had produced in each of the four members a particular kind of opportunity and a particular kind of anxiety. The opportunity was to make music without the constraints of the band’s agreed aesthetic. The anxiety was the question of what that music would be. Ace had been in Kiss since the beginning. He was the space ace, the alien character with the silver makeup and the smoking guitar. The member whose solos were theatrical events rather than purely musical ones. The guitarist who played

in a way that served the performance first and the music second. This had always been, he understood, the point of kiss. The music was in service of the spectacle and the spectacle was spectacular and the success of the spectacle had been enormous and he had been part of all of it since 1972. But in Studio B on a Thursday night in October, without Jean Simmons and Paul Stanley and Peter Chris, without the makeup and the platform boots and the machinery of a KISS production, Ace Freilley was discovering that he was not entirely sure what he wanted to do with the opportunity he had been given. He was Adam Curtsman from the South Bronx, which was who he had been before he became Ace Freilley. And what Adam Curtsman from the South Bronx wanted to do with a guitar had not always been what the space ace had been required to do with one. He had finished a session around 1:30 and had stepped into the

corridor for a cigarette. The corridor at Electric Lady was narrow and low ceiling, painted the specific cream color that institutional interiors accumulate when they have been painted and repainted over many years. The fluorescent lights were the kind that provided illumination without warmth. There was a coffee machine at the far end that dispensed something approximating coffee when prompted.

It was not glamorous. The music happened inside the rooms, and the corridor was simply the space between the rooms, and Ace had walked it enough times that evening that he had stopped seeing it. He stopped now, not because of anything visible, because of something audible. It was coming from studio A.

The door was not fully closed and through the gap came a sound that Ace needed a moment to locate because it was not the sound he expected from a recording studio. It was the sound of an acoustic instrument unplugged the natural resonance of strings on wood. And whoever was playing it was playing something that had no obvious category.

Not a song, not a riff, not the kind of thing you played when you were warming up. something that moved between things without landing on any of them. That changed direction when the direction might have become predictable. That seemed to be looking for something rather than presenting something.

Ace stood in the corridor with his cigarette and listened. He had grown up listening to blues. Before Kiss, before the Bronx, before the Space Ace, there had been the records, Clapton and Cream, Beck and Paige and the Yard Birds, Hrix, all the guitarists who had taken the American Blues and made it into something that could fill arenas while keeping the feeling that had made it true in the first place.

That feeling was what he heard coming through the gap in Studio A’s door. Not the arena version, the original, the thing underneath. He stood in the corridor for several minutes. He had not intended to stand there and he had no particular intention about how much longer he would stand there.

He was simply unable to leave. Danny K at the console noticed the figure in the doorway, he said quietly without interrupting whatever Jimmy was doing. Someone in the hallway. Jimmy played two more bars. Then his hands went still on the strings. He looked at the door. Ace knocked once lightly. The knock of someone who is aware that what they are interrupting may be more important than the interruption. Come in, Jimmy said.

The door opened. Ace Freely stood in the doorway of Studio A in jeans and a leather jacket without the silver makeup that made him the space ace and without anything else that identified him as the guitarist of one of the most commercially successful bands in America. He was simply a man in a corridor who had been standing outside a door listening to something he could not walk away from. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I heard you playing. I should have.” “Come in,” Jimmy said again. Ace came in. He looked at the room, which had the simplicity of a space that has been arranged around a single purpose. The acoustic guitar on Jimmy’s knee and the console that Dany was managing and not much else.

He looked at the guitar, which was not plugged in. He looked at Jimmy. You’re playing acoustic, he said. Yes. Why? Jimmy looked at the guitar in his hands. Sometimes amplification enlarges the sound rather than the music. He said, “They’re not the same thing.” Ace looked at him for a moment. “No,” he said. “They’re not.

” He sat in the chair that was against the wall, the chair that existed for exactly this kind of moment, the visitor’s chair, and Dany brought two cups of something from the machine at the end of the corridor and set them on the console and returned to his seat. They talked about guitar, not about touring or records or bands or any of the infrastructure that surrounded the playing of guitar, but about the instrument itself and the specific quality of the relationship between a player and what the instrument does when the player has been playing it for long enough that the relationship has become something other than a skill. Ace said, “In Kiss, everything is planned. every solo, every effect, what the smoke does and when the guitar smokes and where I stand and what face I make, it all serves the show and the show is real.

Jimmy said, “The show is very real.” Ace said, “I’m not complaining about it, but there’s a difference between playing the show and playing the guitar.” “Yes, I’ve been in there all night trying to figure out what I play when it’s not for the show.” Jimmy looked at him. What did you find? Ace was quiet for a moment.

That I don’t entirely know yet. That’s the right answer, Jimmy said. Ace looked at him. Why? Because if you already knew, you wouldn’t need to find out. The not knowing is where it lives. The music is always in the territory you haven’t been to yet. Ace turned this over. In the corridor, nobody moved.

Dany at the console had the specific stillness of someone who has understood that what is happening in the room does not require his participation and might be compromised by it. I heard what you were playing. Ace said before I knocked. What was it? I don’t know, Jimmy said. I was looking for something.

Did you find it? Not yet. Ace reached over and picked up the guitar that was leaning against the wall. the spare that Jimmy had brought and that nobody had touched. He held it. He looked at it. He said, “Can I?” Jimmy looked at him. “Play,” he said. What happened in the next 2 hours was the kind of thing that the people who are present for it describe afterward with the specific vocabulary of inadequacy.

The vocabulary that people reach for when what they witnessed did not fit the available categories. Danny Kay, who was the only other person in the room, would describe it in various interviews across the following decades. Each time arriving at the same conclusion, which was that he did not have the words for it, and that the words he had were insufficient to what had actually happened. Ace began.

He played the way he played when there was no show to serve, which was not the way the Space Ace played. Because the space ace was a character and a character’s playing serves the character. But the way Adam Curtsman played, which was the playing of someone who had learned guitar from records and from the specific emotional content of what those records communicated when he was 15 years old in the South Bronx, and the music was the thing that made most sense about the world. Jimmy listened for a while.

Then his hands moved on the strings of his guitar. Not the acoustic guitar that had been playing when Ace heard him from the corridor, but the electric that he picked up without plugging it in. And what he played was a response rather than a parallel. The specific way that a musician who has been listening to another musician responds when what they have been listening to has asked something that deserves an answer.

The conversation between the two guitars was not in a language that had words. It moved through things that both players knew and things that neither of them knew they knew until the playing found them. It was not blues in any recognizable form. And it was not the theatrical rock that Ace had been working in for 5 years.

And it was not the Led Zeppelin music that Jimmy had been making since 1968. It was what was underneath all of those things. The place where all of those things came from before any of them had names. Danny K had been at the console when it started. At some point in the first 10 minutes, without making a decision he could afterward identify as a decision, he began recording.

He would say in a 2015 interview, “I know I should have asked. I know they didn’t authorize it, but I also know that if I had asked, the asking would have interrupted something that was not going to wait while we discussed it. I made a choice. I don’t regret it. I regret everything that came after, but not the recording itself.

The recording lasted 93 minutes. At some point around the 40th minute, Ace plugged in the guitar. Danny turned down the monitors so the volume in the room stayed manageable and adjusted the levels without the adjustment being audible. Jimmy switched to a different guitar, the acoustic less Paul, playing it still unplugged.

the sound of it a whisper under AC’s amplified tone present but not competing the specific quality of that combination which should by any conventional understanding have been unbalanced an amplified electric guitar and an unamplified acoustic was the thing that Dany described most often when he spoke about it afterward he said the acoustic was not drowned out he said it was more audible for the contrast the way a quiet voice in a quiet room is more audible than the same quiet voice in a noisy one. At 3:30, the music stopped, not because they had finished, but because the thing had arrived at its natural conclusion, the point where continuing would have been repetition rather than development. Both men sat with the guitars in their laps for a long moment. The room had the specific silence of a space that has been full of sound and is now adjusting to its

absence. That was something, Ace said. His voice had a quality it had not had when he arrived. The quality of someone who has been somewhere they did not expect to go and is still in the process of returning. Yes, Jimmy said. What do we do with it? Jimmy looked at the console where Dany was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, looking at neither of them. Dany.

Jimmy said. I recorded it. Dany said he did not apologize. He had the specific quality of someone who knows they may have done something wrong and who has decided that the wrong was worth doing. All of it. I can give you each a copy. Ace looked at Jimmy. Jimmy looked at Ace.

Some kind of exchange passed between them that had less to do with what either of them said than with what they each understood about the situation they were in, which was that what had happened in the room in the last 93 minutes was attached to the contracts they each had with the labels they were each signed to, and that those contracts did not permit what the recording contained, and that the recording, regardless of its quality, existed in territory that the industry would not allow to remain uncomplicated.

Dany made three copies, one for Jimmy, one for Ace, one that he kept for reasons he described in the 2015 interview as entirely personal, though he declined to elaborate on what the personal reasons were. The Master Tape was gone by the following morning. Dany arrived to find that it had been removed from the console where he had left it the previous night.

The studio security was such that access to the floor where studios A and B were located was not restricted to the people who were actively recording there. And Atlantic Records had had a session running in studio C on the same floor until approximately midnight. And the executive who was supervising that session had been seen in the corridor outside studio A during the evening by a junior engineer who mentioned it afterward and was not asked any follow-up questions.

The executive’s name was not something Dany would give in his 2015 interview. He said only that the person had left Atlantic Records 6 months after that October and had started his own production company in Los Angeles with Capital whose source was not publicly explained.

Ace Freilley spoke about the evening once in 2019 in an interview conducted in connection with his memoir. The interviewer asked whether there was a collaboration he had been part of that the public didn’t know about. Ace was quiet for a moment. He said, “One night in New York, Electric Lady, 1977, he said he had played with someone he had no business being in the same room with in terms of the labels and the contracts and all of that, and that what they had made was something he still thought about.

” He said he had a cassette at home somewhere. He declined to say whether he had ever played it back. Jimmy Paige in a 1990 interview was asked about Ace Freilley and whether he thought Kiss received the critical recognition they deserved. He said Ace is a good guitarist. The interviewer asked when he had formed that view.

He said one night at Electric Lady. The interviewer asked whether they had played together. Jimmy said sometimes things happen in studios. He said this was all he was going to say. Danny Kay gave his 2015 interview to a music journalist who had been pursuing him for 3 years.

He was 66 years old and in poor health. And he gave the interview with the deliberateness of someone who has decided that certain things should be said before the opportunity to say them has passed. He said, “I recorded 93 minutes of Jimmy Paige and Ace Freilley playing together in Studio A at Electric Lady Studios in October of 1977.

He said it was the finest thing he had heard in 30 years of recording sessions. He said the master tape was gone the next morning and he had no definitive account of where it went. He said he still had a cassette, though the quality was what cassettes recorded from a studio tape were, which was not excellent.

He said he had played it three times in 38 years. He said the third time was 2 weeks before the interview. He said, “You’d think after all this time it would lose something. That memory makes things better than they were, but it’s not better in my memory than it is on the tape. The tape is better, which is the only time in my experience that reality has exceeded the way I remembered it.

” He was asked whether he thought the recording would ever surface. He said he didn’t know. He said the person he believed had the master tape had died in 2012. He said the estate had been sold. He said he had tried once to locate the recording through the estate and had been told that nothing matching the description had been found among the possessions.

He said this meant either that the recording had been destroyed or that it was somewhere he had not looked or that the person who had told him it had not been found was not telling the truth. He said, “I’m not in a position to know which of those it is, but I know the tape existed.

I made it and I know what was on it, and if it’s somewhere, it’s the best thing neither of those men ever released. And if it’s gone, it went without anyone outside that room ever hearing what happened.” He paused. The interviewer waited. He said, “There’s a thing that happens sometimes in recording.

You’re at the console and something is occurring in the room that is different from everything else you’ve heard. Different in a way that you don’t have the vocabulary for. The musicians are doing something that doesn’t have a name yet. And you’re sitting there with your hands on the levels and you understand that you’re the only witness to something that the world doesn’t know about and you don’t know if the world is ever going to know about it.

That’s what that night was. two guitarists in a room without a reason to be there together, without a plan, without anything between them and the music except the music. And what came out was something I couldn’t have described in advance and couldn’t fully describe afterward. He was quiet for a moment.

Somewhere there is a cassette with 93 minutes on it. The quality is not good. You’d hear the room as much as the music, but you’d hear the music. And if you heard the music, you’d understand why I’ve spent 38 years not being able to describe it. That’s all I can tell you. It was real. And it was 93 minutes long.

And it happened in Studio A at Electric Lady in October 1977. And if it’s lost, it’s lost. But it was real. He died in 2018. The cassette has not been located. Somewhere in a city, in a house or a collection or a storage unit or the bottom of a box that has not been opened in 20 years, there may be a cassette with two labels.

One would say something like Studio A, Electric Lady, October 1977. The other would say nothing or would say something that means nothing to anyone who does not know what it is. If you found it, you would not know what you had. You would put it in a player and you would hear through the degraded quality of magnetic tape that has been waiting for a long time.

Two guitars in a room, one amplified, one not, playing together in a way that should not work and that works completely. You would understand when you heard it that something had happened that October night that the people who were there tried to describe for the rest of their lives and could not. and you would understand why they tried and why they failed and why the trying and the failing together are the closest anyone can get to what it actually was.

It was two guitarists in a room and 93 minutes and no one telling them what to do. And whatever it was, it was