The Coventry December 21, 1973.
Photo by Rik Fox
When Ace got the advance money from Casablanca he wasted little time and bought a used Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, most probably a 1973 model, at Manny's Music on 48th Street in Manhattan. The main reason it seems likely that it was used is that the Deluxe was modified for humbuckers and the way the neck cavity was routed to accommodate the full-size humbucker is a professional job, one that Ace wouldn't have done himself. (We'll see his slightly hamfisted handiwork shortly.) Despite what Ace may have said over the years the Les Paul Deluxe was not used to record the first album, that job was handled by his Ovation Breadwinner. Ace bought the Deluxe some time in December and the first time it shows up are for the "farewell to the clubs" shows at the Coventry.
Even though the Deluxe was something Ace had dreamed of he apparently wasn't quite happy with it. Despite having played the Ovation Breadwinner for the past six months, a bolt-on instrument which had a sizeable heel, Ace doesn't seem to have liked the heel of his new Deluxe. We don't know quite when he starts but when the band makes its professional debut on New Years eve he has taken a chunk out of the heel of the guitar. Look closely at the photo below and you'll see the naked wood where he had carved the heel.
Just a couple of days later when Aucoin arranged a showcase at Fillmore East Ace had continued his modifications. Several of the photos show a large section of naked wood where the heel used to be, a much larger section that seen in the New Years photos above.
Luckily for the Deluxe Ace settled on a re-shaping of the heel not long thereafter. When the band returned to the stage on January 26 the carved section had been finished (poorly as we shall see). Ace removed a lot of wood from the back of the instrument, so much so that it is a wonder that it endured life on the road for another two-and-a-half years before it was retired. Just compare the original look of the heel of a 1973 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe to the photo from St. Louis below. In later years (2015) Ace has claimed that he carved the heel using a screwdriver which seems unlikely even by his standards of mutilating instruments.
Before we look at the many small variations the Deluxe would "suffer" over the next two years, let's look at what the original instrument Ace got was actually like. The Deluxe had a mahogany body and a mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard. It had a pancake body—the practice of having a thin layer of maple between two slabs of mahogany—to be able to use less thick slabs of mahogany and reduce cost. This is seen in numerous photos of Ace's Deluxe over the years, one of them seen below. The original pickups had been mini-humbuckers but Ace's Deluxe had been routed for full-size humbuckers. We don't know what these "original" humbuckers were but it's a reasonable guess that they were Gibson PAF humbuckers. As noted before the original owner most probably had this modification done professionally since the routing had the neck pickup placed right against the end of the fingerboard which necessitated that the pickup ring was cut. The ridiculously awesome closeup below shows this in amazing detail.
Two more details that will become relevant as we move forward. The Deluxe originally had no binding on the headstock and it had perloid Kluson double-ring tuners. Both of these details can be seen in the photos below and in this closeup of a different 1973 Les Paul Deluxe.
With the heel carved to his satisfaction, Ace kept the Deluxe in more or less the same condition for the first half of 1974. The only part of the guitar that would go through any changes was the headstock. Let's look at the simple stuff first. Some time between the taping of In Concert in late February and the band's return to the Academy of Music in late March, Ace added a small star decal to the headstock. This would stay on the Deluxe until it was retired and allows us to distinguish this original Deluxe from a later addition to the arsenal. (There is a much better photo of the star decal placement further down.)
The second change also affected the headstock and it's slightly more subtle (and variable). Ace wanted a Les Paul Custom, possibly influenced by the black three-pickup Les Paul Custom Eric Clapton played. That was the look he wanted and later in his career he would transition to Customs and never look back. But in late 1973 he couldn't afford a Les Paul Custom so he "made do" with the Les Paul Deluxe. But he could try to make that Deluxe look more like a Custom and the simplest way to do that was to fake some binding on the headstock. Below we see how the Deluxe headstock looked initially.
Some time between January 8 and January 26, Ace set out to carve away at the outline of the headstock to create a faux binding look. (I have this image in my head of how he was carving the heel and suddenly thought, "Hey! I can do this on the headstock too!") Looking at the photos below and comparing them to the ones above you can see that there is a light-ish outline on the headstock. It doesn't look like actual binding but rather like exposed wood, one can compare the two in the photo from Long Beach.
The problem with this headstock binding modification is that it's hard to spot as it looks very different depending on the lighting conditions. Case in point are the two photos below. These are both taken by Charlie Auringer during the same show and one can pick and choose which one to focus on to argue for or against the prescence of the faux headstock binding.
There are some later photos that might possibly suggest that Ace possibly "colored" the faux binding with a silver pen or something similar but I don't think the evidence is strong enough to say either way. Pending better photos I'll leave that possibility aside. This basic look of the Deluxe, with star decal, faux binding, chrome pickup covers, and the original pickguard is the one we see throughout the spring and summer 1974. The examples below cover this period nicely.
We don't know exactly when the next modification of the Deluxe happens but it's some time between July 18 and September 16. Ace simply removed the original pickguard and replaced the pickups. Since the humbuckers in the Deluxe were there when Ace bought it we don't know what they were but an educated guess is that they were regular Gibson PAFs. In September 1974 Ace removed those and put in DiMarzio Super Distorsion pickup (DP100) in the bridge position and probably a DiMarzio PAF (DP103) in the neck position.
Now, this isn't an actual modification to the Deluxe but it happens so we might as well cover it. Some time in late October or very early November Ace starts stringing differently. The available photos from October generally don't show much detail and don't have enough clarity to show whether this change appears earlier, but Bill Parson's shot from November 7 shows that, quite unlike earlier in the year, Ace has started top-wrapping his strings.
Early November also saw a couple of other modifications. Buckle up, because now things really start happening. Up until late October Ace had used the original strap buttons and the last good look at that is from East Lansing on October 21. By November 7 in St. Louis he had the strap button relocated to the back of the heel as seen in the photo below. Look closely at that November 7 photo and you'll see the hole where the original strap button was screwed in.
Mid-October also saw the addition of Ace's first special effect. I say mid-October but I actually think this was added earlier. I think there is something on the back of the headstock in both the September 28 and October 4 photos below but it doesn't really get incontrovertible until October 21. On the back of the headstock are two small sheet metal u-shaped spring clips. As is usually the case these are very hard to spot. First, Ace has to have his back turned to the photographer and second, the focus on the headstock has to be at least decent. For obvious reasons most photographers will not focus on the back of the headstock of a guitar.
So what were those spring clips for? Ace's "rocket launcher". Photos of this contraption are even more scarce. The same problems noted above apply but these are compounded by the fact that this part was only added for a specific part of the show. So far I've only seen the "rocket launcher" actually in place in one set of photos, the ones shown below. That is a pretty serious contraption in the first photo and if you look closely at the other two photos you can see how wide the diameter of the "rocket launcher" tube was. (You can kind of see the effect during Ace's guitar solo from the Winterland show.)
As if all this wasn't enough, in late December 1974 Ace added a little quirk. Again, this isn't exactly a modification of the guitar as such—but then again, the same can be said about the "rocket launcher"—it was, however, an interesting detail. When KISS played the National Guard Armory in La Porte, Indiana, Ace availed himself of a Coast Guard bumber sticker and stuck it on the back of his Deluxe. Since KISS had a couple of choreographed moves where Ace faced "away" from his side of the stage, if the photographer had the right spot in the photo pit they could often capture the back of Ace's guitar. Consequently we have a decent amount of photos of when the bumper sticker was on there.
The bumper sticker remained on the Deluxe into the new year but only stayed on until January 19. After that it is nowhere to be seen. (I should say that "nowhhere to be seen" just means that the photos that are available to me from the few shows in February don't really show the back of the Deluxe well enough to say whether or not the bumper sticker was still there.) As an aside, take another look at the San Diego photo below, specifically how the control cavity cover looks. This will be relevant later.
The headstock rocket launcher remained part of Ace's solo and thankfully it was captured in the bootleg from Winterland, unimpressive though it may be in that video. More interesting during this period were the clips that held the contraption in place on the back of the headstock. Looking at the photos they were a little "mercurial". In the Long Beach photo above there is only one clip on the back of the headstock but in the February and March photos below there are clearly two. Later, in May, the top clip is once again missing and one can see the hole where it was previously attached. The use of only one clip seems to have been the standard through the better part of the summer.
Even though Ace reached for a Les Paul Jr quite often during the spring of 1975, the favorite status of this particular Les Paul Deluxe was never in question. It was used at every single show and, most importantly, and as seen in the photos below, was used at all four shows recorded for Alive!. (So for those keeping score, in order to faithfully re-create the Ace Frehley sound on Alive! you have to start with a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe with DiMarzio pickups and top-wrapped strings. Crude shaping if the heel is optional.)
Some time at the end of summer or beginning of fall Ace moved to his next effect: the smoker. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this happens but it seems to be right around the start of the tour in support of Alive!. The first inkling is actually a newspaper concert review of the show in Norfolk, Virginia on September 13, 1975. The report notes that "During a solo Frehley's guitar begins to smoke and at the end fires a ball of flame". Photographers aren't very good at capturing this new twist on the KISS show but the first known photo of the new effect is the one below from October 4.
Naturally we have to look at the historical context of this so here are two of Ace's later recollections:
"We were on our first tour of Canada and I got some fireworks and said to myself, 'I wonder what would happen if I put a smoke bomb inside my Les Paul' ? I put it in the cavity that holds the potentiometers. It was just a regular store-bought smoke bomb with a fuse that I lit with a cigarette lighter and smoke just started pouring out of the pickups—and it looked great." (Guitar World, September 1996)
"The first time I attempted the smoking guitar was on our first tour in Canada. Originally, I got the idea of making my pickup smoke by by sticking a smoke bomb inside the volume/tone control cavity of the Les Paul. Unfortunately after three or four shows the smoke gummed up the works, and I realized that to do it right I'd have to seal off the volume/tone cavity." (Metal Edge presents "Kiss Alive", 1996)
There are a couple of problems with this account. Firstly, the band's first tour of Canada had been way back in February of 1974 so it seems unlikely to be thee tour Ace remembered. Dito the second stint in Canada in May of 1974. (It seems unlikely that Ace dreamt up the smoking guitar at either of those trips, and apparently tried it, but then it wouldn't be put in use until September 1975.) Secondly, there are no indications of any modifications to the control cavity cover of the Deluxe until October. Remember how the control cavity cover plate looked? By October it had been taped in a very distinct manner. Note how the edges have been sealed to try and force the smoke to emanate somewhere else.
Now, about lighting this with the help of a cigarette lighter... We have the wonderful advantage of having no less than three complete video bootlegs of this effect, the three nights from Detroit in January 1976. (Coincidentally Ace fails to properly ignite the smoke bomb on the first night, there is just a brief puff of smoke.) The way Ace handles the guitar when the effect is initiated doesn't really allow for the use of a lighter. Look at the photo from St. Louis below, that's the grip Ace used. Where would the lighter go and how would he have operated it? No, I think that this original version actually used a simple match and that's what you can see taped to the control cavity cover above. In the footage from January 27, 1976 something falls to the stage when Ace triggers the effect. It's not large enough to be a lighter but it could be a lit match. It's a crude and simple solution but we have to remember that when Ace started using this effect they were feuding with their record company, they had no real money, and there was no indication that Alive! would make them superstars.
This effect was probably used throughout the tour but we have annoyingly few photos of it. The ones below are pretty much it from the fall of 1975 as far as my collection is concerned. We do have a handful of photos showing that the control cavity was still taped over the course of the fall so I think we can safely assume that once the success came the new effect was there to stay.
One minor change was left before 1975 came to an end. Having relied on the stock Kluson double-ring tuners for two years, some time between December 2 and December 14, 1975, a change was made to tulip style tuners. I've seen it mentioned elsewhere that these were Gibson Deluxe-branded tuners but based on (admittedly somewhat blurry) photos of the back of the Deluxe headstock I disagree. The tuners look more like tulip style Grover Rotomatics, but I could be seeing things.
And in order to dot our i's and cross our t's we should note—despite the fact that it's not an actual modification—that throughout all of 1975 Ace appear to have continued top-wrapping his strings. The photos below cover almost the entire year and show this clearly.
Under construction...
