Honker

‘Twas 1987 when I read that the first Frehley’s Comet album was finally coming out. I pert near pooped my pants. My numero uno guitar hero Ace Frehley’s first solo album in almost 10 years! I’d already played his 1978 solo album to death by that point (still do) but man, the release date for that album couldn’t come fast enough. In 1987 “almost 10 years” was an eternity – that was over half of my life at that point!

One of my favorite things about records was looking at the art and reading everything on the covers, over and over and over. If you were lucky you would get a record with a cool dust sleeve where they’d sometimes put MORE art, photos of the band, and usually song lyrics. If you were SUPER lucky the record would also come with a poster or cool gatefold sleeve. The more cool stuff to stare at while enjoying a record the better as far as I’m concerned.

As a young vinyl enthusiast I was programmed to have some pretty unrealistic expectations for extras every time I bought a new record thanks to KISS. For a while there in the 1970s their LPs would include booklets, posters, cool looking merch order forms… ALIVE II even had temporary tattoos. Although no one else (that I know of) was quite as generous with those kinds of extras there were definitely a lot of cool dust sleeves in other records to gaze at. Stray Cats Rant N Rave for example:

YES. Nicely done. Each song on the album (every last one of them AWESOME mind you) got a mention/theme in the art. The other side is yellow with a bunch of old pictures of the band. Stare at art, listen to record from start to finish, repeat. Zero distractions or screens to look at. Life before internet.

I was excited for the new Ace album not just for the new liquid hot magma Space Ace guitar riffs I was in store for. Seeing him sans makeup was still very new at that time and up until then I had only seen a half dozen or so photos of his unpainted yap. I was excited to see my unmasked hero somewhere on the cover..  and to see if maybe the record company slipped a poster or something cool in with the album. I was happy to see the back of the cover had a pretty tight band shot (Ace is 2nd from left. I remember thinking Huh, he sort of looks like that chick from The Pretenders):

While my mum was filling up the car at the gas station on the way home from the store the day I bought the record I opened the album and peeked inside the sleeve.. damn, no poster. That’s okay, surely there was going to be super awesome dust sleeve art in there. Perhaps it would contain more band photos, or better yet a cool photo of the new modern unmasked Ace Frehley in the throes of a blistering guitar solo with fire and smoke shooting out of the pickups. This was the new improved better-than-ever “sober” (little did I know at the time that meant he was still having a drink or 30 every day) Ace Frehley of 1987, let’s see more of what he looks like, man!

I took out the dust sleeve and saw this:

It gave me a good chuckle. He could have gone the typical rock star route with photos of himself as I’d hoped and expected but nope, no dice. It was an awesome curve ball. The joke’s on you, Ace fans. One thing that I appreciate most about Ace is he’s got a really odd sense of humor – sometimes in between songs onstage he’ll tell “jokes” and say things that don’t make much sense and then immediately laugh at himself. I used to think it was the booze doing the talking but he still does it now when he’s sober (he’s actually sober these days) and I guess was that way even before he was a rock star and could walk around in a haze 24/7 with a bottle in his hand. I’m sure he saw that photo somewhere, laughed his ass off at it, and said “Aahm usin’ that pickchah in the new rekkid!” And that he did.

I was perplexed by that monkey for quite a few years. I thought that maybe it was a manipulated photo of some sort or an alien from an old obscure sci-fi movie. This was before the internets and being able to type MONKEY WITH BIG NOSE into a magical computer box to ask search engines whether or not the thing was real. Years later I learned it was a real animal – a proboscis monkey.

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“Honker” is the 11th and perhaps goofiest sounding track yet in my experi-mental series of Music for Synth & Guitar. It’s my musical nod to Ace’s amusing choice of dust sleeve art for that record and even more so the insanely huge phallic monkey nose. I just want to grab it and honk it like a bicycle horn (I’m guessing that’s not how it works). The squeaky, honky clarinet and ridiculous sounding rapid-fire “dooo” scatting that goes with it makes me laugh every time I hear it. It might be one of the dumbest sounding things I’ve done (which is of course why I love it).

When I made my first track of this stuff last November I immediately knew I wanted to make 11 tracks of it and release them as an album. Why? Beats the shit out of me. Why am I driven make this stuff in the first place? It’s not like instrumental retro-flavored synth and guitar space music that sounds like it’s loaded on cocaine and huffing oven cleaner is in high demand. At least that’s not what Taylor and Kanye are doing. Yet. Why ask why though when it comes to being creative… that’s the absolute worst time to start thinking and questioning yourself.

So yeah. Here I am at my 11 track goal. I might slow down from the rapid fire one song per week pace I’ve been making them at but heck if I’m gonna stop doing it altogether, I feel like I’m just getting the ball rolling and figuring out how it all goes together now. As I’ve mentioned in other posts I started making this music as a joke but much to my surprise in the 3 months I’ve been making it I’ve learned more about blending and coloring sound, guitar solos and creating music in general than I have since.. um.. probably back when I taught myself how to use my first multi track recorder in 1994. Here’s to stepping way out of the comfort bubble, not thinking, and letting the i-dee-ers flow, no matter how crazy and slaphappy they are.

Here’s “Honker”: