On October 31, 1979 Kiss was on the Tom Snyder Show, an appearance that would become the most legendary of all their interviews. Mainly because Ace is drunk as f**k and Gene and Paul are visibly pissed off at him.
Kiss's appearance on The Tomorrow Show was timed for Halloween, for obvious reasons. Snyder was providing the four members — Ace, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss — a chance to discuss their rise and worldwide success. But while Simmons and Stanley were keen to follow the script, it was clear almost from the beginning that Ace was going off the rails, making wisecracks and telling jokes, often at the band's expense.
“I was nervous as hell,” he explains. “I think I drank half a pint of vodka, and then I did some blow to wake up.”
That sounds like a lot of drugs, but for Frehley it was business as usual. “Yeah… it was crazy,” he shrugs. “But I was crazy back then. Anything went when I was in my 20s. I mean… everybody was doing that shit.”
“Paul and Gene would try to compete with me but always fail,” he says. “If you look at the old interviews, even when I was loaded and buzzed, once I got into the groove, you couldn’t top me. Gene would try and throw a line in there. I remember Gene tried to tell a joke to Tom Snyder, but he got completely ignored.”
With Frehley doing everything from drunkenly howling to playing with teddy bears and making a lewd joke about being a plumber, one can understand why Snyder fixated on him.
“The plumber thing came completely out of the blue,” he says. “I didn’t plan that; it’s just a line that I came up with. Why this shit flies into my head… I have no idea. It’s probably all the substances I was doing.”
He laughs, but he’s serious. Funny as Frehley’s antics were, it was apparent that Simmons and Stanley weren’t pleased with their lead guitarist's behavior. “Kiss had a weird chemistry back then,” Frehley says. “We had a weird dynamic, which is one of the reasons that group worked.”
Still, Frehley asserts that Kiss thrived on that sort of push/pull. “The four of us were different,” he explains. “Somehow, someway, we got together. That energy… sometimes we’d argue, but when we got together, most of the time, it worked.”
What’s more, Frehley offers a counterpoint to the long-running theory that Simmons and Stanley were furious over his behavior on Snyder's program. “I watched it about six months ago,” he says. “I noticed that toward the end of the video, Paul and Gene were put off by me going off on crazy tangents, but at the end they started joining in with my insanity.”
“It might have been because they couldn’t win,” he adds, with a laugh. “Tom was in love with me. He was so surprised that I was such a maniac and a funny guy. The only way for Gene and Paul to win was to be as zany and nutty as I was; it helped. But earlier in the interview, yeah… they were resistant. It looked awkward.”