KISS and music

Many of you have read about my time on the road with KISS and other bands.  I've done a number of interviews, and of course there are the chapters in Look Me in the Eye, Be Different, and Switched On.

You may have seen my rock and roll photo gallery on Facebook

I started doing sound for local and regional bands.  I got my start working with Fat, Clean Living, Roomful of Blues and James Montgomery.  We played in local bars and at colleges around New England and then the Northeast.

From those bands I moved onto doing sound for shows with regional bands like Orleans, the Fabulous Rhinestones, Bonnie Raitt, and Taj Mahal.

I build crossovers, limiters and other custom single processing components for individual musicians, bands and sound companies.  By the late 1970s I was working as the American engineer for Britannia Row, the sound company Pink Floyd had spun off to rent their surplus gear when they were not on tour.

I had the opportunity to work with lots of national tours at that time.

My 21st birthday came riding the ferry to Cornerbrook, Newfoundland up in Canada.  I was working the sound system for April Wine on their First Glance tour, which was one of their first albums to garner attention in both Canada and the United States.

I'd met the guys from KISS when they came to our New York studios to rent a monitor system.  One thing led to another and I ended up designing a number of special effects and special effects guitars for them. That process is described in Look Me in the Eye.

The tour pass photo on the right is me, circa 1979.  People called me Ampie because I designed the amplifiers.  My little brother accompanied me to shows and he was Baby Ampie, which he did not particularly appreciate.

We made a number of guitars for KISS.  There were a series of smoking guitars made from Gibson Les Paul Customs in sunburst and black.  Back in the day Ace fired them during the guitar solo in 2000 Man, but he later changed the act to use them on other songs.

The iconic light guitars were made for Ace's hit New York Groove.  We did several of those plus a laser guitar and special effects for the other stage instruments - Gene's Battle Axe bass, Paul's Broken Mirror Ibanez and others.

The first light guitar was built from a Les Paul TV, a vintage guitar from the late 1950s. Later guitars were built on newer Custom bodies. The Custom had a curved front where the TV was flat, but it didn't matter as we machined both flat when we cut into the face for the circuit board.  We put almost 1,000 incandescent lamps in each, and you could feel the heat sweep with the lights when they ran.

The lights were powered by a Ni-Cad battery pack and the music was transmitted via a Shaeffer Vega wireless rig so the whole thing was cable free.   There was a special XLR-type plug in back to connect a battery charger between sets.

Ace came on stage playing this guitar while facing back in the corner of the stage.  The audience could see something flashing but could not tell what.  He'd walk out backward, turn round, and they would just go wild.

I describe that scene in the opening passage of my book BE DIFFERENT. We built all KISS's custom guitars in Massachusetts but I had to go on the road to fine tune their development.  I was on the road for all the KISS tours of 78-82 and then the shows with Ace as Frehley's Comet after that.  Here I am working on another of the light guitars, on the road in some hotel:


If you look close you'll see we added a layer of baltic birch plywood to the back of that guitar to thicken it.  That was to allow even more lights (for big halls) and microprocessor control.  

I personally designed all the special effects guitars KISS played in those years.  I also created a fair bit of the electronics they played through.  That included the light guitars below, the smoking guitars, the rocket guitars and the laser guitar for 1979, among many.

Most of the guitar amplifiers I worked on were vacuum tube designs.  We hotrodded and modified heads from Fender, Marshall, and Sunn. Guitar stacks on stage back then were 100-150 watts on a small stage, and up to 400-600 watts on a big arena stage. For KISS we had a stack of seven Sunn Coliseum bass amps, 2,000 watts in total.

The amplifiers I worked on for house sound systems were all solid state, both transistor and MOSFET designs.  I had worked on high power amps for sonar and other applications and we brought that technology into concert amps; it's now common.

Long Island luthier Steve Carr did the fretwork and tuning to make our creations play.  He also did the metallic body finishes and the custom inlays. Later he claimed to have done all the design and work, which was untrue, but by then I had left the music business so I didn't pay any attention.

I designed the electronics.  My then-girlfriend, later-wife Mary Robison did the assembly. My friend Jim Boughton did the mechanical engineering and fabrication.  

After Ace left KISS he played with John Regan (Peter Frampton's long time bassist) Anton Fig, Richie Scarlett and others, and I was connected to them through him

Here I am recently with master luthier Jim Cara, who has followed in the custom guitar tradition.  Check out his story here.

The original KISS guitars are now valuable collector pieces.  Over the years many of them were sold off and I've lost track of them.  in 2011 Ace called me up and asked if we were up for rebuilding the original light guitar, which had not worked in many years.  By then my son was 21, and his mom was interested in doing that project with him. I went down to New York and picked it up from his manager.

Work progressed slowly, and partway through the job, Mary was diagnosed with cancer.  She died and the project was finished up between my son and my old friend Bob Jeffway - one of the engineers I worked with at Milton Bradley.  We rebuilt the car with original technology, seeking out vintage incandescent light bulbs and other period correct pieces.  One concession to modernity was the batteries - we fitted new style battery packs and doubled the run time as compared to the original.

Here's Ace playing that guitar for the first time in 30 years to a sellout crowd - 5,000 people - at the Big E in 2015.  The next photo shows all of us in the bus after the show.  The fellow in the suit is my old friend Gene Cassidy, president of the Big E Fair.