Gene Simmons has told the story of a guitar solo merry-go-round, after revealing that Pearl Jam’s iconic Alive lead effort closely followed in the footsteps of a Kiss solo – which Ace Frehley had previously lifted “note-for-note” from another classic rock heavyweight.
Guesting on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast, the Kiss bassist pointed out Frehley’s plagiarism.
The track in question is Kiss' 1975 cut She, which found Frehley apparently so enamored with Robby Krieger's lead playing on The Doors' Five to One, from 1968's Waiting for the Sun, that he lovingly copied and pasted it onto the Kiss song.
Unaware of this, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready then followed a similar tact when piecing together the solo for Alive, only for Simmons to drop a truth bomb later down the line.
“I said, ‘Mike, I don’t know how to tell you this, but that’s a note-for-note guitar solo from the Doors,” Simmons tells Corgan. “Ace liked it so much, he just reproduced it. He goes, ‘No!’”
Discussing the genesis of some of his biggest hits with Guitar World, McCready now doesn't hide from this fact. All he has to say of the song is, “I copied Ace Frehley’s solo from Kiss’ She, which was copied from Robby Krieger’s solo in the Doors’ Five to One.”
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, McCready waxed lyrical about Kiss and the impact they had on him during his formative years.
“I remember being on a school bus in sixth grade in 1976, with my friend Rick Friel, who eventually played in my high school band, Shadow,” he said. “He had a lunchbox that had Kiss on it. ‘What is that?’
“Then he played me some music and I was hooked immediately.” So it's no surprise there's more than a little Kiss style sprinkled across Pearl Jam's discography.
Going off his comments on the podcast, Simmons seemingly picked up on She’s likeness to Five to One at the time. But he doesn’t see the solo-swapping saga as much of an issue.
“My point is, it’s always very appreciated when somebody says, ‘Loved your stuff,’” Simmons says. “Everybody’s got bits and pieces of stuff. Listen to Zeppelin songs, you’ll hear lots of blues, very recognizable, blues songs.”
McCready has also downplayed the drama to be drawn from their similarities, telling Chris Shiflett’s Shred With Shifty podcast, “I don't do the solo the same live all the time.”
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