Free No Regrets by Joe Layden Ace Frehley John Ostrosky

mayhem. I had slept through that?
    Unbelievable…
    I decided to go through the barbed wire, rather than over it, so thatI could maintain my balance by hanging on to the chain link. A few careful moments later I was on the ground, walking home, my first and last Grateful Dead concert now officially in the books.
    Thanks to the generosity (or at least the tolerance) of my parents, I still lived at home during this time period. (In fact, I didn’t move out until after I joined KISS.) We’d stopped fighting by this point about what I was going to do with my life. I’d appeased them somewhat by going back to school, and I think they figured I was probably safer under their roof than bouncing from place to place, bumming off my friends. I wasn’t home all that often, anyway, and when I did come home, it would be late. I pretty much used the house as a crash pad. There wasn’t much dialogue going on between us. They were getting older and had less energy to deal with the disparities in our lifestyles. I’d throw them money once in a while to help with rent, which made things better, and at least the cops weren’t bringing me home at night. It could have been worse, and Mom and Dad knew it. Basically I just tried to keep the peace. Any insanity—or at least most of the insanity—I tried to keep outside the house.
    All of my energy went into playing music. I was in multiple bands at any given time, juggling gigs, rehearsals, sometimes playing two different venues in a single night. I did whatever I had to do to make some cash and hone my craft. If that meant throwing on a tux and playing a wedding or bar mitzvah, then that’s what I did. If it meant driving up to Kutsher’s or one of the other resorts in the Catskill Mountains and playing for families on vacation, then I did that. There was dignity in all of it. Sometimes there was fun to be had, too.
    The Catskill gigs represented my first taste of the road life, and I didn’t find it unappealing. The Jewish girls up there loved us (and we loved them!), although I’m not sure how their parents would have felt… had they known what went on after hours. We’d go up for a few days or a week, serve as the house band, get free room and meals, and asmall stipend for our efforts. Not bad at all. It was a like a free vacation—with girls and alcohol and great food. All we had to do was play a couple of sets per night. That could get a little tricky—blending material that wouldn’t offend parents with the stuff we really wanted to play. But the same was true when you played weddings. I always managed to sprinkle in an assortment of songs that I liked, a cross section of popular music from Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, and Stones, along with more album-oriented rock from Led Zeppelin, Cream, Grand Funk Railroad, and Hendrix. Mostly songs you’d hear on the jukebox, punctuated with edgier, harder stuff. Once in a while the resort manager would give me a hard time, but I was always able to talk my way through it. The thing is, there was no way I could get up onstage and not play at least some of the music I really loved. I knew too much about the music scene—about what really mattered—to play nothing but Top 40 covers. Shit, I was at the Fillmore East in 1969 when Zeppelin made its first New York appearance. Incredible though it might seem now, they opened for Iron Butterfly that night, and absolutely blew the headliners off the stage. I can still see half the crowd walking out, disillusioned, midway through Iron Butterfly’s set.
    No reason I couldn’t play “Whole Lotta Love” for the folks at Kutsher’s; they’d get over it.
    The most professional and polished (and overtly ambitious) of the bands with which I played in those days was undoubtedly Molimo. The name of the band, as I understood it (though I’ve never verified), was taken from a Portuguese word that could loosely be translated to mean “music of the forest.”
    I also recall one of the