SWEDISH guitar maestro Yngwie Malmsteen has revealed only an ignorance of the Imperial system of measurement cost him the chance to join KISS in 1982.
Speaking on Sirius XM, 61-year-old Malmsteen recalled being asked to audition KISS’s latest guitarist following the departure of Ace Frehley but the conversation ended abruptly when he was asked his height.
“When I sent that tape out to Guitar Player (magazine), I got a phone call from KISS – I know that,” Malmsteen told the Faction Talk channel.
“They said ‘we really want to try you out – we need to know how tall you are. How tall are you? Are you six foot tall?’.
“I didn’t know what six foot tall was because it’s metric in Sweden. I was one metre, 92 centimetres … six three, right?.
“And so they didn’t ever call back. I couldn’t tell them how tall I was!
“That was in 1982, I know that much. I don’t know who was in the band at the time. I think Ace was out.”
The fretboard pioneer also told the Trunk Nation program he had been very close to joining celebrated British band UFO around the same time, when he was playing around the Los Angeles area with Steeler.
“When I first started out … I almost ended up in UFO,” Malmsteen said.
“I remember one night we played in Orange County and Phil Mogg from UFO came there.
“I love that band and he was all ‘oh yeah, I’m putting UFO back together and I need a great guitar player so come to my house tomorrow’.
“I was ‘oh yeah, I’ll be there’.
“The next morning, I get a phone call from somebody. I don’t know who it was, a roadie or manager or somebody … of what became Alcatraz. It wasn’t called Alcatrazz or nothing.
“That was the same day I was supposed to meet Phil.
“So they (UFO) came and picked me up and they bring me to this little rehearsal room and I started asking these guys ‘so what’s you’re songs like?’ and that stuff.
“And they were like ‘we don’t have songs yet’.
“‘What’s your direction?’ ‘Oh, we don’t have a direction yet’, blah, blah, blah.
“‘But you got the gig!’ they said. ‘You got the gig!’. I said ‘let me think about it, I’ve got to go see somebody’.
“Phil walks out and he was super cool but he didn’t really have his stuff together much, as much as the other camp did.
“So I called them (Alcatrazz) from Phil’s house and I said ‘I’d do your thing with a couple of conditions: I write the songs and we get a new drummer’.
“I mean it would have been awesome to be in UFO too but that would have meant I would have to do their classics and stuff like that which was good but I was more into the fresh start thing.”
Main image: Wikipedia
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