It was 1975, and Russ Ballard was in a New York state of mind.
The English singer and songwriter had recently left Argent, the hard-rock band responsible for hits including “Hold Your Head Up,” and moved into producing. That year, one of Ballard’s studio gigs required him to relocate to New York — his first trip to the city in 18 months. During the flight, a phrase popped into his head: “Back in the New York groove.”
“That’d be a good title for a song, I reckoned,” Ballard told Classic Rock this year.
When he returned to Britain, Ballard teamed up with Hello, an upstart glam-rock band in need of a new tune. He didn’t have a finished song to offer, but he showed up at a session equipped with a cool title, and a musical jumping-off point. “In my brain, I wanted to make it a Bo Diddley beat,” Ballard explained to the podcast VRP Rocks.
As the members of Hello began improvising a track — at one point stomping their boots on a table — Ballard wrote a series of lyrics about a wide-eyed hedonist taking in the Big Apple, for the first time, all over again:
Here I am in the city
With a fistful of dollars
And baby, you better believe:
I’m back in the New York groove
“I just made up the tune as we went,” recalled Ballard, who put together “New York Groove” in about two hours. The relatively spare finished track — which featured chugging harmonica, a scraping guitar riff and that thumping boot-beat — arrived in late 1975, and became Hello’s last British Top 10 hit.
But “New York Groove” would find a bigger audience, and a more blistering groove, a few years later, when the song was covered by one of rock’s most reliably spaced-out guitar heroes: Ace Frehley.
In September 1978, while Kiss was in the middle of a yearslong commercial zenith, Frehley and his bandmates — Peter Criss, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley — each released self-titled solo albums. Frehley’s contribution included big-riff shout-alongs (“Rip It Out”) and a sinister five-minute guitar instrumental (“Fractured Mirror”) that Frehley would compare to Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells.”
It was the Side 2 opener, however, that would give the Bronx-born Frehley, who died on Thursday at 74 after a recent fall, his first and only Top 20 single. His take on “New York Groove” was louder and flashier, adding more riffs and backing vocals. The track was recorded in Midtown Manhattan’s Plaza Sound Studios, an area full of local attractions and distractions.
“It was kinda cool because the Rockettes — the dancers who perform at Radio City — used to sun themselves on the roof,” Frehley told Classic Rock. ”The studio was right there off the stairway. These beautiful, semi-naked girls were constantly walking into the studio and checking out what was going on. So that was quite a nice recording environment.”
The souped-up version of “New York Groove” was well-timed for late-70s FM radio. Long-running rock bands were experimenting with the sleek dance sounds emanating from hot spots like Studio 54. Frehley’s anthem was the rare track that worked in both clubs and arenas. One critic hailed it as “an unconsciously titled disco-tinged number” that “totally saves the second side of the LP.”
“New York Groove” reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the biggest hit on any of the Kiss members’ solo records. Lyrics and sheet music for the tune were even published in newspapers nationwide, for those who wanted to sing along at home. The track represented a major career breakthrough for Frehley, who thought “Ace Frehley” — an album he described as “surprisingly better than I expected” — might give him a chance to step away from Kiss for good.
“I see myself eventually on my own without the makeup and the bombs, without theatrics,” he told Rolling Stone that year. “I could dig getting up there with a white suit and three chick singers.”
Frehley wound up leaving Kiss in 1982, and spent the next several years playing “New York Groove” as a solo act, and as a member of the reunited Kiss (his most recent performance of the song, according to Setlist.fm, was at a concert in Providence, R.I., last month). Decades after its release, the disco-fied simplicity of “New York Groove” still had a hold on listeners — as evidenced by Frehley’s 2014 appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where he played the song with the Roots.
By that point, “New York Groove” had become Frehley’s signature tune: an evergreen tale of a young striver-slash-sinner eager to take on the big city. Today, it remains one of the most beloved odes to the five boroughs. The New York Mets play the song after winning home games, and in 2021, Frehley’s track was included in an ad campaign for New York in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I wish I would’ve wrote the song, though,” he admitted to a journalist for Louder Sound, with a chuckle. “I would’ve made a lot more cash out of it.”
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