From the Vaults: Ace
The following artist’s names conjure up an instant mental image: Cher, Elvis, Prince, Madonna, Rihanna, Shakira, Adele, Beyonce, Bono, Sting, Eminem, Sade, Kesha, Flea, and Slash (to name a few more modern examples). Do you remember the black leather clad Elvis or the spangly jumpsuited Elvis? Do you see Cher standing next to Sonny Bono or the latter day Cher wearing a multitude of wigs and outrageous outfits. Sting? Does the black and yellow bumble bee sweater that inspired his name come to mind? A hoodie and ball cap clad Eminem reminds me of his menacing appearance when he first broke through. Madonna has gone through so many phases, a mental image of her would no doubt be tied to whatever song(s) of hers one likes the most. Then there is Ace Frehley. I am willing to bet most will picture him as the ‘Spaceman’ or ‘Space Ace’ in full KISS regalia from his two stints with that band.
Sadly, Paul Daniel ‘Ace’ Frehley (April 27, 1951 – October 16, 2025) left this mortal coil too soon at the not exactly ancient age of 74. The end could have come sooner for Frehley and he admitted in many interviews that it would have if he had not sobered up in 2006. In earlier interviews, Frehley said he never used effects pedals on stage because A) his guitar plugged straight into a stack of Marshal amps is the sound of rock and roll (also his sound) and B) he has always had balance problems. Effects would have just given him more stuff to trip over.
On September 25, 2025, it was reported Ace had taken a fall in his home studio which forced him to cancel his upcoming tour dates. A week later, he suffered a severe head injury after taking another tumble at home, this time down a flight of stairs. The second fall left him hooked to a ventilator with a brain bleed. When his health failed to improve, the family made the tough decision to end his around the clock life support. Frehley died a few hours later without ever regaining consciousness.
Frehley was born in the Bronx, New York, and during his teenage years, he survived a rough home life by joining a street gang. The ‘Ace’ nickname reportedly came from his knack for picking up women. He also got to be a pretty good at guitar after his father put a $25 Japanese model in his hands. Ace was a self taught guitarist who idolized the British Invasion sounds of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Keith Richards. After he dropped out of school to pursue a musical career, life steered him into driving a cab to make ends meet. At the age of 22, his musical prospects took an upturn when he answered an ad in The Village Voice that said, “LEAD GUITARIST WANTED with Flash and Ability. No time wasters please. Paul 268-3145.” The ‘Paul’ in the ad would turn out to be Paul Stanley and the band in question went by their pre-KISS name Wicked Lester.
Guitar World’s Andrew Daly described Ace’s first encounter with his future bandmates in the January 2026 issue (Vol. 47 NO 1): “Legend has it that Frehley showed up at the fledgling act’s New York City rehearsal space on East 23rd Street with a guitar and two different-colored tennis shoes on his feet, one red and one orange. Frehley has often said that the chemistry between him and the other members of KISS (Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, and Paul Stanley) was immediate. But it was Stanley, the other guitarist in the band, that he initially connected with on a musical level.” In his last interview with Guitar World earlier in 2025, he summed up his relationships in KISS as, “More than anything, it was chemistry. But it’s hard to say: it’s always that way with those things. I do know that the little things about my style fit well alongside Paul’s playing.”
Frehley added more than killer guitar parts to the evolving world of KISS. He designed the iconic KISS lightning-bolt logo and his Space Ace / Spaceman makeup. He also helped Stanley come up with his Starchild image. Ace added his touches to soon-to-be KISS hits like Deuce, Strutter, and Black Diamond. The band’s records were not big movers but word of mouth about their live shows led young fans to say, “I don’t like their records but I buy them because I saw them live.” By the time they hooked up with manager Bill Aucoin in 1973, KISS was at a tipping point with the label suits. KISS was very much in need of something to tip the balance toward success and away from getting dropped by their label. The latter scenario would likely have meant returning to their former day jobs.
The band’s label, Casablanca Records, was also on the edge of going out of business when they took a calculated gamble. KISS was known for their powerful, theatrical live shows. The band felt their studio albums didn’t show them at their best, so why not record a live album to showcase them in their best environment? The 1975 release of the double album Alive! was a major step forward for them according to Stanley: “It broke incredible ground for us. We were building this rabid following, yet we weren’t selling albums that reflected that. Alive! was a sonic souvenir where people could go home and say, ‘That’s what I saw, and that’s what I heard!’” The album also kicked their fan base KISS ARMY into high gear.
In his final GW interview in 2025, Frehley expressed similar sentiments about Alive!: “We felt that our studio albums were good, but they didn’t capture the essence of our concerts. I think Alive! did. A lot of people jumped on the bandwagon.” The multiplatinum success sent KISS rocketing up the charts and pulled Casablanca Records back from the brink of going bust. My first contact with Alive! happened in the fall of 1975 in the Ontonagon Area School’s old Elementary/JH gym on Greenland Road. I had a purchased brand new stereo setup and was using the stage monitors from my college band Sledgehammer for speakers. I volunteered to spin records for the JH dances that year and yes, we were still spinning vinyl records and cassette tapes back then. There was one condition: the kids needed to bring the records they wanted to hear and nobody but me would handle the equipment. Songs from Alive! were big on the playlist and a few kids thought I would be shocked to see and hear such a radically different band.
Nothing takes the fun out of shocking an adult (never mind a teacher of all people) than finding out they have actually heard about the ‘next big thing’. The kid who brought Alive! to the dance asked if I had ever heard KISS before. It was his turn to look shocked when I said, “Yes, I heard their first album back in ‘73 or so.” A friend of my buddy Mitch had a super sound system in his Dodge Charger and when we would cruise around Marquette with him, he always had the newest music. Okay, it was an 8-track player, but it sounded great. On one night of our cruising adventures, he tossed on the first KISS album. My only remembrance of the music was looking at the artwork on the cassette and asking him, “Do they really dress like this?” He was the one who first shared the story with us about kids saying they didn’t like their albums but they bought them anyway because they loved their live shows. For the record, this was the same scenario when I was introduced to the band Queen.
All in all, the concept of doing a live album made a lot of sense and the end results for the label and the band proved it was a shrewd move. The only mistake they made was to vehemently deny that it had been touched up in the studio. Years later, Gene Simmons admitted they had to do a lot of ‘touching up’ before they could put the album out. Watching them perform live, it isn’t surprising there would be missed cues, fluffed notes, and even inaudible vocals – KISS was never a band that stood around shoe-gazing when they performed. For whatever reason, they decided to repeat the lie that the album was cut totally live with no fixes. Had they just said, “Well, we have a pretty energetic show and we didn’t want to put out an album that didn’t do the music justice, so yes, we had to go back and fix a couple of things,” nobody in the KISS ARMY would have held it against them. They managed to turn what could have been their swan song album (had it been majorly flawed) into one of the premier live albums of all time. From 1975 on, all other live albums needed to get over the high bar set by Alive!
The KISS rocket was still climbing in 1976, but by then Ace had developed a massive drinking problem. Things began to come to a head during the recording of the 1976 Destroyer album with producer Bob Ezrin at the helm. Frehley gave GW his honest assessment of how the wheels began to come off the bus. Ezrin got upset because he wanted everything done yesterday and Ace had a habit of showing up late. As Frehley put it, “Sometimes I showed up late because I had a hangover from the night before. Everybody knows I was an alcoholic. Bob was a guy who liked to get things done quickly, probably because he had a mountain of cocaine and a bottle of Remy Martin on the mixing desk with him. But, of course, Paul and Gene never mentioned that [when discussing why they kicked Ace out of the band].”
Ezrin ended up bringing in studio ace Dick Wagner (The Frost, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper) to play the lead parts on Sweet Pain and Beth. Frehley continued, “I was [later] told Bob did that because he felt my solos weren’t as great as they should have been, so he had Dick play them. But it was more about punishing me for not being on time. I see it as partially my fault, but also partly Bob’s fault. The thing that bothered me the most was that I wasn’t told he had replaced my solos; I had to find out after I listened to the record at my home on my turntable. That bothered me for a long time.” Ace continued with KISS, even contributing the song Shock Me for the Love Gun (1977) album. Not only was it inspired by a real incident (Ace was electrocuted during a show in Lakeland, Florida in 1976), it also marked his first-ever lead vocal, not to mention another great solo (and not a replacement).
Famed producer Eddie Kramer was on the board for Love Gun. Kramer was known for working with Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, so he knew his way around guitar players. As for Frehely, Kramer said, “Right from the beginning, I knew Ace would be a star – that’s for sure. Ace had intuitive talents; he could play blues and rock, and I loved that he could play all these cool blues licks but make them his own. He wasn’t scared of anything.” As much as he loved the guitar playing, getting Ace’s vocal down on Shock Me took some doing. It took a bottle of something to ‘calm him down’ and multiple takes until Ace got comfortable. Love Gun was another big LP for the band and the success of Shock Me also lit a fire under Ace.
Even as his drinking and drug use escalated, Shock Me started Frehley thinking about leaving the band. The decision for all four members to record their own solo albums and to release them on the same day (September 18, 1977) was made to convince Frehley to hang around. Ace’s album turned out to be the best of the bunch, both in terms of material and sales. It also underscored his growing perception that he was being ‘held back’ by KISS and could be more creative and productive on his own. Perhaps Simmons and Stanley realized this as the next three KISS albums (Dynasty (1979), Unmasked (1980) & Music from ‘the Elder’ (1981)) featured more tracks from Ace. When he told his bandmates he was going to quit prior to recording 1982’s Creatures of the Night, Frehley said Gene and Paul begged him to stay. They were willing to ‘work around his problems’ because ‘Ace was a unique player’.
Out of the band, everyone expected Ace’s new confidence in his own music to produce instant results. Daly said it wasn’t so: “[Instead of his solo career taking off like a rocket]
What followed was a whole lot of drinking, several near-death car crashes, failed rehab attempts, and a separation from his wife Jeanette. Through the chaos came very little music.” Things began to turn around when he met a veteran bassist named John Regan in 1984. They began to collaborate and the chemistry was good. Regan’s stability helped Frehley focus and they began writing and playing music together. Ace’s old friend Eddie Trunk was the Vice President of Megaforce Records and he convinced his partner and head of the label, Jon Zazula to sign Frehley. The resultant record, Frehley’s Comet (1987), almost went gold. Two more records (Second Sighting (1988) & Trouble Walkin’ (1989)) were released before the wheels finally did come off the wagon. Ace’s drinking and the new grunge era music more or less pushed him (and his old band) off the music scene’s radar.
When MTV featured KISS on their Unplugged series in 1995, the band included drummer Eric Carr and guitarist Bruce Kulick. Simmons and Stanley asked Criss and Frehley to join them for a few tracks. Behind the scenes, they were planning a full costumed KISS comeback that would reunit the original line up. Ace was drinking and drugging in excess and even though the reunion tour was a success, the reunion album (Psycho Circus) was not. By 2002, Frehley was out again, however, his stalled solo career was not ready to resume. Once he sobered up in 2006, his musical output began to return to a more respectable level. Anomaly (2009) was the first of a string of strong solo albums that culminated with 2024’s 10,000 Volts. It was rumored that Ace had another album in the works when he passed and there will be much speculation as to if and when that material will see the light of day.
Happy to have survived his own demons, Ace still couldn’t quite remove himself from the KISS drama. His old band went out on their massive End of the Road tour with an final set of shows scheduled for Madison Square Garden in December of 2023. You can pick the version of the story that makes the most sense to you (if any make sense, that is). Simmons said, “We would welcome both Peter and Ace to come up and do a couple of songs during our last show(s).” Stanley told Howard Stern in the weeks before the final show, “If Peter and Ace are involved, we might as well call the band Piss.” Frehley wondered why he would have said this, but in the end noted, “Paul is talented but he is hot and cold. He sometimes says things that are nice and other times not so nice.” This would have been a hard ‘dis’ to ignore.
Frehley himself oscillated between, “They wouldn’t meet my monetary demands to show up,” and “I was never asked to participate.” He modified that stance as the final show loomed saying, “I’m the kind of guy who never says ‘never’. I don’t hate Gene or Paul. We are rock and roll brothers. Peter, too.” It is too bad that Ace passed away before the band was honored at the Kennedy Center in December of 2025, but the event gave Simmons and Stanley an opportunity to say nice things about their former guitarist. Simmons posted, “No one can touch Ace’s legacy. I know he loved the fans. He told me many times. Ace was the eternal rock soldier. Long may his legacy live on!.”
Similar sentiments poured in from guitarists around the world. R.I.P. Ace Frehley.
Top Piece Video: Shock Me – a song that Ace not only lived, but sang – his first KISS lead vocal.