Ace Frehley was the last of the quartet to join Kiss, and when he left, the band were beginning their slow descent through the 80s. By the time Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley wrestled the brand back to the big stages, Frehley – who has died aged 74 – was little more than a face-painted pattern to the generations of new fans who came to gawp at the fireworks.
But one shouldn’t underestimate his contribution to Kiss: almost all of Kiss’s setlist to the end was made up of songs he had played on. And though he was not a prolific writer, one of his compositions – Cold Gin – remained in their setlist until Stanley and Simmons quit in 2023, more than 40 years after Frehley left the band (the less said about the 1998 reunion album, Psycho Circus, the better).
But it also helps that Kiss are the only band in history to have provided a real-time comparison of all the members’ individual talents. When all four of them released solo albums on the same day in 1978, Frehley’s turned out to be by far the best, the only one of the four that passed muster as a rock’n’roll record, and the source of a genuine hit, Frehley’s perfectly pitched version of the Russ Ballard song New York Groove, which gave a disco sheen to the Bo Diddley beat that drove Hello’s 1975 hit version. Admittedly, Frehley had to be talked into it by producer Eddie Kramer, but he delivered triumphantly.
Frehley – born Paul; Ace was the character in Kiss – was a Bronx kid, the proud delinquent in a middle-class family, who first played an electric guitar aged 12, and had his own Fender and Marshall setup by 14. At 21, he successfully auditioned for Kiss, and by 24 he was one of the biggest stars in the US. His bludgeoning guitar was central to the Kiss sound – the “monster plod”, that behind-the-beat throb with the weight of a dinosaur – and he was the most proficient musician in the original Kiss lineup, by a distance: he could be a charismatic lead guitarist, adding instrumental flash to the pyrotechnics.
I’ve written enough about Kiss for it to be plain that while they fascinate me, and I have a genuine love for them, I also don’t think they’re all that great an actual band. They are an event, a ceremony, and Frehley’s Spaceman character was part of that. Where Stanley projected sexuality and Simmons horror, Frehley offered a kind of enigmatic mystery, a blankness. And, of course, while one heard their New York accents, one never heard Frehley speaking. Maybe he really was a spaceman.
Kiss was not a band whose members were destined to be lifelong friends. Frehley’s 2011 memoir, No Regrets, noted that the band divided early on into the partiers – himself and drummer Peter Criss – and the businessmen, Stanley and Simmons. Even decades on, the autobiographies of the four members were a mass of contradictions and resentments, blame and recrimination.
Frehley began drinking almost immediately after the band’s formation in 1973, and started taking cocaine during the making of 1976’s Destroyer. He loved cocaine, not just for how it made him feel. “It made me a better drinker,” he wrote. “I was already damned prodigious, but cocaine put me in a different league. It allowed me to drink longer and harder without passing out.” It was just three years into the band’s career and Frehley already felt he was distanced from Stanley and Simmons.
And, in all fairness, it’s not hard to understand why Stanley, who barely drank, and the teetotal Simmons might have tired of Frehley’s lifestyle. In his book, Frehley admitted that twice on tour Simmons had saved him from drowning while drunk, once in a swimming pool and once in a bath. There were lucky escapes when driving drunk as well.
There was enough rancour that, when Kiss announced their final tour, Frehley ended up not appearing, despite Stanley and Simmons saying they had invited him to make guest appearances (Frehley claimed this was only said to sell tickets).
His solo career didn’t begin until five years after he left Kiss, and then after three records in three years he fell silent until 2009. However, in 2006 he got sober, and the last two decades of his career were his most productive since the early days of Kiss, with six albums in 15 years. He wasn’t just productive in volume, too – he finally sounded like he was making music for pleasure, rather than to fulfil a brief. It was old-fashioned hard rock, but once again he sounded hungry, for the first time in an age.
His first sober album – Anomaly, from 2009 – might well be the best album from Kiss or any of their members since the 1970s. And on 2018’s Spaceman he patched things up with Simmons long enough for them to write two songs together: those, in effect, are the last ever studio recordings of the Monster Plod.
Kiss’s was an extraordinary kind of greatness – unpredictable, unreplicable and often disputed. They would never have achieved it without Frehley, the man who could make the plod into a dance when he soloed.
