Ace Frehley, hard-rocking Kiss guitarist, dies at 74

Ace Frehley, the galvanizing guitarist who helped make Kiss one of the biggest rock groups of the 1970s and ’80s, died October 16 in Morristown, New Jersey. He was 74.

His family announced the death in a statement, noting that he had recently fallen at home. Frehley announced earlier this month that he was cancelling the rest of his 2025 tour dates because of “ongoing medical issues.”

An inspiration for guitarists from Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine to Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Frehley added a dose of blues riffage to Kiss’s theatrical, hard-charging style of rock. He leaned into the band’s pyrotechnics as well, launching smoke bombs and lasers from his Gibson Les Paul guitars. And he occasionally sang.

“A guitar player so incredible, his axe billowed smoke and shot rockets,” Morello said as he introduced Kiss at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in 2014. Frehley, he said, “blazed unforgettable, timeless licks across their greatest records.”

Frehley knew how to explode into a song, grabbing attention with his wailing solos. His squealed notes incorporated hints of Jimmy Page’s early playing and charted a path forward for the grandiose hair metal guitarists who were still to come.

“I don’t want to say playing guitar was easy, because that implies a lack of effort,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir, No Regrets. “But there’s no question that it came easier to me than it did to others.” He added that before joining Kiss, “I almost felt guilty when I got paid for playing gigs. It didn’t feel like work. I was having too much fun.”

Paul Daniel Frehley was born in the Bronx on April 27, 1951. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother was a homemaker. His parents played music around their Bedford Park home, and both were proficient at piano. A self-taught guitarist, Frehley started playing when his parents gave him the instrument for Christmas in 1964.

“For me, the best way to learn how to play guitar is not to take lessons, it’s to listen to your favourite six, seven, eight, 10 guitar players and learn all their solos note for note,” he once told an interviewer. “And once you can do that, then you’ve got a good shot.”

After spending the late 1960s and early ’70s playing in bands around New York, Frehley caught wind of one looking for a guitarist via an advertisement in the Village Voice. Guitarist Paul Stanley, bassist Gene Simmons and drummer Peter Criss were looking for someone with “flash and ability.” Once they saw Frehley’s audition, they asked him to join the band in January 1973.

They tossed names around for weeks before settling on Kiss. Frehley soon designed the band’s iconic logo, using bulky lettering and lightning bolts for the two S’s.

Inspired by the early hard rock and glam bands kicking around New York, Kiss began applying Kabuki-like makeup and developed larger-than-life personas for each member. Frehley had already been nicknamed Ace by a high school bandmate, but with lightning bolts drawn around his eyes, he became the “Spaceman.”

Audiences grew attached to Kiss’s showy performances and direct, rousing anthems such as Love Gun and Detroit Rock City. At its peak, the band’s fan club, “Kiss Army,” had an estimated 100,000 members. While critics found the band’s charms superficial, Kiss sold more than 100 million records worldwide en route to becoming omnipresent rock artists, complete with merchandise, fights among band members and reunions.

They began to lodge regular Top 40 hits through the end of the 1970s, when the release of their 1976 albums Destroyer and Rock and Roll Over yielded several radio successes such as Hard Luck Woman, modelled on Rod Stewart’s folk rock hits, and the steady rocker Calling Dr. Love. Frehley isn’t credited on the band’s biggest single, Beth, a ballad with a rare lead vocal from Criss. Simmons has said that Frehley didn’t play on the recording because he was busy with a card game.

In 2014, Frehley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the original Kiss line-up. But at the induction ceremony, he didn’t perform with the band because the remaining original members, Simmons and Stanley, wanted the latest members to play. The group was celebrated by the Rock Hall for combining “the blues-glam swagger of New York Dolls and Alice Cooper’s B-movie theatricality with the Beatles’ melodic and pop chops.”

It took time for Frehley to become a confident vocalist. The first song for which he received solo writing credit on a Kiss album, Cold Gin, was given to Simmons to sing. But Cold Gin, along with Frehley’s Led Zeppelin-esque riff for Paradise, were included on 1975’s Alive!, a live album that spurred Kiss to break through to a larger audience. It contained their first Top 20 hit, a rendition of Rock And Roll All Nite laced with the audience’s claps and a slightly looser feel than the studio version.

By 1977, Frehley mustered the courage to sing Shock Me, which he wrote after he was nearly electrocuted onstage at a Kiss concert in Florida. It was good practice for his self-titled solo album, which was released in 1978 on the same September day as solo albums by each of the other Kiss band members.

Until the solo albums, the “George Harrison of Kiss had only done lead duties on one song,” wrote Jason Josephes for Pitchfork in a glowing review of the album Ace Frehley in 2003. It “figures that eventually, he was going to combust with some songs he’d been writing out of the limelight.”

The sales for Ace Frehley were bolstered by his hit rendition of New York Groove, which was originally recorded by British glam rock group Hello. It remains the only song by a solo Kiss member to reach the Top 20.

But Frehley became restless during the late ’70s, disillusioned by what he saw as Simmons’s desire to profit and the lack of spontaneity in live performances.

Throughout this period, Frehley was frequently using cocaine, often as a supplement to his drinking. “Alcohol and drugs were my constant companion, my best friend - and worst enemy,” Frehley wrote in his memoir. Those substance abuse issues were what Simmons and Stanley cited for replacing Frehley in 1982. Frehley has claimed in interviews that he quit the band.

“Being in the band from the beginning is not a birthright,” Stanley said to The Washington Post in 2014. “If you are compromised by drugs and alcohol then you no longer deserve to wear the uniform.”

Frehley was replaced on guitar by Vinnie Vincent, leaving Kiss shortly before the period when band members stopped wearing makeup. Looking for a new creative outlet, he assembled Frehley’s Comet in 1984, producing two tepidly-received pop metal albums. Another solo album, 1989’s Trouble Walkin’, followed and included collaborations with former Kiss drummer Criss.

The icy relationship between Frehley, Simmons and Stanley began to thaw in the mid-’90s, culminating in Frehley and Criss joining Simmons and Stanley for some songs on a 1995 recording of MTV Unplugged. In 1996, Kiss announced the reunion of the original line-up for the Alive/Worldwide Tour. A new album, Psycho Circus, followed in 1998, leading Kiss to its first Grammy nomination. Frehley stopped performing with the band in 2002.

Frehley got sober in 2006 with the encouragement of his daughter, Monique, from his marriage to Jeanette Trerotola, whom he married in 1976. The couple had separated in the 1980s but never divorced.

In addition to his wife and daughter, survivors include a brother and sister.

The last reunion of Frehley with Kiss came in 2018, during one of their “Kiss Kruises.” But the peace was short-lived. Frehley wrote in a 2019 Facebook post that Simmons once “groped my wife and propositioned her.” He was referring to his fiancée, Lara Cove; they separated earlier this year.

In December, Frehley and his former bandmates from the original line-up of Kiss are scheduled to be honoured at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.

“The whole roller coaster ride of Kiss to me was just like this jolly, crazy ride where I’m wearing makeup, and dressed up as a superhero, and playing guitar, and having fun and meeting beautiful women along the way,” Frehley told Yahoo News in 2023.

“I just never took the thing that seriously, even though we were one of the biggest groups in the world. And I still look back on it today and I go, ‘Wow, that was weird.’”

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