From the start he wanted to fly
So long to Ace Frehley (1951-2025), the Spaceman guitarist extraordinaire
When my brother Paul and I were kids we were gonzo KISS fans, coming of age right at the band’s mid- to late-1970s peak. Alas, we could never seem to pool enough allowance money to be able to afford memberships in the coveted KISS Army—the perks of which taunted us from the advertising inserts in Rock and Roll Over, Love Gun, and KISS Alive II—but we were true fans, young enough to giddily, innocently enjoy the stomping riffs and cartoon camp, old enough to reckon with our disappointment, unease, and skepticism days after the broadcast of the lamentable KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park made for TV movie. (I finally jumped ship after Dynasty; a few years younger than me, Paul stuck it out through Music from “The Elder.”) When my brother moved out of our parents’ house a few years after I did, he took with him our KISS albums—first into Washington D.C, then out to San Francisco, then over to Manhattan, and finally to Berlin, where he lives and cranks them to this day.
As I wrote about several years ago on my old blog, I subsequently restocked my KISS albums on vinyl, among them Rock And Roll Over, the band’s 1976 follow-up to their career-making Destroyer. In the event, I was looking forward to seeing a drawing of the album cover rendered by a nameless, besotted kid: “Includes awesome crayon drawing of album cover from previous owner, didn’t want to split them up :),” the Discogs seller wrote in the item description. That sold me. What I love about the drawing, below, in addition to its gleefully amateur quality—botching the album title surely aggravated the kid artist—is its agelessness: I don’t know when this drawing was made. Sometime in the ‘00s, ‘90s, ‘80s? ‘70s? The charming, school-notebook lined paper doesn’t appear to be terribly old, I don’t think—no yellowing, no brittleness—but it might’ve been lovingly preserved. I’m guessing that it was recently made, but I’m not sure. I could send it over to forensics, but I’d rather have fun imagining.
I’m terribly charmed, moved even, at the excitement that KISS brought—still brings—to kids, and that I can’t date this drawing to a particular decade. There’s no time- or date-stamp detail, and that’s the point: for all of KISS’ of-the-era ‘70s glam bombast, there’s something eternal about their appeal to kids who are running up to their teen years, hungry for the band’s blend of comic book energy and theatrical spectacle. I can rock out to “I Want You” now as I did when I was eleven, and somewhere the eleven-year old who lovingly drew this is rocking out, too. Or was, and is now looking back. Grins down the decades.
In 2011, Ace Frehley published his autobiography No Regrets (co-written with Joe Layden and John Ostrosky). In it, Frehley sifted through decades of drunken, drug-ridden shenanigans, blackouts, Guardian Angel-guided impaired driving; groupies, brushes with the law, stays in therapy and rehab, professional lows and highs, excesses of all kinds, to tell the story of a left-of-center, lazy kid from The Bronx who had only one ambition in life: to be a rock guitarist in a wildly popular band. Against unlikely odds, Frehley satisfied that ambition a thousand-fold.
As always, I find myself most interested in the early chapters of a rock star’s memoir. Frehley’s stories of seeing the Who, Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Mitch Ryder, and other giants in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his hilariously lucky propensity to find himself backstage often, are loaded with the kind of wide-eyed, fanboy, rockist, beer-soaked details that were still clearly dear to him. Similarly to what Keith Richards does in Life, Frehley regularly brought his musings (you can hear the borough accent) back to his great love: rock and roll. He admitted that his favorite memories of playing in the dysfunctional KISS are the early days, when the band hustled for gigs, made their own fliers, sewed their own costumes, learned how to put on makeup by trial and error, played for an audience of a dozen as if there were tens of thousands there, and stuck together as a band of brothers.
I especially like Frehley’s description of when he bought the first KISS album soon after its release in 1974, which is worth quoting at length. “We were doing things differently in KISS, putting the cart in front of the horse, creating a brand, with a unique marketing concept before we’d even developed a following,” he writes. “So I guess it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that the first record didn’t exactly take the world by storm. Hardly anyone knew who the hell we were, or why we were wearing this ridiculous makeup. Was the band a joke? A gimmick? No, man. We were dead fucking serious. But it took some time to convince everyone else.”
He continues,
On that February day I walked into (the now-defunct) Alexander’s department store on Fordham Road in the Bronx, right across the street from Fordham University. Alexander’s stood near one of the busiest intersections in the borough. There was always a crowd hanging out nearby, and the traffic in and out of the place seemed never to slow. I’d been shopping at Alexander’s since I was a little kid—bought a big chunk of my album collection there. So you can imagine how I felt walking through the store, my heart racing as I headed to the music section. You can imagine what it must have been like for a guy who had bought his first Hendrix record—and his first Led Zeppelin record, his first Who record—in this very spot to suddenly be thumbing through the stacks of vinyl, looking for a record of his very own.
And there it was, staring out at me from a wall of new releases:
KISS.
I picked it up, held it for a moment, flipped it from back to front. I smiled and laughed a little as I looked at my silver-painted face, gazing stoically from the upper right-hand corner.
Then I walked to the cash register, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and paid for the record without saying a word.
That nameless kid’s drawing, Ace’s eager purchase of the first KISS album: the through line here is the excitable joy of rock and roll. Frehley, who died last week at the age of 74, embodied that joy in his fiery guitar playing, laidback and loose personality, and Everydude vibe—a vibe so earthy and genuine that it pushed its way through the makeup. As a kid, I intuited that Ace was much more like me—well, more like my older brothers, well, more like my older brothers’ more risky friends—than Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were. In retrospect, the two frontmen seemed pure showbiz, committed to the spectacle, dollars in their eyes; Ace just wanted to rock out, back arched, eyes shut tight, in the background. Sure, Ace dig his wealth, his guitar smoked, literally, and no one towering on stacked heels and painted to look like a stoned messenger from the cosmos could easily disappear, yet Ace’s motives always seemed pure: he was, finally, a guitar god from the borough, not from the heavens.
Ace aways gave great interview. (For a taste, dig Dan Epstein’s terrific tribute at Jagged Time Lapse.) “I’m a street kid from the Bronx,” Frehley remarked to Liza Lentini in an interview at Spin posted after his death. “I don’t even think of myself as a celebrity, but everybody else does. I don’t get it. Playing guitar always came second nature to me.” He remarked a bit later, “My life has always been so fucking weird”—he then proceeded to regale Lentini with a story about UFO abduction. “I think I may have been abducted by aliens, too. I used to live in Yorktown, which is considered an alien hotspot. One day, I woke up, I had been drinking, but that doesn’t matter. I woke up and I was halfway in my house and halfway outside my house. I’ve never done anything like that. I remember at least I made it into the door [in the past], through the door, and crashed on the couch or something, but laying on the ground, halfway inside and halfway out. It was just mind-boggling to me. Then I looked around the front yard, and there was like a depression, about 30 feet, a circle.”
He added, “I don’t know. They had wiped my memory, I think, but a couple of weeks later, I started getting dreams about being inside a UFO.” “Who knows?,” he continued, offering a trademark cackle. “You see, I take that in stride, like going down and buying a gallon of milk. If it happened, it happened. If it didn’t happen, it might still happen. Who knows? Maybe they’ll come back and visit me again. I don’t know.”
I love everything about this exchange. Even if Frehley was playing up his spacey reputation and lurid past for the piece, his deadpan delivery and shoulder shrug at extraterrestrial shenanigans nail his street corner appeal. A blood-spitting Demon? A star-crossed Lover? A Cat? Nah, the Spaceman was cooler, gifting smoking guitar solos and interstellar riffs to ‘70s pre-teens and teens who were raised on Tang, Major Matt Mason, and Skylab. As a twelve-year old, I was so taken with the epic “Fractured Mirror,” the trippy, shadowy instrumental that closed out Frehley’s ‘78 solo album, that I imagined an entire feature film based around it; the “plot” is lost to the vapors of my adolescence, though I think that I still have the meticulously drawn movie poster that I labored on for hours in my bedroom.
Ace’s best peak-era KISS moments, his combustible playing and untutored, streetwise singing on “Shock Me” (Love Gun), “Rocket Ride” (KISS Alive II), the rockin’ songs off of his solo album, the best of the four, “Rip It Out,” “New York Groove,” “Snow Blind,” “Ozone,” “I’m in Need of Love,” and “Wiped Out,” the underrated “Hard Times” (Dynasty) and the late pop gem “Talk to Me” (Unmasked), all kicked it with a knowing blend of glam, hard rock, sloppy grins, and comic book fantasy, catnip for kids navigating through an adolescence marked by that confusing blend of joy and dismay, puberty itself an endless sci-fi journey. Make me feel better….
Ace Frehley partied legendarily hard (probably with alien abductors), made some questionable, half-blind life and career choices, and endured more than a few near misses. Yet he survived, and was making music to the end. A few years back at my YouTube channel I posted “Snow Blind,” his riff-tastic ode to blow. After Frehley’s untimely death, the tributes from around the world began accumulating in the comments section, these, and my friends’ wonderful reminiscences and tributes on social media, being the 21st century funeral home book:
Rest in power out there Paul Daniel Frehley, wherever you’re rocketing.
You might also dig:
Rock steady: 4 bands, 1 story
Doug Brod's terrific They Just Seem a Little Weird: How KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll does what all successful music books do: finds the pulse of an artist or a band and then tunes in the larger vibrations happening all around them. In this case, Brod tells the complex story of four bands,
They wrote a song, they played a show
DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Last night at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, Steven McDonald of Redd Kross paused mid-story, vaguely distracted, a rare look of unease on his face. The ebullient, long-haired, high-kicking bass player/singer was a little bummed out. He described how the band had played Saint Paul, Minnesota the night before, and how for them “th…
When I'm in chaos
For a recent road trip from Illinois to Maryland and back I put together a 740+ song playlist of Detroit and Detroit-area rock and roll. The Paybacks’ three superb albums—Knock Loud (2002), Harder And Harder (2004), and Love, Not Reason (2006)—were on there, of course, and muscled their way up through shuffle-play with ferocious tenacity. I fell in deep…
“Kiss Ace Frehley” via Creative Commons
Image of Alexander’s, photographer unknown, via Facebook
”Ace Frehley” via Creative Commons
My fandom started and stopped with KISS Alive - a monster of a rock and roll record that - while I’m sure has its share of studio overdubs— made this then teenage listener put it up there with best live records of 70’s rock legends- make up or no make up. You are right to give Ace props for his musical contribution to the songs — he always delivered tasty licks and grooves that always perfectly served the song. His solo for “Rock n’ Roll All Night” is simply textbook and it’s no wonder young listeners (and players) discovering KISS’ music for the first time, get sucked right in. While Paul & Gene provide the spectacle, Ace’s guitar work made the band’s music simply rock solid. RIP Ace.
Thanks for this, Joe -- a lovingly rendered and emotionally true tribute. As luck would have it, my dad moved our family to Guam in '70, and then to Tokyo in '77, so I missed out on much of the KISS phenom and had to catch up later. Ace always struck me as the true rockstar of the band. Also: I, too "...find myself most interested in the early chapters of a rock star’s memoir." I want to try to understand what forces and influences shaped that person early on.