The Five Best Stories Ace Frehley Told Us

When Ace Frehley died this week (Oct. 16), he’d exceeded the expectations of many, especially some of his former Kiss bandmates.

But in a sense, the guitarist had the last laugh (and what an incredible laugh he had, personally). Since 2009, he’d released six solo albums, two of them in his ongoing Origins series and four that were largely original material. 2014’s Space Invader, in fact, became the only solo album by a member of Kiss to land inside the Top 10 on the Billboard charts. Not a bad run for someone who had supposedly been left in the wreckage by addiction and personal struggles.

We were fortunate to speak with Frehley a lot over the years. He shared plenty of tales on a variety of subjects, including his own personal Spinal Tap story, the chance encounter that found him acting as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and his band and countless tales about the experiences of working on Kiss albums, like Hotter Than Hell and Dynasty.

Just like Cheap Trick taught us, we’ve got our Kiss records out as we revisit some of our other favorite moments from those conversations with Ace.

The Classic Kiss ‘Alive!’ Album

“When I think about ‘Kiss Alive!,’ I think about the live performances, but I also think about [being in the] studio with Eddie Kramer, doing overdubs to try to clean it up a little,” Frehley laughed in 2015. “He had these crazy mic stands with long tape loops, you know, it was before digital equipment, so everything was on tape and we’d have these long tape loops with different audience sounds, so on and so forth. It was pretty wacky. But we had a lot of fun doing it. It was one of the highlights of my career, working with Eddie and doing something that crazy. The packaging was right, the timing was right and it’s still one of our biggest records to date, if not our biggest. Kiss is known for our live show and our theatrics and the Alive! record captured that. It captured the explosions and the crowd response and all of the other mayhem that went along with the rock and roll circus that we presented in the ‘70s. I think that’s why it was so well-received.”

READ MORE: Kiss Comes ‘Alive!’ by Using Some Studio Magic

Listen to Kiss Perform ‘She’ From the ‘Alive!’ Album

Seeing the Who and Cream on the Same Day Had a Big Impact

A rogue excursion to go see the Who and Cream ended up being one of many early formative musical experiences for the Spaceman, though he went there for different reasons at first. “I had cut school and snuck into the show with a friend of mine. We didn’t know what to expect. I wanted to see Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, because I love that song ‘Devil With The Blue Dress On’ and I loved the guitar solos that Jim McCarty did on that song,” he shared. “I remember figuring it out when I was learning how to play guitar. It was ironic, because later on down the road after I left Kiss and started Frehley’s Comet, Jim McCarty’s band actually opened for me. I got to hang out with Jim and that was a special treat for me. He’s just an amazing guitar player. Great blues guitarist.”

“[But seeing the Who], It was their first U.S. tour. I just stood there with my mouth open going, ‘What the hell is this? I’ve never heard anything like this!’ First, Cream and then the Who? Keith Moon wrecking his drums and Pete Townshend would throw his guitar up in the air 20 feet and catch it and hit the downbeat right on the beat. It was just amazing,” he said. “They were kids and they had so much energy and it came across on stage. That was one of the major influences, after seeing the Who, that I realized when I got older, I wanted to form a theatrical rock group. Because they were very theatrical.”

“Cream was the complete opposite of the Who. Cream used to just stand there and not move. But they played the shit out of their instruments. You couldn’t touch those guys. I mean, who could touch Eric Clapton? Roger Daltrey was all over the stage,” he recalled. “The funniest thing about the Who was that John Entwistle never moved! [Laughs] You’ve got Keith Moon going crazy on the drums. You’ve got Pete Townshend throwing his guitar and smashing his amps and you’ve got Roger Daltrey swinging the mic around and jumping all over the place. There’s the bass player just standing still and taking care of business. That was the unique thing about the Who.”

READ MORE: What Will Happen to Classic Rock Once All of the Icons are Done?

His Encounters With UFOs

Frehley told UCR he thought he might have been visited by beings from another world. “I dreamt that I was [visited]. The dreams started happening a couple of weeks after I ended up unconscious between the open door in the front of my house,” he remembered. “I was halfway in and halfway out. Even when I’d get completely wasted, I’d make it inside the door and at least crash on the couch or something, it was unprecedented. Then I looked outside on the grass in my front yard and I saw a circular depression.”

Those close encounters inspired the track “Up in the Sky” on his 2024 album 10,000 Volts. “They’re up in the sky / Girl, I know what I saw / You can’t trust the news / Can’t trust the law,” he insists within the song’s chorus.

READ MORE: Ace Frehley, ‘10,000 Volts’: Album Review

Listen to Ace Frehley’s ‘Up in the Sky’

Ace Was Modest About His Guitar Style and His Influence on Others

Frehley influenced numerous guitar players with his work in Kiss and beyond. Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, Slash and Tom Morello are just a few examples. “I’d probably have practiced a little more If I knew I was going to affect that many people’s lives,” he mused in a 2023 interview. “It does make me proud and very happy though that I influenced a lot of great guitar players.” But as he shared with UCR, how he got there was a bit of a mystery, even years after the fact “That’s one thing I still haven’t been able to figure out,” he cackled, in his inimitable way. “My guitar sound is a Les Paul through a Marshall, pretty much turned up to 10. I only use the bridge pickup. In fact, on all of the Les Pauls I use live, the middle and the neck pickup are disconnected. It’s just like Eddie Van Halen, he only used the triple pickup. That’s my sound.”

“And for me, it’s not hard to get. But the one thing that I do differently than a lot of guitar players, is the way I hold the pick. A lot of times, when I hit the string, I’ll be hitting the string and muffling it with my thumb,” he explained. “That way, I get harmonics. I can kind of control the tone a little, with just how I pluck the string.”

“The best solos are always the kind of souls that you can hum. You know, those are the most memorable solos,” he detailed. “I kind of learned that from players like Eric Clapton. Now, here’s a blues-based guitar player, just like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page —  all my idols. They were the guys I learned how to play guitar — I never took [lessons from] a guitar teacher. But, you know, I figured out all their guitar solos. My style is pretty much a combination of Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page. ‘m just a blues rocker and my style hasn’t changed very much with my tone over the years.

READ MORE: Top 20 Post-Kiss Ace Frehley Songs

The Moment Frehley Knew He Needed to Leave Kiss

“I used to get frustrated when I’d read the paper the following day and read the review of our show. A lot of times, it talked about the pyrotechnics, the elaborate costumes and makeup,” he reflected. “And a lot of times, it didn’t really talk much about the music. That used to bother me, because for me, it was always the music first and the show second. With the success of my solo album with “New York Groove,” having the only hit [from the Kiss solo albums] I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I realized I was more creative away from Paul [Stanley], Gene [Simmons] and Peter [Criss] than when I was with them. I knew eventually that I was going to end up forming my own band and leaving the group. That’s what happened. I mean, I lost millions of dollars by doing that. But what I gained was sanity. [Laughs] To me, that’s more important. I mean, if you don’t have your health and sanity, it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred million dollars in the bank. You’ve got to be happy. I’ve met so many rich people that are really unhappy people.

Listen to Ace Frehley’s ‘New York Groove’

READ MORE: Top 10 Ace Frehley Kiss Songs