Crackerjack timing. Smoke-bomb effects. An entertainer for generations. Beneath the Spaceman costume was Ace Frehley, one of the finest guitarists in rock history. The founding member of the iconic rock group Kiss has died.

The 74-year-old, who inspired a generation of guitarists, played in the band during its peak in the Seventies and again during the Nineties, a reunion period. Frehley’s representative, said his death was due to a “recent fall at his home” but provided no further information. He reportedly fell in his recording studio and hit his head in late September. He was hospitalised for several weeks.

Mr Live!

Known as the ‘Spaceman’ of the popular face paint-wearing rock group, his self-taught playing style inspired generations. His love for Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page pushed him towards hard rock.

Kiss wasn’t all about make-up. The band knew how to rock the city in which they performed. Though Frehley’s brother Charles was a trained classical guitarist, Ace never took a lesson or learned to read a note of music. He received his first electric guitar at the age of 13. He used a late-1960s Gibson Firebird when he auditioned for Kiss.

The group’s early albums were well received, but it was the 1975 live album Alive! that proved to be a turning point. It showed that the group’s music needed to be experienced live. The double album contains live versions of selected tracks from their first three studio albums — Kiss, Hotter Than Hell and Dressed to Kill. It was recorded at concerts in Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; Wildwood, New Jersey; and Davenport, Iowa, on May 16, June 21, July 20 and 23, 1975. It was then cleverly engineered at Electric Lady Studios by producer Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin). It remains an Ace Frehley tour de force.

His live rig was simple and that makes his music special. A diehard advocate of Gibson Les Pauls, the Bronx-born guitarist was often seen with a pair of 1974 Customs and a 1973 Deluxe, all modded with DiMarzio Super Distortion humbuckers. The three-pickup ebony Custom had only two actual pickups — the neck slot featured the smoke bomb for concert thrills. His pedals were kept to a minimum.

Smoke bomb

Paul Daniel Frehley was born in the Bronx on April 27, 1951. He was given the name Ace at 16 by the drummer in one of his early bands.
By the autumn of 1971, he was in a financial rut and living at home with his parents, playing in an assortment of bands. Soon, he answered a classified ad posted in The Village Voice on December 17, 1972, by Paul Stanley, who, together with Gene Simmons and Peter Criss, was looking for a lead guitar player with “flash and ability”. The ad was signed only as “Paul”.

He didn’t know who “Paul” was or anything about the band. “For some reason, though, this one was intriguing. I figured, ‘f***, I have flash, and I sure as hell have ability.’ I doubted the part about the band having an album ‘out soon’, but it seemed worth investigating, at the very least,” Frehley said.

During Frehley’s original tenure with Kiss, the band released 11 albums, both studio and live. They are now considered classics.

When Kiss released their self-titled debut album in 1974, critics didn’t warm up to it, but the band became popular for their wild live shows, black-and-white makeup and leather costumes.

Frehley was known for playing a modified Les Paul designed to fill the stage with smoke during his guitar solos. In 2009, he said: “I’m an anomaly, I’m an unschooled musician. I don’t know how to read music, but I’m one of the most famous guitar players in the world, so go figure.”

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were the main songwriters in Kiss, but Frehley’s guitar licks were integral to the band’s success. As a songwriter, Frehley wrote Cold Gin, Parasite, Shock Me, and Talk to Me.

The band had a string of Top 40 hits through the end of the 1970s, when the release of their 1976 albums Destroyer and Rock and Roll Over delivered several radio successes such as Hard Luck Woman, modelled on Rod Stewart’s folk-rock hits, and Calling Dr. Love.

‘Didn’t feel like work’

On his guitar approach, he told Pete Prown, the writer of The Guitarists Who Rocked the World: Ultimate Heavy Metal Guitars: “Ninety per cent of my studio solos are spontaneous; usually the first take is the one I keep. If there are a couple of bad notes, we’ll punch in some new ones. Earlier in my career, I tried working out solos, but now playing off the top of my head works best. The harmonised lead in Detroit Rock City was worked out, of course, but that was written by Bob Ezrin, who produced the Destroyer album.”

In the late 1970s, he became disillusioned by the group’s “desire” to profit. It was during this period that he frequently used cocaine, besides drinking heavily.

“Alcohol and drugs were my constant companion, my best friend — and worst enemy,” Frehley wrote in his memoir. It led to the group replacing Frehley in 1982, though the guitarist claimed in interviews that he quit the band. “Being in the band from the beginning is not a birthright,” Stanley told The Washington Post in 2014. “If you are compromised by drugs and alcohol, then you no longer deserve to wear the uniform.”

After Kiss, he had a somewhat successful solo career but later joined a popular Kiss reunion in the 1990s. He was the inspiration for many guitarists, from Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine to Slash of Guns N’ Roses.

Simmons, Stanley, Frehley and drummer Peter Criss were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

“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.”

“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.”

The guitarist became sober in 2006, thanks to his daughter, Monique, from his marriage to Jeanette Trerotola, whom he married in 1976. The couple separated in the 1980s but never divorced.

The last reunion of Frehley with Kiss came in 2018, during one of their “Kiss Kruises.” He is survived by his wife, Jeanette; his daughter, Monique; his brother, Charles; and his sister, Nancy Salvner.