The ever-outspoken Gene Simmons has opened up about Ace Frehley’s on-and-off relationship with Kiss, including a striking anecdote about his struggles with the pace of life in the band.

In his typically entertaining fashion, the bass player once recalled how he was ready to throw fists during Frehley’s audition for the band in 1973, only for his playing to change everything. Together, they produced 11 albums, as Kiss battled their way to superstardom, and cemented their place as one of America’s biggest bands.

But Frehley’s time in the band was disjointed, leaving the group twice, in 1982 and 2002. His last show was at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, with his omission from the band’s grand Madison Square Garden farewell in 2022 a sore point for the guitarist.

Simmons, who came under fire for controversial comments following his passing last November, has now suggested Frehley didn’t have it in him to go the distance with the glam rockers.

“It’s so hard for the fans. It’s heartbreaking,” he tells The Moynihan Report. “Ace had a massive influence on guitar players — Dimebag Darrell, Mike McCready, Metallica, just everybody across the line.

“But not everybody’s designed in their DNA to run a marathon,” he adds. “Some people just have a short race.”

Another player who idolized Frehley was Eddie Van Halen, and the premier shredder was reportedly eager to fill his platformed boots following his first exit. Ace had grown frustrated with the band’s change in direction, and played only a small role in the creation of Music from “The Elder” in ‘81.

“Ace told me to my face when he was leaving the band, ‘I’m gonna have a solo career ‘cause if I go out on tour again, I’m gonna kill myself,’” Simmons develops. “The psychological pressures affect different people in different ways.

“I have no problem with anything,” he says. “I’m voraciously ambitious and love the attention, money, and fame. But it doesn’t affect everybody the same way.”

Frehley’s solo career got off to a flying start. All four members of the band – completed by co-guitarist Paul Stanley and drummer Peter Criss – issued eponymous solo records in 1978. Sandwiched between the releases of Love Gun (1977) and Dynasty (1979), Frehley’s album outsold his bandmates, creating parallels with George Harrison’s first post-Beatles record, All Things Must Pass.

But as he did in November, Simmons was eager to highlight Frehley’s substance abuse problems and his struggles with life in Kiss.

“I’m not a shrink, but I think it starts with who you are in your own skin,” he believes. “Regular people every day drink themselves until they’re numb and can’t even walk, and use drugs and become drug addicts, even when nobody’s watching, just because they’re not comfortable in their own skin.

“Ace and Peter handled it for a few years, and then they were in and out of the band three different times. And it breaks the heart of fans…”

In April, Simmons opened up about the future of Kiss, with avatar shows and being bigger than Mickey Mouse as topics of conversation. Guitarist Tommy Thayer, who replaced Frehley in 2002, has now confirmed that new music is very much happening.

Speaking to Guitar World, he says he has recorded “a great new song that Paul wrote,” while detailing the band’s grandiose next steps.

“Kiss has always believed in making things an event,” he details. “So whatever new music comes, it has to feel special and have a reason for existing. You don’t make another Kiss record just because you’re supposed to make another Kiss record.”

Steve Farris holds a distinction no guitarist envies: he may have been a member of Kiss for the shortest time in the band’s history.

The future Mr. Mister guitarist was effectively hired and fired during the sessions for Kiss’s 1982 album Creatures of the Night. Yet during his brief stint in the band’s orbit, he accomplished something few people can claim: he sang lead vocals on the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” with Kiss.

At the time, Kiss were searching for a replacement for departing guitarist Ace Frehley. Their commercial peak was behind them, and as work began on what would become Creatures of the Night, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were auditioning players to help revitalize the band.

Farris was playing original music with a group that included three members of country-rock veterans Poco when an unexpected opportunity arrived during a packed show at the Blue Lagoon Saloon in Marina del Rey.

“I play a set, and in that band I had lots of guitar solos. The place was packed,” he tells Vertex Effects. “After the set, some tall guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Ace Frehley’s leaving Kiss. Will you be interested in auditioning?’

“And I’m like, ‘Well, I eat peanut butter and jelly every day, and my Volkswagen Rabbit doesn’t start unless I push it off the clutch. Yeah, I would do that.’”

The man scribbled a phone number on a napkin, and Farris hurriedly assembled an audition tape featuring demos and “anything I could find that showed I played guitar well.”

“Two weeks later, I get a call,” he recalls. “It’s Paul Stanley. He says, ‘Gene and I listened to your tape last night, and we really liked it. We’re down at the Record Plant cutting a record, and we’re having guys come and play on the record. It’s kind of an audition. Want to come down?’”

The answer was obvious.

The next day, Farris arrived at New York’s Record Plant carrying little more than a guitar, a few pedals and a dream.

“I’ve got my Valley Arts Strat, a Goodrich pedal, and a CE-1 Chorus,” he says. “They’re in Studio Four, I’m walking [down the corridor], and Tom Petty’s coming out of one studio, Luther Vandross is on the phone [in another].”

After spending three hours waiting in the hallway while other players auditioned, Farris finally got his shot.

“They’re in the control room, and they hand me a cable. There’s a Marshall in the other room,” he recalls. “Gene and Paul are standing there looking at me.”

He was asked to play an eight-bar solo. Then he played it again.

The response was immediate.

“Can you dye your hair black? Can you wear high heels?”

Farris answered yes to both questions.

“Fuck man,” they replied. “We got the guy.”

“They’re going nuts,” he says. “They say, ‘Don’t cut your hair, we’ll see you Tuesday.’ I was the guy after two solos. The second take is what you hear on the record.”

But the celebration proved premature.

When Farris returned the following week for a full-band rehearsal, Kiss asked him to do something he hadn’t expected: sing.

As Farris explains, he’s not a singer. But he knew he needed to be.

“I realized at one moment, ‘Wow, I’m going to take a stab at this. If I don’t sing, I don’t get the gig,’” he says. “It’s one of those moments. So I have the dubious distinction of having played ‘Honky Tonk Women’ with Kiss, with me singing lead vocal. I wish I had that tape.”

The audition didn’t go as planned. Although Simmons and Stanley loved his guitar playing, they ultimately decided he wasn’t the right fit. Farris remained involved in the Creatures of the Night sessions, but the permanent job eventually went to Vinnie Vincent — the guitarist Ace Frehley would later criticize for playing “too fast.”

More than four decades later, Farris can still laugh about the experience.

“I still do interviews about that freaking solo,” he says.

Not bad for the shortest-serving member in Kiss history.

Kiss may be done with touring, but Tommy Thayer isn’t ruling out the possibility of new music.

The band returned to the stage last month to play two shows at a Kiss Kruise event in Las Vegas. The show saw the quartet perform a candle-lit tribute to their late founding lead guitarist, Ace Frehley. Thayer tells MusicRadar the event was a huge success and teases what else the band has up its collective sleeve.

“Fan events like we just did in Vegas are really great to do, and we’ll probably do more,” he says. “We hadn’t played together for almost two years, [but] it’s funny how quickly everything felt like we hadn’t been apart that long.

“There’s a lot in the works for Kiss moving ahead,” he continues. “We’re not touring anymore, of course, but there’s still a ton happening behind the scenes.”

Thayer took over full time for Frehley in 2002 and has played on two albums with the group. He says more new music isn't out of the question.

“I’m honestly not sure yet,” he says. “It really depends on where things go and how everything evolves over the next year or two. But I do feel like we all still have a lot of great ideas and a desire to keep creating and doing all the things we love doing.”

Thayer adds that a hologram version of the band similar to ABBA's hugely successful Voyage shows is on the list of possibilities.

“It’s been interesting doing the avatars so far,” he says. “I haven’t really thought about what it all means in the big picture, but with technology evolving as quickly as it is, there’s no doubt that this is the direction a lot of entertainment is going.”

Thayer started life in Kiss doing menial work for guitarist Paul Stanley and bass guitarist Gene Simmons while working on their book Kisstory.

That led to him getting the lead guitarist gig in the wake of Frehley’s second departure in 2002. (Frehley, for his part, said Thayer “played the right notes, but didn’t have the right swagger.”) He remained a part of the band up to and including their extravagant tour farewell at Madison Square Garden in 2023.

Although Frehley and founding drummer Peter Criss were originally slated to join Simmons and Stanley for that final show, that idea fell apart.

Simmons has since voiced regrets about how Frehley and Criss were treated. He also had to apologize for his comments that the guitarist died due to “bad decisions.”

An archival interview with Ace Frehley has been released in the guitarist’s memory, and in it the former Kiss man reflects on producer Bob Ezrin’s magic touch. He even credited Ezrin with writing one of his most iconic guitar solos.

Ezrin, once described by Alice Cooper as his band’s unofficial sixth member, has long been known as a hands-on producer. He was the man who convinced the king of shock-rocker to resurrect a misfiring early track and transform it into the satirical political anthem “Elected.” He also persuaded Kiss to get in touch with their softer side on “Beth” — the band’s most successful single — despite protests from Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley.

But his impact on the glam rock giant’s music didn’t end there. On Destroyer, the 1976 LP on which “Beth” also featured, Ezrin had a big sway on Ace Frehley’s lead playing.

“Bob brought a cohesiveness and a sound that we didn't have before,” the guitarist told Banger TV in 2010. “Bob is classically trained, and he’d made a lot of hit records before working with us. He had a proven formula, and we had to kind of fit into his formula.”

Ezrin’s own words about his time cutting Destroyer with Tape Op give insights into the kind of ship he ran.

He pushed the band hard, saying “we spent weeks — 8, 10, 12 hours a day — drilling the material until the band was really comfortable,” he said.

“The rest becomes an emotional process,” he explains. “With most of the music made in studios, you don't really hear that depth of emotion. And the recordings where you do hear that depth of emotion are either ones where the band is comfortable with the material and can just feel the songs — play them with all the emotion that they deserve.

“With Kiss, and to a certain extent Pink Floyd, we figured out the parts first and practiced, practiced, practiced — and then we recorded them.”

But when it came to the guitar solo in “Detroit Rock City,” Ezrin played a special and unique role.

“Bob's the one that came up with the solo for 'Detroit Rock City,’ – I didn't write that,” Frehley revealed. “Bob came up with the melody.

“He had some great ideas, and we were able to execute them pretty much the way he wanted us to. It made for a good marriage, and I think it showed a different side musically of where we were prior to that point.”

The solo certainly has Ezrin's signature flair. Paul Stanley and Frehley harmonize a repeating motif that wouldn't sound out of place on his early records with Alice Cooper, like Love it to Death and Killer.

Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock in 2021, Paul Stanley also revealed the touching backstory to the track, and one that belies the swagger of the finished product.

“Bob Ezrin at the time really wanted us to push ourselves in terms of our lyrics and perspective,” he says. “I remembered that a fan going to our show in Charlotte was hit by a car and died, and I just remember thinking about the idea of somebody traveling to see something that celebrates life, and in the process losing their life.

“So the song became about somebody traveling to a Kiss concert and not making it. It was still championing Detroit, but also memorialized somebody who didn't get there.”

Meanwhile, Gene Simmons has explained why he made Frehley recreate an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo note-for-note on another iconic Kiss hit. And there’s also the solo that Simmons says Frehley stole from the Doors.

Gene Simmons says he has one regret about his relationship with Kiss founding guitarist Ace Frehley. Speaking at the 2025 Kiss Kruise in Las Vegas this past weekend, the bass guitarist said he wishes he had tried harder to give some tough love to Frehley, as well as founding Kiss drummer Peter Kriss, when they were partying too hard.

“If I have any regrets, my hand to God, it’s that I sometimes wish we were smarter and better at trying to help Ace and Peter have better lives,” Simmons said (via People).

Simmons admitted that too often he and others would look the other way rather than confront Frehley and Criss.

“All of us are guilty of it, and so am I. [We’d say] ‘I don’t want to start an argument. Let’s just continue doing the tour.’ Because you want to get through it for selfish reasons, because it’s working, and the chicks, and the money, and you don’t want to ruin anything.

“Meantime, somebody who might be your brother is ruining their life by making bad decisions.

“I wish I had practiced more tough love and been more in the face of people that we cared about,” says Simmons, who at 76 has been anti-drink and drugs his entire life,. “It’s not going to be a popular thing, or you’re going to argue about it, but in the long run you’re going to be helping that person, hopefully, change their life.”

Simmons made similar comments last year when speaking about the duo's contributions to the group he and guitarist Paul Stanley put together after the failure of their previous band, Wicked Lester.

“Ace and Peter have as much credit for the beginning of the band as Paul and I do. There's no question it was that chemistry,” Simmons told Backstage Pass (via Classic Rock). “They should have been here with us 50 or 55 years later and enjoying the fruits of their labor. But sadly, they're not.

“It's not even unique,” he added. “Go to almost every band and you'll find people ingesting stuff more than the bum on the street corner, except they're richer and they can afford to ingest more. It's sad.”

Frehley, who died on October 16 following a fall at home, eventually got clean and sober. He once told Classic Rock that “alcohol and drugs were my constant companion, my best friend — and worst enemy. Sometimes, they were a deterrent to my career and personal life.” Ultimately, he says a phone call from his daughter, Monique, drove him to get sober.

The guitarist was understandably a topic of conversation at the Kiss Kruise event. As reported by Guitar World, the band held a candle-lit tribute to him before performing an unplugged set on Saturday. The show marked the first time Simmons and Stanley have taken to the stage together since their End of the Road tour concluded in New York in December 2023,.

In related news, Simmons has reflected on the solo Eddie Van Halen recorded for a Kiss demo — a band he once asked to join — and why he made Ace copy it note for note.

A veteran guitarist has claimed that one of Ace Frehley's most iconic Kiss solos laid the foundation for Eddie Van Halen to flip the guitar world upside down with "Eruption."

It’s not the first time that links have been made between Ed's 1977 guitar solo and various other guitar players. For example, Harvey Mandel said he deserves credit for introducing EVH to the two-handed tapping techniques that are a signature element of the song.

But this new assertion of a link between the virtuoso and Kiss — a band he loved so much that he once asked to join them — is something altogether more incendiary.

The claim has been made by former Cro-Mags guitarist Parris Mayhew in the newly published book, Talk to Me: Conversations With Ace Frehley, by Greg Prato.

Despite his deep-rooted associations with the New York hardcore punk scene, Mayhew is a big admirer of the late Space Ace. He says there are clear similarities between Ace's solo on "Shock Me" from Alive II and Eddie's showcase.

“People understand and revere how important Eddie Van Halen is. It's so clear,” Mayhew states. “He is so much better than everybody else. But he also has all that fire and magnetism and magic that Ace had. He just did it better.

“And nobody that I knew who liked [Van Halen's debut] would accept the fact that this guy was influenced by that guy,” he continues. “And if you listen to the ‘Shock Me’ solo and ‘Eruption’ back to back, and if you don't hear that the 'Shock Me' solo is completely a template for the 'Eruption' solo, then you don't have ears.”

Frehley's solo — which, like "Eruption," is performed without accompaniment — comes at the 4:05 mark. While there are similarities in his and Van Halen's approach and style, including plenty of squealing pinch harmonics, there are good reasons to doubt the claim Ed took his lead from Ace.

Consider the recording and release dates: Alive II was issued on October 24, 1977. Van Halen's self-titled debut album, which features "Eruption," wasn't released until the following February, but "Eruption" was recorded September 8, 1977, several weeks before Alive II came out.

For that matter, Ed had been performing "Eruption" well before its September 8 recording date, as can be heard on a live taping from June 10, 1977. The recording of "Shock Me" on Alive II comes from a show at the L.A. Forum in late August of that year. To claim it was a template for a work that was already months in the making seems quite a stretch.

This isn't the first time someone has claimed Eddie took something from Ace. Even Ace thought Eddie began using two-handed tapping after seeing him do it in concert. Eddie said he saw Jimmy Page do it in 1971, well before Kiss existed, making him realize the technique's potential for his electric guitar fireworks.

Mayhew admits his claim has led to debates with fans over the years. But he stands by it.

"When I first heard 'Eruption', I was like, 'Oh my God, he's totally ripping off Ace!' I have never heard anybody else say that. And when I've brought it up, I've had people argue it down. And I'm like, 'Listen to them back to back.'

"Eddie Van Halen, if he was alive, and he claimed that he didn't just nick that whole thing as a template for 'Eruption', he's a liar."

In related news. former Van Halen bass player Michael Anthony has revealed the career-saving advice Eddie got from David Lee Roth in the band's early days, and Carl Verheyen has recalled the time Eddie borrowed one of his Les Pauls, causing him distress in the process

The one-two punch of Alive! and Destroyer made Kiss a success in the mid 1970s. In the summer of 1976, shortly after the release of Destroyer, Gene Simmons decided to use his newfound fame and fortune to help find and lead another group to the top of the charts. While in Los Angeles, he saw a young, unsigned Van Halen perform on the Sunset Strip and decided he would turn them into superstars.

He cut a demo tape with the group — Eddie Van Halen, drummer Alex Van Halen, singer David Lee Roth and bass guitar player Michael Anthony — at Village Recorder in L.A., then flew the group to New York City for overdubs and final production at Electric Lady Studios.

Nothing much came of the effort — Kiss’s management vetoed Simmons’ request to sign the group — but the bassist stayed friendly with Van Halen. (Simmons has said Eddie even tried to join Kiss in 1983 when he grew tired of leading his own band.)

As Simmons explains, while Van Halen were in New York City, he hired Eddie and Alex to help him record demos for three songs, including the Kiss hit “Christine Sixteen.” Simmons says he liked Eddie’s guitar solo on the cut so much that he made Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley copy it note for note.

“Around ’77, I wrote ‘Christine Sixteen’ and two other songs,” Simmons says. “On the way back from Japan, at one in the morning, I called Eddie and Alex and said, ‘I’ve got some songs — you want to help me do these demos?’ And they did.

“Eddie did the solo on ‘Christine Sixteen’ in one take. I loved it so much that I made Ace copy it note for note. So when you hear ‘Christine Sixteen,’ that’s Eddie’s solo you’re hearing, but copied by Ace.”

Granted, the solo is short on the kind of fireworks Eddie would soon be unleashing on Van Halen’s records, but it’s a tasty fill that shows young Ed’s maturity as a player. Whereas another guitarist might have used the opportunity to show off his chops, Ed gives the song just what it needs.

Simmons might have showed similar restraint. When it comes to crude and rude rock songs, they don’t get much worse than “Christine Sixteen,” which Kiss delivered on their 1977 album, Love Gun. The song concerns a 16-year-old girl, and the much older singer — Simmons was 27 at the time — who is spending too much time hanging around her high school waiting for a glimpse of her. Many radio stations banned the song. Others played it only during late-night broadcast hours.

As Simmons explained in the liner notes to his 2017 box set, The Gene Simmons Vault, the song was written as a retort to Kiss guitarist Paul Stanley.

“Paul would say, ‘Gene, all you ever write about are monster songs. Like ‘God of Thunder,’’’ Simmons wrote. In fact “God of Thunder” didn’t exist at the time Stanley said it; he just made the name up in the moment, but it sparked an idea. “And of course, he went home and wrote that song, as a semi-parody of a Gene song,” Simmons explained.

Simmons similarly challenged Stanley, telling him, “All you ever write are teenage girlie songs, like ‘Christine Sixteen.’

“And as soon as I heard myself say that, I quickly wrote it.”

Perhaps too quickly. With lyrics like “when I saw you coming out of school that day / that day I knew, I knew / I’ve got to have you,” “Christine Sixteen” is creepy and cringey.

Nevertheless, it reached a respectable number 25 on the Billboard charts.

Notably, “Christine Sixteen” isn’t the only time Frehley copied a solo. As Simmons told The Magnificent Others With Billy Corgan last February, the late Ace was a huge fan of Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and copied his electric guitar solo for “She,” a track from the 1975 Kiss album, Dressed to Kill. The Krieger solo comes from the Doors’ “Five to One,” from their 1968 album, Waiting for the Sun.

One week after Ace Frehley’s death, New Jersey state officials have ordered an examination into the Kiss founding guitarist’s death.

Frehley died on October 16 in Morristown, New Jersey after his family decided to remove him from life support. The guitarist had been in a coma and on a ventilator after falling in his home studio.

TMZ reports that “a New Jersey medical examiner is now investigating his death.” The Morris County Medical Examiner’s office is conducting a toxicology screening along with an external body examination to finalize the cause of death.

“The rep also said Ace's cause of death will be finalized in the next few weeks after the toxicology report is completed,” the site reports.

Frehley’s health problems began before September 26 when he suffered what was described by his team as "a minor fall in his studio.” He subsequently canceled the September 26 show on his tour in support of his most recent solo album, 10,000 Volts, released February 2024. On October 6, his team announced he was cancelling all remaining shows in October and November to focus on his recovery.

Shortly afterward, on October 10, Frehley texted Guitar Player contributing writer Andrew Daly to confirm he was well and just taking a break.

“All good,” the guitarist wrote. “…needed a timeout, from a minor fall on the carpet in my studio!”

On October 16, reports surfaced that the Frehley had suffered a brain bleed and was on life support. His family decided to remove him from life support that evening.

“We are completely devastated and heartbroken. In his last moments, we were fortunate enough to have been able to surround him with loving, caring, peaceful words, thoughts, prayers and intentions as he left this earth,” his family said in a statement.

“We cherish all of his finest memories, his laughter, and celebrate his strengths and kindness that he bestowed upon others. The magnitude of his passing is of epic proportions, and beyond comprehension. Reflecting on all of his incredible life achievements, Ace’s memory will continue to live on forever!”

Frehley, whose electric guitar of choice throughout his career was a Gibson Les Paul, was a founding member of Kiss, the glam-rock act that brought a new level of theatrics to rock performance. With his silver outfit, painted face and tall platform boots, the guitarist became known as the Spaceman and Space Ace.

He often made light of his habit of tripping over his boots onstage.

“I used to fall a lot in those boots,” Frehley told Music Radar earlier this year. “A lot of times. Paul [Stanley] would would cover for me by walking over to me like it was part of the show.”

Sadly, that same habit would result in his death.

Ace Frehley will be forever celebrated for his years with Kiss, the iconic group he cofounded in the 1970s with Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and Peter Criss.

But Frehley — who died on October 16 at the age of 74 from injuries after a fall at home — will also be remembered for his signature solo hit: “New York Groove,” released in 1978.

That was the year all four Kiss members issued solo albums. But only Ace scored a top 20 hit, when “New York Groove” reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was especially appropriate, since the electric guitarist was a Bronx-born native of the Big Apple.

Since then, “New York Groove” has remained popular in the New York area, where it’s become the Mets signature tune, played at home games to celebrate a win.

But as Ace explained, he had one regret about the song: He didn’t write it.

“A lot of people think I wrote ‘New York Groove,’” he told Louder in an interview published October 6. “It’s not a myth that I’ve perpetuated, but that’s the way it is.

“I wish I would’ve wrote the song, though. I would’ve made a lot more cash out of it,” he said with a laugh.

The foot-stomping three-chord tune was actually written by Russ Ballard, the British songwriter behind hits like Rainbow’s 1979 hit “Since You Been Gone” and “God Gave Rock and Roll to You,” originally recorded by Argent in 1973 and covered by Kiss, no less, in 1991 as "God Gave Rock '’N' Roll to You II," with modified lyrics.

Ballard told Louder he wrote the song while en route to New York City for the first time.

“While I was sitting on the plane, I got out a pen and paper and started thinking of the phrase ‘back in the New York groove,’” he said. “That’d be a good title for a song, I reckoned; the whole idea of someone going back to New York and singing about the experience.”

The tune was originally cut by the London-based glam-rock band Hello in 1975 and became a number nine hit in the U.K.

Strangely, Frehley had no recollection of hearing Hello’s version.

“Or maybe I have and I just can’t remember,” he told Louder. “Can you send me an MP3 of it?”

Freely said “New York Groove” became forever associated with him after “we realized we needed a more commercial song for inclusion on my solo record.”

“To be honest, I actually didn't want to record this song,” he told Guitar Player last year. “Eddie Kramer my producer, introduced me to it. He kept saying to me, ‘Ace, you’ve got to record this song,’ and I kept saying, ‘I don't think it has anything to do with any of the other songs.’

“But once we had finished recording a lot of the album in Connecticut, we went down to Manhattan to do the overdubs and vocals, and once we got down there, he finally talked me into doing it.”

He cut the track at Plaza Sound Studios above Radio City Music Hall on 51st Street, giving him a memorable view of the hall’s Rockettes dancers to go with the session.

“It was kinda cool because the Rockettes used to sun themselves on the roof,” he recalled to Louder. “These beautiful, semi-naked girls were constantly walking into the studio and checking out what was going on. So that was quite a nice recording environment.”

Ace also remembered that, on this particular session, he used his sunburst ‘59 Gibson Les Paul, one of the guitars he, unfortunately, parted ways with.

“I bought it in a guitar store, and it was really faded, but it was a great guitar,” he told Guitar Player. “Gibson actually ended up putting out a copy of it several years ago. They got ahold of a guy that owned it and did a version that was aged and a regular version too.”

Considering that Ace often stood in Simmons and Stanley’s creative shadow, it was a point of pride that he was the only Kiss member to have a solo hit. “I'm starting to come out of my shell and I'm going to get stronger,” he told People in 1980, noting that the song’s success gave him some clout in the group.

Despite that, he didn’t gloat over his achievement.

“It didn’t feel like I was getting one over on the other guys in Kiss,” he remarked to Louder. “It’s just something that happened. I was lucky that it came out as good as it did.

“I never really listened to the other three solo records, although I did put Gene’s on once. When I heard his version of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star,’ I had to pull it off the turntable, ha-ha-hargh!” The tune was originally a children’s favorite from the Disney animated film Pinocchio, but in Simmons’ hands it became a cringe-inducing oddity.

While “New York Groove” remains one of Ballard’s best-known tunes, he remains a little mystified by its success.

“I guess it surprised me because it’s so incredibly simple,” he says. “They say a good song will always sell. And there’s a lot of truth in that.”

Paul “Ace” Frehley’s passing on Thursday, at the age of 74, leaves us with a lot of memories. He will forever be Kiss’s Spaceman, the lead guitarist with the slightly vacant look but the undeniably present chops, as he fired Roman candles from his headstock and rocked through the likes of his songs “Shock Me,” “Cold Gin” “New York Groove,” and other Kiss favorites.

After answering a Village Voice ad placed by Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Frehley went on to serve two tenures with the band — from its formation in 1973 to 1982, and then from 1996 to 2002. During that time, he appeared on 11 of the group’s studio albums and three of its live releases, and guested on four tracks from 1996’s Kiss Unplugged.

Frehley’s self-titled set in 1978 went Platinum and was the top seller of the four Kiss solo albums released concurrently. He went on to issue nine other albums — two with his band Frehley’s Comet and another pair of Origins projects on which he covered songs from the catalogs of his very favorite bands (he was working on a third at the time of his death).

Ace certainly let the music — and his electric guitar — do the talking, but he always had plenty to say away from the stage. Which makes his passing seem like a good time to share a dozen of the interesting things he’s shared over the years.

On meeting Jimi Hendrix in 1969

“I was lucky enough to sneak backstage and I ended up roadie-ing for Jimi. I set up Mitch Mitchell’s drums, which was a very surreal experience ’cause I used to walk around high school with the Are You Experienced album under my arm and just stare at it. I actually froze for a second and said, ‘This can’t really be happening!’ [laughs] But [Hendrix] just shook my hand and said, ‘Thanks for helping,’ which is a helluva memory to have.”

On seeing Led Zeppelin

“It was their first New York appearance, at the Fillmore East [on January 31 and February 1, 1969], when I was 16, 17 years old, and it changed my life. They were opening up for Iron Butterfly, and a friend of mine — actually it was the lead singer of my band at the time, Larry Kelly — he told me about this new band: ‘They’re going to be great!’ I got a hold of the record, and it blew me away. When I went to see them live it was just like, ‘Whoa…!’ I said to myself, ‘This is gonna be the next big band.’ And the rest was history.”

On getting sober

“It took me a long time. I’m stubborn. [laughs] I’m a Taurus. By the time I left Kiss for good [in 2002] all my addictions and abuses caught up with me. I had to get clean and sober and get my life back together. I basically worked through the 12-step program and therapy, changing my friends, hanging out with people who are clean and sober, changing my life, getting in touch with my higher power, turning my life around.

“It’s easy to say ‘I don’t want to drink anymore’ or do this or that. But you can’t do it halfway. You have to follow through. There’s some people who can do that the first time in rehab, then there’s other people who go in and out and end up in rehab a dozen times before they get it, and one day they just get it.”

On the hardest song to play since then

“I feel a little funny playing ‘Cold Gin’ ’cause I don’t drink anymore and I don’t promote it. But it’s such a kick-ass song… I think that me talking about the fact I’m clean and sober and I’m not a party animal anymore is plenty. I can still get away with playing it.”

On Simmons and Stanley

“We had some great times together — more good than bad. We’re all still friends. I know a lot of people think we hate each other, but that’s not true. We’re just like a family; sometimes brothers and sisters have arguments and so on, but when the shit hits the fan, we’re there for each other.

“I wish them the best, I really do. There were just times when I had enough and I had to leave and do my own thing. I’m driven by the quality of the music, and Paul and Gene are driven by different things, that’s all.”

Was End of the Road really the end for Kiss?

“Kiss is supposedly retired — which I don’t believe is gonna happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if they reformed. No matter what they say, that’s what those guys do.”

On maintaining the Kiss legacy

“I’ve actually added two more Kiss songs to my set; I added ‘Shout It Out Loud’ and ‘Rock and Roll All Nite,’ and everybody was on their feet and having a good time. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter who wrote the song; I played the guitar solos on those records, and that’s good enough for me.

“And I’ve decided I’m gonna keep going until the wheels fall off. There have been a lot of ups and downs since I got sober 18 years ago… but to me the music was always the most important thing, not the makeup and all that shit.”

On the makeup — and all that shit

“Y’know, I hated reading reviews that said, ‘Yeah, Kiss played last night at such-and-such arena and their show was incredible and somebody breathed fire and somebody’s guitar smoked and rockets and explosions and blah, blah, blah.’ And they didn’t really talk about the music. That used to piss me off all the time, ’cause to me it’s always the music first and the other shit second. It’s even more important to me now.”

On Simmons' and Stanley's plans for a Kiss avatar show

“I wish them all the best [they filmed motion capture for before the end of the farewell tour], but deep in my gut I have a feeling it may not be as successful as they think it’s gonna be. That’s not just me talking; a lot of people I’ve talked to feel that way. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing like a live band onstage with real amps and singing into the microphones, but that’s just my opinion. Let them prove us wrong. I just want them to be happy and doing their thing.”

On Alive!, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in September

“Well, that was a great record. That was the record that really broke Kiss. Prior to that album we put out three records which did okay; they were kind of mediocre sales. But once the live one hit, it broke all records. It was on the charts for years and that was the album that put us in arenas.

“It didn’t surprise me at all because Kiss is really known for its live show, and Alive! is kind of a souvenir of a Kiss concert and captures the essence of what Kiss was, live. We doctored up a lot of the mistakes, ’cause everybody makes mistakes live, so some of the mistakes were fixed in the studio with the help of Eddie Kramer, the producer. But the essence of the album comes across. The excitement comes across. It was the right move at the right time.”

On 2024’s 10,000 Volts, his last solo album

“It’s pretty much the same thing I set out to do on every record. I didn’t do anything different on this record than I’ve done on my other records, except I’ve been singing a lot more because I’ve been touring with my band. So I guess the more you sing the better you sing.

“I’m glad, ’cause here I am at age 72 and I put out one of the best records I’ve ever recorded and the singing is some of the best vocals I’ve ever done. This album surpasses all my expectations. It really doesn’t make any sense, but I’m the kind of guy that always broke rules, y’know?”

On Origins Vol. 3, the covers album he was working on at the time of his death

“When I was a kid, basically it was Led Zeppelin, it was the Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, the Rolling Stones… and it’s so much fun to go back and do my own versions of their songs. I was on YouTube the other day and I typed in ‘classic rock songs from the ’60s and ’70s’ and nothing grabbed me yet.

“The Origins records are a different animal, ’cause the songs are already written and the lyrics are already written. All I have to do is Ace-ify it and put my stamp on it. Right now… I’ve got a lot of time to figure out what I want to do for the next record.”

As the rock world mourns the death of Ace Frehley, his former Kiss bandmates reponded to the news of his passing on October 16.

Guitarist Paul Stanley and bass guitarist Gene Simmons issued a joint statement, saying, “We are devastated by the passing of Ace Frehley. He was an essential and irreplaceable rock soldier during some of the most formative foundational chapters of the band and its history.

“He is and will always be a part of Kiss’s legacy. Our thoughts are with Jeanette, Monique and all those who loved him, including our fans around the world.”

Peter Criss, who with Frehley, Stanley and Simmons made up the group’s founding members, wrote on social media, “I’m shocked!!! My friend… I love you!”

Simmons acknowledged the group’s upcoming Kennedy Center’s Honor on December 7, for which Frehley will now be recognized posthumously.

“Sadder still, Ace didn’t live long enough to be honored at the Kennedy Ctr Honors event in Dec.” he wrote on his personal X account. “Ace was the eternal rock soldier. Long may his legacy live on!”

The Kennedy Center paid tribute to Frehley as well, saying, “We will be paying tribute to this “rock soldier”, his work, and his legacy at our ceremony in December.”

Tributes continued to flow from the many guitarists and musicians who Frehley influenced and entertained over his lifetime in music.

In a post on Pearl Jam’s official social media accounts, guitarist Mike McCready credited Frehley and Kiss for influencing him to play guitar.

“Ace was a hero of mine and also I would consider a friend,” he wrote. “I studied his solos endlessly over the years…

“Just listen to “Alive”, I used his solo from “She” as a template. Ace jammed on “Black Diamond” with Pearl Jam at Madison Square Garden…a dream come true for me.

“I would not have picked up a guitar without Ace and KISS’s influence.

“RIP it out Ace, you changed my life.”

Guitarist Tom Morello, a longtime Kiss fan, wrote on his Instagram, “My first guitar hero, Ace Frehley, has passed away. The legendary Space Ace Frehley inspired generations to love rock n roll and love rock n roll guitar playing.

“His timeless riffs and solos, the billowing smoke coming from his Les Paul, the rockets shooting from his headstock, his cool spacey onstage wobble and his unforgettable crazy laugh will be missed but will never be forgotten. Thank you, Ace for a lifetime of great music and memories.”

Frehley was, as Morello noted, a lifetime player of Gibson Les Pauls, his electric guitar of choice. The guitar maker paid tribute to him on X, saying, “We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of the legendary Ace Frehley. Thank you for the decades of music inspiring generations with your electrifying guitar work and unforgettable stage presence.

“Your sound helped define rock ’n’ roll. Our thoughts are with Ace’s family, friends, and fans around the world. Rest easy, Spaceman—your legacy will live on forever.”

Ace Frehley didn’t just play guitar in Kiss. He didn’t just write songs and sing either. He poured himself into the gig, with a personality and style that was too big for his Space Ace costume to contain.

His off-kilter, truly idiosyncratic guitar approach defined Kiss’s early six-stringed sound. Classic cuts like “Deuce,” “Cold Gin,” “Detroit Rock City," “Love Gun” and — his signature tune — “Shock Me” could have never happened without the Space Ace.

But Frehley — who died on October 16 following a fall at his studio — was too big for Kiss to contain. His tenure lasted from 1973 through 1982 and again from 1996 through 2002. During his absence a handful of guitarists filled in — including Bruce Kulick, Vinnie Vincent and Tommy Thayer — but none could take his place.

It goes without saying that Frehley — an admittedly unschooled musician who leans heavily into vibe and balls-to-the-wall cock rock — is a different animal than those who came after him. For one thing, he's been the most influential lead guitarist in the group by far, with fans that range from Kim Thayil to John 5. “I’d probably have practiced a little more If I knew I was going to affect that many people’s lives,” Ace told us recently when discussing five classic Kiss tracks. “It does make me proud and very happy though that I influenced a lot of great guitar players."

It goes without saying that when it comes to quintessential Kiss guitar theatrics, the buck kinda, sorta stops with Ace. But where does that leave Vinnie, Bruce, and Tommy? We'll let Ace tell you himself.

Bruce Kulick

“I would say that Bruce was the best guitar player all around. He’s technically a better player than I am, in my opinion. He can play stuff that I can’t play. He’s just a technically better musician. I never took a guitar lesson, you know? But when it comes to playing melodic guitar solos, you know that nobody is better than me!

“A lot of that has to do with how you hit the string with the guitar pick and hitting the string with your finger at the same time. That’s how you get the harmonics. A lot of musicians aren’t even able to hit that. It takes a while to learn that technique with a really good vibrato—but it’s a winning combination.

“I know Bruce admires me as a musician and vice versa. We’ve jammed together at a couple of conventions—but it hasn’t really gone any further than that. Well, I mean… on my last Origins record [Volume 2], he played on a Hendrix song, ‘Manic Depression.’ We traded off solos, but it was done remotely with Pro Tools.”

Vinnie Vincent

“Vinnie Vincent played too fast. I never paid much attention to him as far as anything else. I know that Paul [Stanley] used to complain to me about Vinnie. He said that he was like a loose cannon, and that he doubled the length of the guitar solo, and that he played things too fast, and they couldn’t control him, you know?

“But I was really amazed… I hadn’t met him over the years. The first time I met him was a few years ago in Florida — and I didn’t realize how short he was. [laughs] I was really like towering over him! But the problem with shredding is that it’s not memorable, you know? When you put 64 notes in a bar or two bars, you don’t know what the guy is playing. I mean… not everybody can do that, but I’m more into melody.”

Tommy Thayer

“Tommy played the right notes, but he didn’t have the right swagger. He just doesn’t have my same technique. For example, my father was an excellent pianist. He could play Beethoven, Chopin, and everything. He would always say to me, ‘It’s not so much playing the right notes; it’s how hard you hit it and how to use the pedals below the piano. It’s all in the technique!

“I never forgot that. And because my father had a very light touch, and he had excellent technique, I took that and transferred it to the electric guitar, and my focus toward it. So, for me, it’s not just about hitting the right notes but doing it with style. You know — my style.

“But it is true that Tommy had to show me some of those old parts when I came back for the reunion. You’ve got to realize that there’s songs that Paul and Gene [Simmons] wanted me to perform that I hadn’t played in 10 or 15 years. Tommy’s like an encyclopedia, and he knows how to play the right notes.

“But Tommy was funny. When I played certain solos, I played them at a different position on the neck than he thought I did. He would go, ‘Wow, that’s surprising!’ I’d go, ‘Well, Tommy, I’m just not a schooled musician, so I play things where I feel like playing them!’ And it surprised him because he thought I’d played them at a different position on the neck.

“As it turned out, he wasn’t playing them correctly, either. I thought it was funny, and so did he.” [laughs]

Ace Frehley, the iconic guitarist who was a cofounder of Kiss, died today. He was 74.

His publicist reports that he passed away peacefully surrounded by loved ones in Morristown, New Jersey.

Frehley’s family issued the following statement:

“We are completely devastated and heartbroken. In his last moments, we were fortunate enough to have been able to surround him with loving, caring, peaceful words, thoughts, prayers and intentions as he left this earth. We cherish all of his finest memories, his laughter, and celebrate his strengths and kindness that he bestowed upon others. The magnitude of his passing is of epic proportions, and beyond comprehension. Reflecting on all of his incredible life achievements, Ace’s memory will continue to live on forever!”

Frehley suffered what was described by his team as "a minor fall in his studio" in late September. That resulted in him cancelling a tour date for September 26, then cancelling the remaining dates on his tour on October 6.

“Due to some ongoing medical issues, Ace has made the difficult decision to cancel the remainder of his 2025 dates,” an announcement on his Instagram read. Those dates included a handful of shows in October and November in support of his most recent solo album, 10,000 Volts, February 2024.

But in the following week, rumors spread online that Frehley was in worse condition than originally thought.

On October 16, the day of his death, TMZ reported that Frehley was on life support and that his family was considering removing it.

Paul Daniel Frehley was born in the Bronx, New York, and began playing guitar at age 13. Frehley’s musical influences ranged from Led Zeppelin to Cream to the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix (for whom he was briefly a roadie at the age of 18).

With a musical legacy spanning 50-plus years, Frehley began performing with various bands in the early 70s until he joined Peter Criss, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons to form the iconic rock band Kiss. As lead guitarist for the band, his persona was known as Space Ace, and later, the Spaceman.

In 1978, Frehley delivered his self-titled debut solo album, which reached Platinum status. It was followed by several others, including Frehley’s Comet, Anomaly and the 2014 release Space Invader, which hit number nine on the Billboard 200.

Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, Slash, Lita Ford and John 5 collaborated with Frehley in 2016 on Origins Vol. 1, which reached number one on the Billboard Top Hard Rock Albums Chart and scaled to the top five of the Billboard Top Rock Albums Chart. Frehley followed up Origins Vol. 1 with “Spaceman in 2018 and Origins Vol.2. He was preparing to work on Origins Vol. 3 at the time of his death.

Frehley was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Kiss in 2014 and inducted into Hollywood’s Rock Walk in 1999. A lifelong player of Gibson's Les Paul electric guitar, he received a 1999 Gibson USA Legends award and was to be a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors with Kiss this December 7.

Frehley’s was on tour this year in support of his last album, 10,000 Volts, which features guest appearances by Paul Stanley, Robin Zander and Bruce Kulick.

Frehley is survived by his wife Jeanette, daughter Monique, brother Charles, sister Nancy Salvner, nieces Suncere Frehley and Julie Salvner, nephews Sky Frehley and Andrew Salvner, sister-in-law Michelanne and brother-in-law Ron Salvner.

Founding Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley was forced to cancel his concert appearance on Friday, September 26, after taking a fall in his studio.

The Space Ace has been told by his doctors not to travel.

His camp broke the news in an update:

“Dear Rock Soldiers, Ace had a minor fall in his studio, resulting in a trip to the hospital. He is fine, but against his wishes, his doctor insists that he refrain from travel at this time.

“As a result, he is forced cancel his performance at the Antelope Valley Fair in Lancaster, California on Friday, September 26th. Please go to the fair to support his friends in Quiet Riot and Vixen, and Ace looks forward to continuing on his tour and finishing work on his next album, Origins Vol. 4.”

Frehley has a history of falling during his tenure in Kiss, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. His high-heeled boots would frequently trip him up, causing him to take spills onstage. Whenever it happened, his bandmates Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley would race over and begin playing over him, as if the entire thing was planned.

“I used to fall a lot in those boots,” Frehley told Music Radar earlier this year. “A lot of times. Paul would cover for me by walking over to me like it was part of the show. He made it look like it was choreography or something.

“If nobody realized I’d fallen, I play on my knees and get back up. It was just part of the show!”

Frehley also damaged his knees by falling on them when performing the solo on “Black Diamond.” The fact that his electric guitar of choice is a Gibson Les Paul only added to his pain.

"I screwed my knees up doing that,” he admitted. :I would drop to my knees, and the weight of the Les Paul really killed them.

"During the Reunion Tour, I ended up chipping a bone in my knee, and the doctor said, ‘Listen, you gotta stop doing that, or you'll end up in a wheelchair.’"

"We ended up putting a pad under the carpet where I’d fall. I tried to hit it — and if you look at old videos, you can see that I’d go down one knee at a time."

We hope Ace is well and on the mend soon. His next concert dates begin October 10, in Decatur, Illinois.

Nearly two years after the curtain fell on Kiss for the final time, Ace Frehley has finally shared details as to why he was a notable absentee from the band’s End of the Road tour.

The final iteration of the rock heavyweights featured mainstays Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer. That meant there was no room for original guitarist Frehley, who recorded 11 albums with the group, the last being 1998’s jeopardy-ridden Psycho Circus.

His omission — and that of original drummer Peter Criss — was glaring to fans, especially when he is considered a key part of the band’s classic line-up. Speaking to Guitar World, Frehley has been keen to set the record straight on how it went down.

“About nine months before Kiss was going to play [their final show at] Madison Square Garden, both Paul and Gene were saying, ‘We’re going to bring everybody out on stage,’” he details.

It felt natural — pleasantly predictable, even – that the stars of the band’s long, often turbulent history, all got a look in at their blockbuster bow out. But that’s not the way it panned out.

“A few months before the concert, they both changed their tune and said, ‘Ace and Peter aren’t going to do it,’” Frehley continues. “In fact, Paul went on to say, ‘If Ace and Peter got on stage with us, the band could be called Piss.’ So, I kind of got into an argument with him.”

Frehley’s last show with the band came in 2001, at the end of Kiss’ first farewell tour. Since then, he’s focused on his solo career, releasing seven albums. Despite the animosity felt towards his former bandmates, however, he isn’t ruling out donning the Spaceman make-up again in the future.

“I’m the kind of guy that never says never,” he says, diplomatically. “I don’t hate Paul or Gene. We’re rock and roll brothers, and Peter, too. So, anything can happen.”

That being said, there are caveats. A reunion is far from impending, because he’s “having too much fun doing my own thing.”

“And maybe,” he adds, “I’ll eventually get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist.”

Kiss were inducted into the Hall in 2014. If Frehley manages what currently seems a slightly unlikely feat, he’d become the 29th musician to double dip in its annals. He’d follow the likes of Eric Clapton (The Yardbirds, Cream, and as a solo artist), Ronnie Wood (the Rolling Stones, Faces), and all four Beatles.

The latest to follow in those sizable footsteps was Ozzy Osbourne, who, following Back Sabbath's 2006 induction, was honoured for his solo career last November. That ceremony saw Wolfgang Van Halen seemingly put the EVH-Randy Rhoads rivalry to bed by joining members of Metallica, Tool, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play “Crazy Train”.

There were hopes among the Kiss fandom that Frehley would feature at November’s Kiss Army event in Las Vegas, where Simmons, Stanley, and Bruce Kulick are set to reprise the band's unmasked era. This time, Frehley takes full responsibility for his absence.

“They asked me and I declined,” he states, leaving no room for misinterpretation. “There’s no way I’m gonna be involved with that. Their biggest mistake is that they should have done that at [the 19,500 capacity] Madison Square Garden, not in Las Vegas in a 5000-seater, or whatever it is.”

Back in February, Frehley sat down with Guitar Player to offer his thoughts on his Kiss replacements, and he didn't hold back. He’s also said the band are lying about his two departures from the group, and has offered his side of the story.

It’s no secret that Kiss’s 1975 album Alive! was doctored in the studio with overdubs. Guitarists Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss have confirmed it in their autobiographies, while bassist Gene Simmons has discussed it elsewhere.

While the album was intended to capture the energy of a live Kiss show, getting all the pieces to work with a group like Kiss proved difficult. Stanley’s animated stage moves meant he wasn’t always on mic, and the heat from the stage lights could throw the guitars out of tune.

Overdubbing and re-creating those parts in the studio allowed them to rectify the issues while maintaining the live energy of the original recording.

Alive! producer and engineer Eddie Kramer confirms that the shows’ production elements were largely to blame.

“Bombs going off, Gene spitting fire, rockets from Ace’s guitar. And imagine leaping about the stage in those super-high-heeled boots!” he tells Guitar Player today. “It’s no wonder things got a little bit out of whack.

“Kiss was a new band and the effort they put out in those shows was monumental, so we did a bunch of guitar and vocal overdubs at Electric Lady Studios,” he says, referring to the facility he helped Jimi Hendrix build in the heart of Greenwich Village.

By coincidence, Peter Frampton was at Electric Lady working on Frampton Comes Alive, his monumental live album that topped the charts in 1976. And as Frampton revealed to this writer in a 2005 interview, Frehley and Stanley made ample use of his gear while sweetening up Alive!

“We were mixing Frampton Comes Alive, and Kiss were next door doing the same thing for Alive!,” Frampton said. “But they kept on coming to us and asking if we got guitars, amps or basses, as they were doing some fixing on their live record.”

Among the guitars Frampton had with him was his famous mid-1950s Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty,” the iconic instrument featured on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive! and the same electric guitar he played on Humble Pie’s breakthrough album, Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore. Frampton would dub the guitar Phenix after it survived a 1980 plane crash and was considered lost before he recovered it some 32 years later.

“They just kept on coming in and borrowing all sorts of different stuff,” Frampton confirms. “So my equipment is on that album — but not me!”

Kramer confirms Frampton’s account but doesn’t recall if any of his guitars made an appearance on Alive!

“I do remember Peter’s amps in Studio A other than the Marshall stacks that Ace and Paul had,” he says. “Aside from them doing lead vocals and some harmonies, that’s all the gear I can remember now, as it’s ‘only’ 50 years ago now.”

Although some critics have taken shots at Alive! over the years, given the studio work that was performed, Kramer has no regrets about the decision to improve upon the performances.

“After having heard all of the original shows and the rehearsals, they were remarkably good,” he affirms. “The essentials were there and well played, and we did whatever was needed to make that a great live album.

“In the end, it was the album that broke Kiss big time by going multi-Platinum and selling close to eight million copies.”

As for Frampton Comes Alive!, it also gave the guitarist his breakthrough and became the best-selling album of 1976 after spending 10 nonconsecutive weeks on the charts and producing three smash singles. Like Alive!, it has gone on to move eight million units, putting Frampton’s gear on two of the biggest-selling live albums of the 1970s.

As a band that made its name with outrageous makeup and costumes and a stage show that combined fire breathing and smoking guitar pickups, Kiss was certainly not known for its subtlety.

But as the group's producer Bob Ezrin says in a new interview, that's exactly why everyone sat up and paid attention when Kiss released a piano ballad devoid of the sonic trappings of electric guitar and pounding drums heard on their previous singles.

The song in question, is "Beck," from the group's fourth studio album, 1976's Destroyer. Co-written by Kiss drumer Peter Criss, his former bandmates Stan Penridge and Ezrin,

“It was such a big departure for them,” Ezrin tells CBS News’ The National.

But it was just what the band needed following a difficult start to their recording career. The three studio albums that preceded Destroyer — Kiss, Hotter Than Hell and Dressed to Kill — failed to capture the band at its best, in Paul Stanley’s estimation.

That changed with Alive!, the group's 1975 live album, which purported to capture the group's raw energy direct from the concert stage. In fact, the album was heavily reworked in the studio — even the audience was faked, according to some sources — but it didn't matter. Alive! was the hit the group needed. It not only saved their careers — it saved their label, Casablanca, from bankruptcy.

In a bid to continue moving in a more commercially viable direction, Kiss enlisted Ezrin’s production talents. The producer was renowned for his work behind the desk across a successful four-album run with Alice Cooper — from 1971's Love It to Death to 1973's Billion Dollar Babies — alongside his work with Lou Reed and Aerosmith. The band saw him as the Svengali who could take them to the next level.

Little did they expect Ezrin would do it with "Beth." Criss co-wrote the song with Penridge while the pair were members in the rock group Chelsea, several years before the drummer joined Kiss.

The tune was written in jest about Becky, the wife of their band's guitarist Mike Brand, who had an annoying habit of interrupting rehearsals with pestering phone calls. The original chorus featured the line, “I know you love complaining, but Beck what can I do?”

Ezrin immediately heard the song’s potential and set about revising it.

“The story about 'Beth' is that, politically, it was always important that the drummer gets at least one song,” Ezrin explains. (It's a lesson the Beatles learned all too well with their drummer, Ringo Starr.) “So we went through a bunch of songs that Peter Criss had.”

The producer, who had succeeded in bringing shock-rocker Alice Cooper a huge audience with singles like "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out" and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” also believed it could solve one of the band’s biggest problems.

“I went to see them play live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to 9,000 pimply 15-year-old boys,” Ezrin says of Kiss in the mid 1970s. “There wasn’t a single girl in the audience.

“We started to talk about working together, and I reminded them of an old 1950s Marlon Brando movie called The Wild One, where he was the leader of a motorcycle gang and Lee Marvin was the leader of the rival gang.

“Lee Marvin and his gang were real bad guys. On Marlon Brandon’s side, yes, they were a motorcycle gang, but he had something — and of course, the girl in the town saw that something in him and thought maybe she could fix him. And a romance grew between them.

“So I said to those guys, ‘Right now you’re Lee Marvin. You’re everything that scares the girls of America, and I would like us to do something where you become Marlon Brando — where you can still be bad boys, but there has to be an element of vulnerability.

“You have to let the girls of America feel that maybe they could fix you.”

He says he sensed “a real opportunity” with Criss’s song, even though the original version of it “was a little more jaunty, a little less vulnerable. It was kind of like, ‘Screw you, me and the boys are gonna go play.’”

Ezrin set out to change that, first by centering the arrangement around piano.

“I slowed the song way down, and it just felt like suddenly it was almost like a lullaby," he says. "It became this gentle sweet thing. And I tweaked the lyrics because I wanted it to be about the singer being the one that was hurt.”

As such, “I know you love complaining” became the more sensitive, understanding, “I think I hear you calling.”

Ironically, for a song that helped humanize the band, Criss was the only member to perform on it. Ezrin played piano, and the New York Philharmonic provided the cinematic flourishes that gave the song its magic.

Perhaps because they were mere bystanders to the song’s creation — and the fact that it lacked their usual Black Sabbath frightening bravado — Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley weren't keen to include it on the album. Reportedly, manager Bill Aucoin fought against it on the grounds that his ex-wife's name was Beth.

The song was released as the B-side to the testosterone-fueled Destroyer track “Detroit Rock City,” but to everyone's surprise, radio stations began playing "Beth." Resigning themselves to the obvious, Kiss reissued the single with the sides reversed, and "Beth" went on to reach number seven on the Billboard chart, a height no other Kiss track has topped.

“People thought it was like heresy!” Ezrin says with a laugh. "What the hell is he doing? We had this band that was cock and balls and appealed to 15-year-old boys.

"But that was the point. That was the point."

In late March 2025, it was announced that Kiss would be “storming Vegas.” People weren’t sure what that meant at first, other than some version, or perhaps a partial version of Kiss, probably with founders and forever holdovers, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, performing at the event.

Soon after Kiss Army Storms Vegas was announced, onlookers found out that it was, in fact, true and that Stanley and Simmons would be performing. But not only that, but that they’d be doing so without their trademark kabuki makeup. And as is always the case when Kiss does anything, the rumors began to swirl, and the reactions began to swell. Such is life within the world of Kiss.

In recent weeks, Simmons has made it clear in interviews that, no, Kiss won’t necessarily be performing a whole set. And no, this is not Kiss doubling back on their promise to get off the road, an era which ended on December 2, 2023, at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

And now, in conversation with Guitar Player, Kiss’s Starchild, electric guitar player Paul Stanley, has weighed in, clarifying, with outright simplicity, what Kiss’s forthcoming Vegas shindig actually is. “Let’s just call it a Kiss Kruise,” Stanley says. “But landlocked in Vegas.”

Within that context, the idea of Stanley, Simmons, and company, climbing up onstage as Kiss, without makeup, isn’t a state-of-the-art idea. Historically, Kiss Kruise’s, throughout their 12-year existence, as per the name, have always featured performances by Kiss, without makeup.

They’ve also always featured a roster of bands and artists, ranging from Kiss alumni, such as Bruce Kulick, who will be in Vegas come November, current members of the band, like Tommy Thayer, who will be with Stanley and Simmons in Vegas, and Ace Frehley, who, much to the chagrin of the Kiss Army, will not.

Elsewhere, the Kruises have featured all sorts of period-correct acts, and to that end, Kiss Army Storms Vegas will be no different. Still, Kiss’s ranks are part of an ever-evolving beast, populated by career rule-breakers.

To that end, there’s more to be announced when it comes to this impending Vegas shebang. “There’s so much yet to come,” Stanley says. “We’re not any other band. We don’t live by those rules. And I think that’s the double-edged sword.”

“It makes people love us, and it makes other people despise us,” Stanley says. “And that’s good! You know, I judge myself by the people who love me, and by the people who hate me.”

What’s the story behind Kiss Army Storms Vegas?

Well, there’s going to be some really exciting changes that enhance what it already is. Let’s face it, it’s what we’ve spent 12 years building, and really, polishing, which is the Kiss Kruise. But does a Kiss Kruise really need to be on a boat? Everything that we do on a Kiss Kruise can take place virtually in any place.

So there’s even bigger news with regard to the event to come?

I think everybody is going to be very excited. Whether it’s the Kiss Army, the Navy, the Kruisers, or fans, in general, it’s turning into something that everybody has loved and that we’ve nurtured over the last 12 years. So I’m looking forward to it. More will be coming shortly, and I think all the announcements are going to make everybody that much more excited.

When you put it into perspective, performing in this fashion, as you’ve done on Kiss Kruise’s, isn’t new per se. So you must have had to laugh when everyone got the idea that this was the proper live return of Kiss.

I’m flattered by suppositions, or any ideas that people have, but they often go way deeper than reality. You know, the Kiss Kruises have been something that everybody has loved, including us. And again, the lack of a ship this year doesn’t mean the lack of a Kruise, you know?

It’s really not down to its location; what we’re going to do is going to be very, very exciting. And quite frankly, it has us that much more excited. When everybody reads, sees and hears about what’s going on, as far as the new announcements, I think everybody is going to be very excited.

You must be excited about getting back up onstage with Gene and Tommy?

As far as playing live, other than either somebody who is deaf, or somebody who decides that they vehemently don’t like the band… Gene is a phenomenally ferocious and creative bass player, and I certainly miss the camaraderie onstage and with Tommy. It's going to be exciting. I look more and more forward to it as we polish the diamond, so to speak.

When this was announced, the first thing that came to people’s mind is that Kiss hung it up after the End of the Road tour. But to be fair, I don’t recall you or Gene saying you’d never perform again in any capacity, just that you wouldn’t tour. What is it about Kiss that every time you guys do anything, everybody's imagination runs wild? Does that come with the territory of the band?

Well, it’s flattering. I mean, it’s either very positive in terms of people’s reaction, or venomously negative. And to the people who want us to go away, we pick and choose when and if we go away. And for the other people, they’re thrilled with any prospect of us doing something.

Among the roster of artists playing at the Vegas event is Bruce Kulick, a key cog in Kiss’s non-makeup era. Seeing as you and Gene won’t be performing in makeup, will we see Bruce join you onstage?

Well, Bruce has been at our events before. And he’s a storied part of the history and our past foundation. But I don’t see any plans for him to play with us, but that’s me speaking at the moment.

But as a rule, we’ve had Bruce there before; it’s just another way to celebrate the history of the band. And regardless of whether he plays with us, or another band, his contribution to Kiss is huge.

How about Ace? He’s performed on Kiss Kruises before, but he doesn’t appear to be on the roster for the Vegas event. Are there any plans in the works for Ace to be a part of this, or did he decline?

We always invite, or open the door to, past members. But I also respect their declining, or unrealistic, required requests, or demands. So no, I don’t believe… I would be fairly certain that you won’t see, you know, the two original guys [Ace Frehley and Peter Criss] there. And that’s nothing new, either.

What makes Kiss unique is that the band doesn’t play by the rules of conventional rock groups, a template you set a long time ago. So, do you see Kiss Army Storms Vegas as a yearly event in lieu of the Kiss Cruise? And if so, do you see yourselves performing in makeup again at these types of events?

Let me just say that I’ve never called it Kiss Army Storms Vegas. Now more than ever, it deserves to be called a Kiss Kruise. And that goes against, you know, some people’s definition of a cruise, but everyone who has any questions will soon find out that it is indeed a Kiss Kruise in Vegas.

Ultimately, be it on the water or on land in Vegas, these events are a great way to celebrate the Kiss Army and keep you and Gene connected to them.

Well, the Kiss Army is not only important to us, but it’s the template for every other band’s fan club. It was snickered at when it first came about because fan clubs weren’t considered cool. But in reality, it came from the fans. The army is a volunteer army, and the Kiss Army started with fans in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the ’70s, demanding that the local radio station play Kiss music.

With that said, why is the Kiss Army important to you, and where would Kiss be without their support?

Those fans in Terre Haute, Indiana, if the station didn’t play Kiss music, they would surround the building. And they did that, and that was the birth of the Kiss Army. So, I can’t say enough about them. I’d like to believe that their feelings toward us are based on realizing and seeing our feelings toward them.

So, lo and behold, every band has an Air Force, or a Tank Squad, or a Bubble Bath Brigade, or whatever they have. [laughs] But it all started with the Kiss Army.

It’s seems everyone has a good Ace Frehley story. Gene Simmons has one about the time Ace auditioned for Kiss, on December 8, 1972, in the space above the former Live Bait Bar on 23rd Street in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.

“And Ace plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy,” Simmons told Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast last February, “and I walked up to him and said, ‘Buddy, you better sit down before I knock you out. What are you doing? We’re talking.’”

In the end, it was Ace who knocked out Simmons — as well as Kiss guitarist Paul Stanley — when he started the audition in earnest.

“Paul and I looked at each other, ‘Wow!’” Simmons recalled. “You don’t know what you’re looking for, but you certainly know it when you hear it — and see it. And… it just kind of happened.”

Frehley’s account jibes pretty closely with Simmons’. But in his January 1979 interview with Guitar Player, he added recollections that lend additional nuance to the story.

At the time it wasn’t Kiss,” he told the magazine. “It became Kiss after I joined the group. Peter, Paul and Gene had a trio and a record deal, and they advertised in the Village Voice. At the time I was unhappy with the group I was working with, and I just thought I would try out for the audition.

“We worked out pretty good, and they said, We can’t give you a definite answer today, but call us back in a week or two. They called me back and said, ‘Come back and jam with us again; we really like the way you play.’

“After the second audition they said, ‘You’re the one.’

“And I said, ‘I’m the one — I’m not sure you’re the one.’”

Ace laughed at the memory. But as he added, he knew he’d found the band he’d been looking for after he auditioned by playing a solo on “Deuce.”

“They just blew me away with volume. I got very excited, and I said, ‘This is terrific material — I want to jam with these guys.’

“We hit it off. I just played all my cool licks, every lick I ever knew; I jammed from beginning to end.”

What kind of equipment were you using when you joined the band?

I was using a reverse Gibson Firebird with one pickup and a 50-watt Marshall amp. Once we got our advance money from Casablanca I bought a Les Paul and a 100-watt Marshall. There’s nothing like a Les Paul through a Marshall for that hard rock sound.

What are you using now?

Well, I’ve got about 20 Les Pauls of various models. I have a couple of ’59s, but I don’t use them onstage because we really jump around with acrobatics and everything, and I wouldn’t want to take a chance with getting them hurt or with getting them stolen on the road, because they’re really irreplaceable.

What kind of amplifiers are you currently using?

Still Marshalls, about eight 100-watt heads and 20 speaker cabinets. How many of them we use onstage just depends on the size of the auditorium. We use a minimum of four bottoms and two heads. I’m not really using any special effects except an Echoplex and a Mu-Tron octave divider on a couple of tunes.

Have your guitars been modified?

Yes, I put DiMarzio pickups on the Gibsons. About a year and a half ago I started using three pickups on all my guitars onstage. There are two reasons for that: One, you get a little more variety in tone, and second, it looks cool. I like DiMarzio’s Super Distortion humbucking pickup. It’s really good for getting a ballsy sound. As I said earlier, I used my old vintage guitars on the solo album, not really any of my stage guitars.

I also like to record with vintage amps. After traveling all around the country for four or five years on tour and going into pawnshops, I’ve been able to find some nice ones — about 30 different little amplifiers. There’s a couple of really funky-sounding old Vox AC-30s, the English ones, and an old Ampeg Jet, and an old Fender Harvard model — that’s the one I really like. It’s dynamite.

Are there certain settings on the amplifiers that you stick to?

I’ve tried every setting and, to me, you take a 100-watt head and put every knob on 5. Sounds pretty cool.

Are the amps modified?

No. For a while we experimented — you know how it is when you’re a new group on tour. For a while we had little Fender amps and miked them. But sometimes we couldn’t hear what was coming out of the amps because it was going through the P.A., and even though the sound might have been a little better with the small amps it just didn’t feel right not to be able to hear exactly what was going on, so we did away with that.

Now we just go direct into the mixer and also through the amps, and the sound man will mix the right blend between direct and the amps, depending upon what the song calls for.

Are there certain keys that Kiss songs tend to be in?

You should make a note of this: I guess a lot of guitar players who try to copy Kiss records pull their hair out, but we tune down a half-step. So like when I strum an open E chord, it’s really an E♭. That’s the way we record. We’ve been doing it ever since I joined the group, so it’s been a long time.

As a hard rock group, we like to use a lot of open strings, and I guess tuning a half-step down also makes it a little easier to sing. That was probably the initial reason, and we just carried it on. I don’t even think about it now.

Are there certain scales or runs that you tend to work from?

When I’m in a major key, I kind of like to play a run where sometimes I go up and drop into a minor scale. I like to do that — I like minor sounds. Every time I hear a major line, I hear a minor one humming. I always had that problem with [producer] Eddie Kramer. Eddie’s such a purist, a classical pianist at heart, and every time he hears that minor third over a major chord, he cringes.

Could you describe how your smoking guitar works?

Well, it is something that me and our engineer developed together. Basically it was my idea that I wanted to have a smoking guitar, and it smokes, you know? It works with a smoke bomb; I mean, how do you think it works? There is an area in the back that was reamed out, and there’s a plate covering it. The smoke bomb is inside, and I trigger it with a button. It looks terrific, doesn’t it?

It’s a great effect. Do you think that all of the flash and excitement that surrounds Kiss ever obscures what you are trying to do as a musician?

I think it might to an extent. Unfortunately, I have felt frustrated at times. I remember in the early days I used to go out, and if I didn’t think I played well I would come off the stage and not be pleased, but if the theatrics went really well most of the audience wouldn’t know.

Then if we did a show and sometimes certain bombs wouldn’t go off or an effect didn’t work, even though you played your ass off the audience reaction might not be as good. You are dealing with people reacting to not only music but also special effects, and in some cases they are reacting to special effects more than to the music.

Whether it is good or bad, I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve been frustrated as a musician at times because the special effects got more reaction than maybe a solo. Sometimes the music gets lost in the barrage of bombs and lights, but the main reason we are involved in the group is entertainment, and we seem to be giving a lot of people enjoyment, and a lot of people get off on the show.

That’s our job, and it’s a give and take; sometimes, you know, you have to take the good with the bad. I am sure I could play better if I didn’t move around, just stood still like most guitar players do. I’d definitely be much more proficient, but you’ve got to give and take a little.

Kiss fans had much to celebrate in 1998 when the original lineup announced they were returning for a new album. Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss hadn't recorded together since 1979's Dynasty, which meant Psycho Circus should be a record for fans to savor. Sadly, that wasn't the case.

The album sessions began following a hugely successful reunion tour that had taken up much of the two years prior. All things considered, the quartet should have been in top form after a long road stint, but the sessions proved to be highly disjointed.

To get the album on track, the band called in Bruce Kulick, the guitarist who'd lost his job in Kiss when Ace Frehley stepped back into the fold. Kulick had joined the band in 1984 during their unmasked era and remained for 12 years, until Frehley returned.

As he reveals, he wasn't gone for long. Stanley hired him to assist with demos for Psycho Circus. When the album sessions began to stall they brought him in to help.

"It was flattering because I knew it wasn't like I was fired,” Kulick says. “They went off to do the original four. So, it felt good, and it was ironic that I could so naturally perform for them.”

He’d go on to co-write “Dreamin’” with Stanley and predominantly play bass when it came to tracking the song, but some of his guitar playing can still be heard.

“I didn't play any guitars [in the studio], but there is some guitar from 'Within', from a demo that I did with Gene that they used,” he explains. “I played bass on quite a few of the songs, some of the Paul songs. I was excited to be there.”

Frehley and Criss proved fringe characters during the record’s creation, contributing to three songs each. The guitarist plays lead guitar on "Into the Void", which he co-wrote with Karl Cochran, "You Wanted the Best" and the Japanese bonus track "In Your Face". Criss, meanwhile, only plays drums on "Into the Void" and sings on "You Wanted the Best" and "I Finally Found My Way".

Tommy Thayer, who would later fill Frehley’s shoes in the band, describing himself as “the glue that kept the band together” also played lead guitar and bass on two songs. It might not have been the reunion anyone dreamed it would be, but Kulick was simply happy to be involved.

“I mean, they paid me well,” he says. “[They] even rented some gear I had because they were looking for certain things.

"I never saw Ace or Peter. It was just Gene and Paul. So it was an interesting time. I was obviously flattered that I could help. It wasn't the 'magical record' anyway, but it's another Gold record for me to have on the wall."

The album debuted in at number three on the Billboard 200 and was certified Gold a month after its release. But its success was mired when Alice Cooper issued a lawsuit claiming "Dreamin'" sounded suspiciously similar to his 1971 hit "I'm Eighteen." (Kiss settled out of court.)

Kulick, who released a new line of “period-correct” guitars inspired by his Kiss era, a stint that included the worst gig of his life, is set to reunite with the band for a maskless show in Las Vegas later this year.

Spats, temper tantrums and scathing retorts within the Kiss camp are no rarity, and Ace Frehley has been at the center of his fair share of them.

Now the guitarist, who hasn’t donned his Spaceman outfit since the turn of the millennium, wants to set the record straight regarding his two departures from the band.

The facts are straightforward.

Frehley successfully auditioned for the band in 1973, despite his antics nearly leading to Gene Simmons punching his lights out. He stuck around for nine studio albums, and helped turn the band into one of the most commercially successful acts around before making his unceremonious departure in 1982.

After reuniting for the band’s 1995 MTV Unplugged performance, the original lineup — Frehley, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss — regrouped the following year. Ace bowed out for a second time after performing at the closing ceremony for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, Utah.

But why did Ace leave both times? According to Stanley and Simmons, he was fired. But as Ace tells Guitarist, that's not what happened.

“A lot of the misconceptions were created by Paul and Gene,” he says. "They still say in interviews that they fired me, but I was never fired from Kiss. I hate when I hear that. And they say that both times I was fired. I quit both times.”

According to Ace, he was unhappy with the group's change of direction as the 1970s classic-rock era gave way to the glossy sounds of the 1980s. Although he is credited as a performer on the 1982 albums Killers and Creatures of the Night, his contributions were very minimal. As he tells Guitarist, he already had one foot out the door.

“They didn't want me to leave,” he says. “The first time I quit, Paul showed up on my doorstep, took me out to lunch, and was trying to change my mind, but I had already made up my mind.”

Frehley says he was interested in pursuing a solo career after the success of Ace Frehley, his 1978 solo album. Each of the four Kiss members released self-titled solo albums, but none had the success of Frehely's record. The single "New York Groove" hit number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the highest placement of any solo Kiss record at that time.

“The success of my solo album made me realize that I was more creative away from Paul, Gene and Peter than I was around them,” Ace says, bluntly.

“So time marches on. They've said shit — like, I'm late and I'm lazy. And yeah, maybe not as much as they've said it, but it's true. As far as when I'm working, and I've got an idea, and I'm excited about it — I have tunnel vision.”

Frehley's stints away from the band yielded several solo albums under his own name and Frehley's Comet.

As for Kiss, they did just fine without Ace. His first departure paved the way for guitarists like Vinnie Vincent and Bruce Kulick – who survived one of Kiss's most disgusting gigs, while his second exit saw Tommy Thayer step into his platform boots and walk them all the way to the band's finale.

And as you might expect, Frehley has had plenty to say about his replacements.

In related news, the guitarist has recalled the shocking on-stage incident in 1976 that should have left him for dead, while Gene Simmons reckons the Space Ace stole a classic Doors solo “note-for-note” and claimed it as his own for "She".

Simmons has also recalled the band’s fabled touring days with Black Sabbath. He was determined to one-up the heavy metal heavyweights across those shows, saying, “Once the war paint was on, I became the Demon.”

“I’d probably have practiced a little more If I knew I was going to affect that many people’s lives,” Ace Frehley told us when we asked him about the five tracks most essential to his career.

And indeed, Ace has been an influence on countless players, thanks to his well-loved guitar licks and melodic solos, all of it performed on a Gibson Les Paul.

Be it the solo for “Shock Me,” which Frehley has said he did in “one take,” the flange-soaked-meets-wah-drenched solo in “Rocket Ride,” or the one in “She,” which Gene Simmons revealed was a note-for-note re-creation of Robby Krieger’s solo in the Doors’ track “Five to One,” there’s simply no denying that Ace Frehley’s unschooled, off-the-rails style was a harbinger for hair metal and thrash.

Proof of this can be found in numerous interviews with players like Dimebag Darrell, John 5, Slash, and many others, in which they've spoken Frehley's praise. Hell, even grunge icon Mike McCready and alt-hero Tom Morello have shown Ace loads of love over the years.

But what does Ace think of the adoration that generations of six-stringed heroes have thrown his way? Specifically, what does he think of his influence over Dime, John 5 — who has his own Kiss museum filled with personal artifacts and mementoes — and Slash?

GP wondered, and so we asked Ace — who recently told us what he thought of his Kiss replacements — to recount his thoughts and experiences with all three.

Dimebag Darrell

“I was good friends with Dimebag. I actually spent a weekend at his home, and he was a good guy! And he was a fun guy. He always said I was a big influence on him — but he played a lot faster than me. He was heavy metal. He played more speed metal than blues.

“But Dimebag was a great guy, and he had my face tattooed on his chest. [laughs] And man, we had a lot of fun one weekend at his house!”

John 5

“John 5 is a dear friend of mine. He actually called me up, and he said, ‘I’m a little nervous about playing with Mötley Crüe,’ so he invited me for the first show. He wanted a little moral support. [laughs]

“And then, me, him and Nikki [Sixx] were handing out backstage after the show. I think it was in Atlantic City, in New Jersey.

“But John is really technical. I mean… he can play anything. He can play stuff by Glen Campell, and he’s just a really great, technical guitar player. He definitely surpasses me, you know? I just have one style. I can’t play 10 different kinds of styles — but John can play country, metal, and he can even play country. You know… he’s just an amazing musician.

“But for the most part, he pretty much just stands up there, whereas I kind of, you know, developed certain types of physical moves. I remember that in the early days with Kiss, I used to bend back really far, and I had all these sorts of physical moves and choreography with Kiss. And a lot of that was actually created by Kiss’s first road manager, Sean Delaney, who had a big hand in getting us to do all those moves.”

Slash

“Slash is another good friend of mine. He says I influenced him, but I have to be honest — I don’t know how. [laughs]

“He never told me. He just said that he’s a fan of my guitar playing, and I never questioned it. So you’d have to interview Slash on that one. But we did do a song for my first Origins album [Vol. 1] together, which was ‘Emerald’ by Thin Lizzy. We did that together, live in the studio, and we traded off solos. He’s a great guitar player.”

Karl Cochran, the rock guitar player who worked with Kiss and performed with singer Joe Lynn Turner, died on February 19 in Bridgewater, New Jersey. He was 61.

Cochran was the passenger in a car driven by his 90-year-old mother when she struck a tree while backing up the car. The guitarist was ejected from the vehicle. Cochran was flown by helicopter to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where he died from his injuries.

Cochran performed electric guitar with the solo group of former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley in the 1990s. When the original Kiss lineup regrouped in 1996, Cochran’s career got a boost. Along with Frehley, he co-wrote “Into the Void,” a track from the group’s 1998 reunion album, Psycho Circus. He and Frehley had demoed the song on their own before they succeeded in getting it into the album's lineup.

Cochran recovered from a stroke in 2014 and continued to work as a music producer and engineer and teach guitar and bass.

Upon hearing the news of his passing, Kiss shared a post about Cochran with a photo of him and guitarist Paul Stanley.

“Our dear friend Karl Cochran was killed in a car accident on Feb. 19th,” it read. “Karl was a vocalist and guitarist extraordinaire who suffered a massive stroke but never stopped fighting to make his way back. He was loved by our fans worldwide through his appearances worldwide and was a constant inspiration as our guest on our KISS Kruises.”

Cochran began working with singer Joe Lynn Turner in 2003, when he performed on his album JLT. He went on to work on subsequent albums with Turner, perform onstage with him and co-write songs, including “In Your Eyes” from 2007’s Second Hand Life.

Joe Lynn Turner wrote a tribute to Cochran on Instagram, stating: “I have lost a brother, friend and partner. Now there will always be a missing part of my heart. I shall always remember and celebrate with love for the time I was fortunate enough to share with his incredible character and boundless spirit.”

Cochran was also a member of the Eric Singer Project, featuring the Kiss drummer.

Kiss’s ever-outspoken bass-playing, blood-drinking ringleader Gene Simmons might define the band’s notorious 1974 tour with Black Sabbath as the making of “a lifelong memory,” but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a fierce rivalry at play.

The English heavy metal band were five albums deep into their career at that point, still basking in the success of their 1973 LP, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, as they continued their meteoric rise.

Conversely, Kiss were new kids on the block in the summer of ‘74, having dropped their self-titled debut album months earlier. They'd scored an opening slot with Sabbath for what Simmons recalls as "three or four shows." But while it may have been a David-versus-Goliath matchup on paper, that didn’t stop the makeup-clad glam rockers from putting up a fight.

“I've always loved and admired Black Sabbath, and can proudly say the early days of touring together will be a lifelong memory," Simmons tells Classic Rock.

“The Sabbath of 1974 had all the adrenaline of a new band in a strange land doing what they believe in. There was no question Sabbath was going to do things their way. Love them or hate them, this would be a band that would mark its own territory like an animal.”

Rather than wait, Simmons decided to lay into the group first. His victim? Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler. It happened at the Boston Theater, where the bands performed for some 12,000 fans.

“I was backstage fully made-up and ready to go out onstage with the band,” Simmons recalls. “Standing next to me was the great Geezer Butler. All five feet six inches of him! In my platform heels, I stood at about six feet nine inches tall.

“It's in my DNA — once the war paint was on, I became the Demon. And Geezer didn't quite know what to make of me.”

Simmons knew this was his chance to leave a mark on the headline act.

“As he stood next to me, he looked me up and down,” Simmons adds. “I looked down at him. I glared at him and stuck out my tongue, lowered my head so we were face-to-face with each other, and I said, ‘Aaahhhh!’

“Many years later, Ozzy either told me or I read it someplace — Geezer had come back and told him he felt threatened by the bass player in the opening act. He didn't think that was a good sign.

“And he was right,” he adds. “Our intention was to go out onstage and destroy all living things. We did.”

Ozzy would later tell Kerrang! that following the band each night was “frightening,” which would have been music to the Demon’s ears.

Indeed, Simmons may have felt Kiss won the first battle in Boston, but the war was far from over and the two bands would soon lock horns once more

“At the next show in Rochester, New York, our road manager was told that we would have to go on immediately,” Simmons says. “The problem was that the Sabbath amplifier line was too close to the edge of the stage, so we did not even have enough room to go by each other to get to the other side.

“What followed was a staring contest. We would not go on until the Sabbath amplifier line was pulled back.”

It seems Kiss claimed another victory. Says Simmons, “It was pulled back.”

Despite his obvious gloating, Simmons says his recollections come with "a great deal of admiration, respect and love for one of the few bands who forged the way for countless others to follow.

“I will never forget the first time I ever heard the name Black Sabbath. It was an advertisement for their first album. It appeared in Rolling Stone. It said: 'Black Sabbath — louder than Led Zeppelin!' Louder and prouder, indeed.”

In related news, former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley has admitted to stealing a Robby Krieger guitar solo for a classic Kiss song and recalled the electrifying onstage incident that should have left him for dead.

Frehley has also opened up on how the band's “weird chemistry” was a recipe for success, which Simmons has likened to George Lucas' Star Wars franchise, believing “We created a culture with Kiss.”

Guitarist Harvey Mandel wants credit for helping to bring two-handed tapping into rock guitar’s repertoire. Not only does he claim to have been performing the technique on electric guitar several years before Eddie Van Halen rose to prominence, but he has two well-known guitarists to back him up.

Ritchie Blackmore told Guitar World’s Mordechai Kleidermacher way back in 1991 that he’d first witnessed two-handed tapping when he saw Mandel perform in the late 1960s.

“The first person I saw doing that hammer-on stuff was Harvey Mandel, at the Whisky A Go-Go in '68," said Blackmore, who told Guitar Player in 2018 how he ended up with the world's loudest Marshall amplifier. "I thought, What the hell is he doing? It was so funny.” Blackmore claimed the sight was so odd that “even the audience stopped dancing. Obviously, Eddie Van Halen must have picked up a few of those things.”

More recently, in an interview with Rocket circa 2009, George Lynch claimed he and Eddie Van Halen were together when they saw Mandel perform the technique. “We both witnessed Harvey Mandel from Canned Heat do a neoclassic tapping thing at a club called the Starwood in Hollywood back in the 70’s,” Lynch revealed.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Mandel makes it clear he doesn’t want to be overlooked for his contribution.

“I was actually doing it way before Van Halen and way before almost everyone else did after him,” he says. “People heard my stuff and thought I was a jazz player!”

As Mandel explains, he picked up the two-handed tapping technique in the late ‘60s from Randy Resnick, his co-guitarist in the American blues-rock group the Pure Food and Drug Act.

“He did it in a very melodic but simple way,” Mandel says of Resnick, adding that he was able to figure out the technique on his own after watching Resnick.

“Unfortunately, when I was doing the tapping, I wasn’t with a known band,” Mandel says, “as opposed to Van Halen, who had a hit record, so he did it, and the world got to hear it. When I did it, the audience that got to hear me do it was much more limited.”

While Ace Frehley has claimed Van Halen took the concept from him, Mandel believes the guitarist was inspired to perform two-handed tapping after seeing him do it at the Starwood.

“I was playing at the Whisky and the Starwood, and George Lynch, Van Halen and a couple of different people saw me doing it,” he says. “Next thing I know, he’s using it all the time, and he took it off into his own world.”

Mandel makes it clear that he has no beef with Van Halen. “He played great; I can’t say anything bad about Van Halen,” he explains. “He was a great player! But he was more of a gymnastic player.

“I still did the fast tapping and everything, but I tried to make it more musical, and parts of the melodies of the songs and stuff, as opposed to just going crazy and showing off with it.”

For a good listen to Mandel's tapping in action, check out his 1973 album Shangrenade. "Every song, every note of guitar you’re hearing on that record, except for the rhythm playing, I’m doing finger tapping," Mandel told Guitar Player in an excellent 2022 interview with Bill Milkowski for his most recent album, Who's Calling. "All those melodies, everything I did is total finger-tap style. And everything wasn’t about doing the real fast thing like Eddie Van Halen did. It’s more slow melodies, some soloing, but still going back and forth from one hand to the other, totally tapping. It’s all fingertips."

As for Van Halen, he told Guitar World in 2008 that he got the idea from Jimmy Page. "I think I got the idea of tapping watching him do his ‘Heartbreaker’ solo back in 1971,” he told the magazine. “He was doing a pull-off to an open string and I thought… I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around?"

The origins of two-handed tapping on guitar go back well before Mandel or his bandmate Resnick. As just a few examples, pickup designer Harry DeArmond used the technique to demonstrate his pickups’ sensitivity, and his friend Jimmie Webster not only put it to use but also described it in his 1952 guitar instruction book Touch Method for Electric and Amplified Spanish Guitar. Barney Kessel employed it as well, as did Italian guitarist Vittorio Camardese, who demonstrated two-handed tapping in 1965 on an Italian television show.

Mandel has had quite a diverse career, having performed with Charlie Musselwhite, Graham Bond and John Mayall, among others. He began working with Canned Heat in 1969 and played with the group at Woodstock that year.

Following Mick Taylor’s departure from the Rolling Stones, Mandel was invited to perform on their 1976 album Black and Blue. As he tells Guitar World in his new interview, he believes he would have been invited to join the group were it not for Keith Richards’ friendship with Ronnie Wood, who became — and remains — Keef’s co-guitarist.

Rock music is full of licks, riffs and songs that writers and musicians borrowed or stole outright from others. The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” is a copy of Chuck Berry's “Sweet Little Sixteen,” George Harrison's “My Sweet Lord” closely follows the chord pattern from the Chiffons’ “He's So Fine,” and Neil Young admitted to taking the melody from the Rolling Stones’ ”Lady Jane” for his own appropriately titled “Borrowed Tune.”

You can add Ace Frehley to that list. According to Gene Simmons, Ace was so enamored of a Robbie Krieger electric guitar solo that he lifted in virtually note for note for “She,” a track from the 1975 Kiss album, Dressed to Kill. The Krieger solo comes from the Doors’ “Five to One,” from their 1968 album, Waiting for the Sun.

Simmons made the revelation on The Magnificent Others With Billy Corgan podcast. The former Kiss bass guitar player recalled how Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready told him Ace Frehley’s guitar work had been a big inspiration to him. Specifically, McCready cited “She” as one of the first guitar solos he learned and said it had served as the inspiration for Pearl Jam’s hit “Alive.”

“I said, ‘Mike, I don’t know how to tell you this, but that’s a note-for-note guitar solo from the Doors,” Simmons explained. “Ace liked it so much, he just reproduced it. He goes, ‘No!’”

Simmons went on to point out that there was nothing nefarious or unusual about Frehley’s appropriation of Krieger’s solo.

“My point is, it’s always very appreciative when somebody says, ‘Loved your stuff,’ ” Simmons says. “Everybody’s got bits and pieces of stuff. Listen to Zeppelin songs, you’ll hear lots of blues, very recognizable, blues songs.”

Indeed, even Led Zeppelin have been accused of plagiarism, as when they took words from Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love” for their own 1969 hit “Whole Lotta Love.” Guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant were famously sued in 2014 by the estate of Spirit guitarist Randy California, which claimed the famous arpeggiated guitar lines to the Led Zeppelin track “Stairway to Heaven” were inspired by California’s own song “Taurus.”

Remarkably, “Alive” was not among the tracks McCready selected when Guitar Player asked him to name the five songs that best define his career. But the guitarist has spoken at length about his Kiss obsession, which began when he was a youngster in school.

“I remember being on a school bus in sixth grade in 1976, with my friend Rick Friel, who eventually played in my high school band Shadow,” McCready told Rolling Stone in 2014. “He had a lunchbox that had Kiss on it. ‘What is that?’ Then he played me some music and I was hooked immediately.”

McCready spoke further about his Kiss love with Chris Schiflett’s Shred With Shifty podcast, “I obsessed on it,” McCready said. “It was exciting, and then that turned me on to all sorts of other music. I just wanted to emulate that stuff.”

Despite taking inspiration from Frehley for his “Alive” solo, McCready told Shiflett,” I don't do the solo the same live all the time.”

Ace Frehley recently told Guitar Player about his top five Kiss tracks, and spoke with us about the group's infamous 1979 interview with Tom Snyder that upset Simmons when Frehley stole the spotlight with his jokes and incessant laughter. “I was nervous as hell,” Frehley said about the interview. “I think I drank half a pint of vodka, and then I did some blow to wake up.”

From a casino burning down to channeling "The James Bond Theme" at sound check — rock and rollers have taken inspiration from some of the strangest things.

But as Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington once said, “The more wild experiences you have, the better songs you can write.” And for former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, a brush with death provided the genesis for one of the glam rocker’s biggest hits.

Looking back at his event-filled Kiss days during a new MusicRadar interview, Frehley first pointed out how his platform boots — a quintessential part of his stage outfit — led to a series of mishaps that would leave him worse for wear.

“I used to fall a lot in those boots,” the guitarist relays. “A lot of times. Paul would cover for me by walking over to me like it was part of the show. He made it look like it was choreography or something.

“If nobody realized I’d fallen, I play on my knees and get back up. It was just part of the show!”

Playing into this, the band decided Frehley would drop to his knees for the solo at the end of "Black Diamond," from the group's self-titled 1974 debut. But doing was the precursor to a series of injuries he would incur while gigging with Kiss.

“I screwed my knees up doing that… the weight of the Les Paul really killed them,” he reflects. “During the Reunion Tour, I ended up chipping a bone in my knee, and the doctor said, ‘Listen, you gotta stop doing that or you’ll end up in a wheelchair.’”

As the old saying goes, the show must go on, and the group devised a compromise. “We ended up putting a pad under the carpet where I’d fall," Frehley explains. "I tried to hit it. If you look at old videos, you can see that I’d go down one knee at a time.”

But that injury was tame compared to others involving his electric guitar. The instrument was designed to emit smoke from the pickups cavity at a crucial point in the show. At one point it even had a rocket launcher.

“I burned my leg real bad once back in the ‘70s," Ace says: "A smoke bomb ignited too early inside the cavity of the guitar, and it melted the asbestos—which our f**king costumes were made from—to my thigh,” he says.

Before then he'd accidentally shot a rocket at bass player Gene Simmons when his prop guitar misfired. "It almost f**king hit him,” he laughs.

While those injuries were more painful than life-threatening, one incident nearly had far more fatal consequences. While playing a show in Lakeland, Florida in 1976, Frehley was electrocuted after a grounding issue unknowingly left a staircase rail that was part of the band’s stage setup, electrically charged.

“I should have been dead that night,” he tells MR. “The fact that I got electrocuted and didn’t fall forward was a godsend. There must have been angels pushing me back.

“I was standing on top of four Marshall cabinets on a staircase when I got shocked. I had a heavy Les Paul around my neck, and my body should have fallen forward. I would have broken by neck, but I fell back, and the road crew dragged me back off of the staircase.”

Whether he has angels or his luck to thank matters not; Frehley survived and saw out the gig, despite having “no feeling in my hands for five to 10 minutes”.

“I maybe had feeling in half of my fingers by the time it was done. It was crazy shit, man, but I did get 'Shock Me' out of it," he says, referring to his track from 1977's Love Gun. "So I guess it wasn’t all for nothing.”

The song helped the band score their first top-five album on the Billboard 200. Nearly being zapped to death by his own stage was a small price to pay.

It was also the first Kiss song to feature Frehley as the main vocalist.

“I hope the fans realise that I’m for real,” Ace continues,. “All the stuff I’ve done was not contrived or remotely premeditated. It was always spontaneous. With my guitar work, how I wrote songs, and how I play live: None of that spontaneity has changed.

“That makes things magical. You can do the same thing over and over again if you want, but eventually, it’s gonna get stale. But if you come out with something that’s magic, man, that’s the one. My career is a testament to that.”

When Love Gun dropped, few American rock bands could rival Kiss' popularity. Two years later, they sat down with Tom Snyder for a now-iconic interview, of which the guitarist has recently dished the dirt.

He's also admitted he should have better honed his guitar playing skills throughout his career, while he is said to “still get excited like a little kid, like a true rock fan,” at 72 years old.

Frehley released his aptly titled eighth solo album, 10,000 Volts last year, which is set to be quickly followed up by the third installment in his Origins series of records later this year.

At one time, Ace Frehley was a manifestation, if not an outright snapshot, of rock and roll excess. That came in the form of balls-to-the-wall, Les Paul–into-a-Marshall badassery and a party-hearty lifestyle.

Things are different now, of course. Frehley is coming up on 18 years of sobriety. But in his early years with Kiss, the electric guitar player was anything but a teetotaler. “People ask me questions about stuff I did 40 or 50 years ago,” he tells Guitar Player. “They expect me to have total recall.”

Given his drug and alcohol intake, that's hardly possible. “I make stuff up sometimes because I don’t remember,” he admits. “I had no idea these songs would have this type of longevity, or that I’d go on to be a part of one of the biggest groups in the world.”

Spaced-out as Frehley was in the 1970 and early ’80s, he insists it was all business when he sauntered into the studio. “For me, it was about going into the studio and getting the work done — and then I’d go party," he cackles. "I’d go hit Studio 54. That’s where the action was."

“Even when I performed with Kiss, I’d have a couple of drinks, maybe a couple of lines of blow, but the heavy partying happened after the show. I had pride. I wanted to be able to play the solos the way the kids heard them on the record. I didn’t want to disappoint people. I saved the partying for after the show.”

If the part about pre-show drinks and blow sounds contradictory, that’s because it is. And it's easy to see Frehley made no bones about indulging his habits even when the band were making an important TV appearance. For evidence, let's look back to Kiss’s ’79 appearance on The Tomorrow Show, with host Tom Snyder.

Snyder was, at the time, one of the most-watched talk show hosts in late-night TV. He was known for bringing on important and controversial guests, and had hosted everyone from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to philosopher Ayn Rand.

Kiss's appearance on The Tomorrow Show was timed for Halloween, for obvious reasons. Snyder was providing the four members — Ace, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss — a chance to discuss their rise and worldwide success. But while Simmons and Stanley were keen to follow the script, it was clear almost from the beginning that Ace was going off the rails, making wisecracks and telling jokes, often at the band's expense.

“I was nervous as hell,” he explains. “I think I drank half a pint of vodka, and then I did some blow to wake up.”

That sounds like a lot of drugs, but for Frehley it was business as usual. “Yeah… it was crazy,” he shrugs. “But I was crazy back then. Anything went when I was in my 20s. I mean… everybody was doing that shit.”

Watching Snyder’s interview with Kiss, one can’t help but laugh, as much for Ace as for Stanley's and Simmons' pained reactions. Even before the interview was over, it was obvious Ace had stolen the show. “When I was on, nobody was funnier than me,” Frehley insists.

“Paul and Gene would try to compete with me but always fail,” he says. “If you look at the old interviews, even when I was loaded and buzzed, once I got into the groove, you couldn’t top me. Gene would try and throw a line in there. I remember Gene tried to tell a joke to Tom Snyder, but he got completely ignored.”

With Frehley doing everything from drunkenly howling to playing with teddy bears and making a lewd joke about being a plumber, one can understand why Snyder fixated on him.

“The plumber thing came completely out of the blue,” he says. “I didn’t plan that; it’s just a line that I came up with. Why this shit flies into my head… I have no idea. It’s probably all the substances I was doing.”

He laughs, but he’s serious. Funny as Frehley’s antics were, it was apparent that Simmons and Stanley weren’t pleased with their lead guitarist's behavior. “Kiss had a weird chemistry back then,” Frehley says. “We had a weird dynamic, which is one of the reasons that group worked.”

Still, Frehley asserts that Kiss thrived on that sort of push/pull. “The four of us were different,” he explains. “Somehow, someway, we got together. That energy… sometimes we’d argue, but when we got together, most of the time, it worked.”

What’s more, Frehley offers a counterpoint to the long-running theory that Simmons and Stanley were furious over his behavior on Snyder's program. “I watched it about six months ago,” he says. “I noticed that toward the end of the video, Paul and Gene were put off by me going off on crazy tangents, but at the end they started joining in with my insanity.”

“It might have been because they couldn’t win,” he adds, with a laugh. “Tom was in love with me. He was so surprised that I was such a maniac and a funny guy. The only way for Gene and Paul to win was to be as zany and nutty as I was; it helped. But earlier in the interview, yeah… they were resistant. It looked awkward.”

Less than a year after Kiss’s appearance on The Tomorrow Show, Criss was out of the band. Two years later, Frehley quit, too. But Frehley doesn’t see the infamous Snyder appearance as a precursor to any of that.

“That’s not necessarily true,” he says. “I knew I was going to leave Kiss. I quit, though I was never fired. Peter was fired, but I never was. I quit Kiss because I realized I was more creative away from those guys. And with the show, I think that was just an example of how different our four personalities were.”

The end of Kiss’s golden era and its excess are in many ways defined by their appearance on Snyder's show. As for how Frehley looks back on that era?

“You take everybody’s personalities for what they were,” he says. “That’s who we were at the time.”

“That evolved over time,” he concludes. “You know, Paul isn’t the same as he was back then as he is now… or maybe he is. But I know I’ve changed a lot, though I’m still just as funny as I was back then — even if I don’t get loaded anymore. That’s for sure.”

Ace Frehley was one of the original masked group members in the iconic lineup of Kiss from 1973 until his untimely exit in 1982, before returning again for another stint between 1996 to 2002. Taking on the stage persona of the Spaceman, which he inhabited as lead guitarist for the pyro musical circus that was Kiss, it became one of the most recognizable characters in popular culture. Frehley’s distinctive unschooled six-string meanderings went on to connect with a generation of electric guitar players that followed in his wake, influencing players from Kim Thayil to Ty Tabor to the late Dimebag Darrell to name but a few.

After his departure from Kiss, Frehley took to fronting his own outfit Frehley’s Comet before segueing into numerous solo outings. While having achieved some of the greatest heights of fame that being a member of Kiss bestowed, he never lost sight of who he was and where he came from, always holding firm to the belief that he was “just a kid from the Bronx who got lucky.” To Frehley, the mass admiration shown to him by fans and fellow guitarists alike causes much pause for reflection.

“I’d probably have practiced a little more If I knew I was going to affect that many people’s lives,” he says. “It does make me proud and very happy though that I influenced a lot of great guitar players. And with so many of them, I can't even begin to name, I have become friends with too. I recently went to see John 5 play and he gave me a picture of when he had met me when he was only 15 years old, and it made me feel old! But look at him now? He is such an amazing guitarist and now playing with Mötley Crüe!”

Frehley's most recent outing is 2024's 10,000 Volts, on which he's continued to prove his talent for pumping out heavy doses of attitude, high-energy hooks and riffs to die for.

“Steve Brown [Trixter, lead guitarist], my co-producer of 10,000 Volts was a huge fan of mine, and told me that his two biggest influences were me and Eddie Van Halen,” Frehley says. “And he's not only an amazing guitar player and songwriter, but he's also a great engineer. He's been engineering for over 30 years on Pro Tools. So I didn't even have to hire an engineer to record this latest record. Steve lives 45 minutes from me, and has a studio in his basement. Sometimes I'd go to his house and we'd work, and then his wife would come down around six o'clock and say, ‘dinner's ready’. We’d go upstairs, have dinner, and then I'd do magic tricks for kids.

“The process in the way I record music hasn't changed since my 1978 solo record or even before that with Kiss. I have a certain sound and it's very recognizable. I don't really think too much about what I do or how I do it, largely because I wasn't trained and I can't read music. I just kind of do things by feel and just do what feels right to me.”

And while simplicity may lay at the core of Frehley’s signature guitar work on record, additional layering of guitars to enhance the tonal colors to his rhythm tracks have always been part and parcel to his studio modus operandi. “I actually learned that technique from Pete Townshend,” he says. “If you listen to the early Who records, a lot of times when Pete recorded with an electric guitar, he would also support it by doubling it with an acoustic guitar. It's buried in the mix so you really don't hear it sometimes, but if you pulled it out of the mix, you would definitely miss it..”

With Kiss officially behind him — heck, behind them as well — Frehley is at peace with what’s gone before. He even owns up to the fact that the late studio ace Bob Kulick recorded some of his guitar parts on a number of Kiss tracks.

“I normally don't look back,” Frehley ponders. “The past is the past. Bob was a great guitar player and I was really good friends with him. We’d talk to each other every now and then, and I’d meet him at places where we would jam together. I didn't, and still don’t have a problem with Bob playing on those tracks. To be honest, I was probably doing other things anyway. Or I was drunk.”

“COLD GIN” (1974)

“I wrote this song when I was in my early 20s in the subways of New York City on the way down to a KISS rehearsal one day. The main riff came into my head, and when I got there, I played it to the rest of the band. Paul, Gene and Peter said that it could make a good song, so I played with it some more and then wrote some lyrics. And next thing you know, we got a song that became a Kiss classic!

“I used a Gibson Les Paul Standard ‘honeyburst’ that I bought at Manny’s Music. It was only a couple of years old. I plugged that into a 100-watt JMP Super Lead Marshall. My whole career has been pretty much Les Pauls and Marshalls in the studio. Sometimes I'd overdub with Fenders and Danelectros and acoustics, but the Les Paul has always been the guitar I would cut the basic track with. I probably did this in one take. I don't exactly remember. It’s been over 40 years ago.”

“STRANGE WAYS” (1974)

“This is one of my all-time favorite guitar solos. It was recorded through an early model MCI automated console. I had a Marshall Stack set up along with my Les Paul, and once we recorded the basic track, I switched over to bass and threw down a bass part along with some vocals. When it came time to try and get a guitar solo down, I wasn't happy with the sound I was getting — I wanted more feedback, but we were having some issues internally with the equipment. So I said to the engineer, ‘I'm just going to go out in front of the Marshall stack and stand right in front of it and play the solo.’ So I stood in front of the stack, laid down the solo in one take. And that was the solo we kept.”

“ROCKET RIDE” (1977)

“I don’t have much recollection of this. I’m sure it was the usual Les Paul–and-Marshall combo. I vaguely recall using a Vox wah too. It was one of the older models. I just did things on the spot; I was never schooled as a musician, so I’ve always done solos without thinking, for the most part.

“With Pro Tools now, it's become a lot easier. I can just do multiple solos and piece them together. A lot of times I'll do six solos and then I'll take the front half of one, the center of another and the tail end of a third, or sometimes it'll be one solo from beginning to end. There's no rhyme or reason why anything happens, because I don't think when I play; I just play. I'm still playing this song live today. It’s a staple in my set.”

“NEW YORK GROOVE” (1978)

“To be honest, I actually didn't want to record this song. It was originally recorded by some English glam-rockers called Hello. Eddie Kramer my producer, introduced me to it. He kept saying to me, ‘Ace, you’ve got to record this song,’ and I kept saying, ‘I don't think it has anything to do with any of the other songs.’ But once we had finished recording a lot of the album in Connecticut, we went down to Manhattan to do the overdubs and vocals, and once we got down there, he finally talked me into doing it.

“We tracked ‘New York Groove’ at Plaza Sound Studios and the song turned out to be my biggest hit! Who knew? I used my sunburst ‘59 Les Paul, which I don't own anymore. I bought it in a guitar store, and it was really faded, but it was a great guitar. Gibson actually ended up putting out a copy of it several years ago. They got ahold of a guy that owned it and did a version that was aged and a regular version too.”

“RIP IT OUT” (1978)

“This is a track I wrote prior to Rock and Roll Over [1976] album. So I had it ready for that album, but because I knew that my solo album was coming up after Rock and Roll Over, I decided to keep it. I actually kept a couple of good ones — just held them back for my solo record.

“After the success of the solo record, I realized I was being more creative away from Paul and Gene and Peter than I was being with them. So the writing was kind of on the wall that I would leave and put together my own band. Plus, I was also having issues with alcohol and drugs and that kind of set things back for a while after I quit. But once I got my head screwed on straight, I put together a band and put out the first Frehley’s Comet album on Megaforce Records. But that’s a whole other story.”

Since becoming a force on the New Jersey rock circuit at age 12, Steve Brown has made guitar playing the center of his life. His glam-metal group Trixter enjoyed success through the 1980s, culminating in their 1990 hit Give It to Me Good. Along the way, Brown shared stages with some of that era’s biggest acts and earned accolades from fellow guitarists, Eddie Van Halen among them. 

Since then, Brown has performed on Broadway in the hit musical Rock of Ages and played with former Styx vocalist Dennis DeYoung and ex-Rainbow and Deep Purple singer Joe Lynn Turner. He’s also had the special distinction of being the only guitarist to sub for both Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell onstage with Def Leppard. Here he tells us, in his own words, about working with Ace Frehley on 10,000 Volts. 

“I made two records with this band, Tokyo Motor Fist, which is Ted Poley from Danger Danger, Greg Smith from Rainbow and Alice Cooper, and Chuck Burgi from Billy Joel’s band. Ace’s girlfriend, Lara, and John Ostronomy, his manager, heard it and said, ‘This is phenomenal. Ace needs to do something more current and up his game.’ 

“Now, I’ve known Ace for 30-plus years and he’s very easy to get along with, so we hit it off, right off the bat. Walking on the Moon was the first song that we worked on and recorded. And with that song, we both looked at each other and we knew that our chemistry was magical. 

“Our working process was I would give him a rough idea of an arrangement. And luckily, in this age of digital, we both have Pro Tools studios in our houses. I want to be able to use everything that was recorded, and that’s what we did. It was a matter of just cutting and pasting, moving some parts around.

“I came up with the first couple of ideas: Walking on the Moon, Fighting for Life, 10,000 Volts, Cherry Medicine... I thought, ‘What would I want to hear as a fan?’ Like, with Cherry Medicine, I wanted to write a song that all the fans were going to identify with, but still be current. I’ve had people say that track reminds them of a Weezer song or reminds them of Green Day. But more than anything, it’s like his Kiss songs Talk to Me or Two Sides of the Coin – a simple Rolling Stones–type vibe.

“What impressed me the most was, at 72 years old, the guy still gets excited like a little kid, like a true music fan and a rock fan. He had a lot of ideas, like the bridge to Walking on the Moon. I get a call one morning from Ace who says, ‘I woke up at three in the morning and I had this idea for a bridge.’ He ran downstairs to his studio and in the middle of the night he’s cutting and engineering his own vocal tracks and guitar tracks! I had to cut that whole section in. 

“He was so inspired and so excited, like a young musician in his 20s that really gives a shit about making a great record and writing a great song and playing and singing. 

“I think this record sums up two things: It’s Ace’s best all-around songwriting record, and it’s also Ace’s best vocal performances he’s ever had on record. He’s done things that he’s never done before. We inspired each other to get the best out of each other.”

The Gear Behind 10,000 Volts

Ace Frehley

GUITARS Gibson Les Paul Custom (Sunburst, three-pickup), Gibson Les Paul Custom (Black, three-pickup), 1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard (Blue Sparkle), Gibson Les Paul 1960 Standard (Tobacco Sunburst), Epiphone Randy Rhoads Les Paul (Made in Japan), Xaviere Pro930 semihollow cutaway (Blue Burst), Fender Stratocaster, 1963 Fender Precision Bass 

ACOUSTICS Ovation 12-string, Guild F-212 12-string, Gibson Jumbo (Sunburst)

STRINGS Ernie Ball .009–.044 

PICKS Dunlop .78mm medium

 Steve Brown 

GUITARS SBS VS200 offset, SBS MS260 Strat-style, Xaviere Pro500 LP-style (Blue Burst), Sola Custom (with Evertune bridge, tuned down one whole step)

ACOUSTICS Guild six-string, Fender Acoustasonic Jazzmaster, Takamine classical

STRINGS EVH and Dunlop strings, .009–.042

PICKS InTune, Extra Heavy GrippX

• Ace Frehley's 10,000 Volts is available to stream or purchase now.

Apparently, even the Space Ace needs an occasional boost. When Ace Frehley began work on his latest solo record, the results, he admits, didn’t exactly put him over the moon. 

“I remember coming out of the studio, which is in my basement,” Frehley tells Guitar Player. “And I said to my fiancée, Lara, ‘The stuff that I’m recording is not knocking me out.’”

Fortunately for Frehley, she had a suggestion at the ready: Call Steve Brown, former guitarist for Trixter and a huge Frehley fan. “She had been after me to work with Steve because she was a big fan of Trixter and was good friends with him,” Frehley relates. “So she goes, ‘Do me a favor: Please call Steve Brown, because he’s a great songwriter, great guitar player, great person, and great singer.’”

Frehley took her advice, and the results can now be heard on 10,000 Volts, his new album, co-produced, and, partly, co-written with Brown. The title is an apt one. The record is Frehley's most powerful collection of material in many years, infused with enough sizzling six-string power and kinetic electricity to light up a city. With it, Ace brings new fire to the long solo career he launched in 1982 following his departure from Kiss. 

Indeed, things are looking bright for Frehley these days. As an elder statesman of rock guitar, his impact on players of the past 50 years continues to be celebrated by legions of musicians he inspired, including Lenny Kravitz, Stone Gossard, Kim Thayil, John 5, and Tom Morello. 

“It’s kind of mind-blowing to know I was a huge influence on a new crop of guitar players in the same way that people like Hendrix, Page, Beck and Townshend had an impact on me,” Frehley observes. “It’s a good feeling and it makes me feel proud.”

Recently, he learned that one of his own idols was an admirer of his guitar work. Last May, Elvis Presley’s stepbrother, Billy Stanley, revealed that the King was floored by Frehley's playing on Let Me Go Rock & Roll, from Kiss’s 1975 breakthrough album, Alive! “That guy’s got some X-rated licks,” Elvis said. “I really like him.” 

The news made Ace ecstatic. “It made me feel fantastic,” he says. “If Elvis was still alive, I would have invited him to perform on one of my Origins records. Forget about it. I would have been on cloud nine. 

“I remember when Kiss started playing arenas, and at least two or three times I recall looking at the marquee – we’d get in the day before and it would say ‘Elvis Presley,’ because they hadn’t changed it yet. And I’d go, ‘Wow, we just missed Elvis. He left the building.’” 

10,000 Volts is a huge step up from your previous solo albums of the past 15 to 20 years. When did you begin to work on it? 

“I started the album about 13, 14 months ago, and it started off real slow. I had written a couple of song ideas, and I had recorded a couple of songs with [producer] Alex Salzman. One was called ‘Fact or Fiction.’ That title never made it on the record, but the song Up in the Sky came from that. We still had the master that I had recorded with Alex, and me and Steve Brown re-overdubbed it, changed some of the lyrics to make it work, and it became Up in the Sky on the new record. That came out great.” 

Steve deserves major props for his role as co-producer and collaborator. As a lifelong Kiss fan, he gets you, and also knows what the fans want you to deliver.

“Steve sent over a song, and one of the lines in it was ‘walking on the moon,’ but it wasn’t at the end of the chorus. So I said, ‘Steve, ‘walking on the moon’ has to end the chorus. Do me a favor – get your ass over to my studio.’ We started rewriting the lyrics to this song, which turned out to be called Walking on the Moon. Steve came up with that opening guitar riff. It’s amazing the way we work together. Whenever I can’t come up with a line, he’ll come up with it.”

Did Steve’s input shape the more melodic flavor of the album?

“It’s a combination of him and me. I’m a blues-based guitarist. I prefer melodic solos over speed solos. You can’t hum 30 notes in a measure. Some people have said that a lot of my solos are kind of a song within a song and that people can hum my solos.

“I think back to Sunshine of Your Love by Cream and think of the guitar solo that Eric Clapton did. Those kinds of solos get to you. When I record solos these days, I try to empty my mind and not think. As long as I know what key I’m in, I just say, ‘Roll the tape,’ and knock out five or six solos. And then we’ll listen to them and pick the best parts and comp them together using Pro Tools. 

“I’m still an old-school guy when it comes to recording solos. I like to use an old 50-watt Marshall head. I have a drum room in my studio here in New Jersey, and it’s completely soundproof, so I can blast the Marshalls on 10. You won’t hear it in the control room. 

“There’s something about those old Jensen speakers that I think are actually a little better than the Celestions. A lot of solos I record with either a Vox head or a Marshall head. If I’m working with a 4x12 cabinet, I’ll be using a 100-watt Marshall head. But the cabinets are in a sound-proof room and the heads are in the control room so I can adjust the sound. And that’s the way I’ve always recorded, for the most part.”

Having made so many records, how do you balance the expectations of your audience with what you want?

“Well, you can’t be too self-indulgent, but I’m lucky that I really have a second sense of what people want and expect from Ace Frehley based on my previous records. 

“I was in an Italian restaurant the other night, and the owner was sitting at our table for half an hour and talking about my guitar playing, showing me videos he shot of me in concert at B.B. King’s on his phone and saying things like, ‘Ace, when you dropped to your knees and played that solo in Black Diamond, oh my God! I was in, like, heaven.’ 

“After I left the restaurant, I just said to myself, God has been so great to me that I’ve influenced and made so many people happy. Thank God I got sober 17 years ago, because I’d probably be dirt napping right now. 

“Whenever I do meet-and-greets, at least one or two of the guys that I shake hands and take a photo with pull out their AA five-year or 10-year coin and say, ‘Ace, I got sober because of you.’ That means more to me than a million dollars, because it means I saved a life.”

There’s a positivity that runs through the lyrics on the new album.

“I’m in a good headspace. If I’m in a good mood, I write good lyrics. Me and Steve are like a marriage made in heaven. That’s why the album came out so good. Sometimes you argue with your producer, bad vibes transpire, and it just affects the music. I love Steve; he’s like my brother. I gave him one of my Strats last night as a Christmas gift.”

Cherry Medicine sports one of your most memorable choruses in many years.

“Cherry Medicine came real easy. Steve pretty much came with the music all ready and I rewrote at least half the lyrics and did the solo. Lara has so many girlfriends. She’ll always bring over three or four of her girlfriends and say, ‘Why don’t you play a couple of your rough mixes of your new album?’ And, invariably, every single girl picked Cherry Medicine as the new single. Maybe they like the line ‘You make me feel better when you’re in your black leather.’” [laughs] 

Longtime fans will be pleased you’ve resurrected Back Into My Arms Again, which was circulating as a demo among collectors for years. 

“I wrote that song 40 years ago, right after I had quit Kiss for the first time and put together my band with [rhythm guitarist] Richie Scarlet, [bassist] John Regan – God rest his soul – [drummer] Anton Fig, and Arthur Stead on keyboards. Me and Arthur wrote that song, but most of it was written by me. I came up with all that chord work and 90 percent of the lyrics, if not all of them. 

“Me and Steve were sitting in his studio, flipping through Ace songs on YouTube, and all of a sudden he stopped and goes, ‘What’s this demo, Back Into My Arms Again?’ I said, ‘That’s something I recorded 40 years ago.’ He listened to it and said, ‘This is a great song. We need to record it for the new album.’ 

“I always thought it was a good song, but for some reason I never put it on one of my albums. So we recorded it with today’s great production tools, and we made it sound way better than the original demo.”

Is there a song that serves as a guitar highlight for you on the record?

“All the songs are my favorites. There’s not one solo on the record that stands out to me as being a favorite. Nothing like Strange Ways by Kiss, which I always refer to as one of my favorite solos of all time, because I did that standing in front of a Marshall stack with one take, and I had earphones on. But the stack was on 10 and I got natural feedback and did those ‘dinosaur bends,’ a phrase that Gene [Simmons] came up with. And that solo came out amazing. 

“One of my favorite songs on the album is Cosmic Heart. It’s autobiographical. If you listen to the lyrics, it’s about the way my life has gone. Listen to the second verse which says, ‘I ignored warning signs, and I woke up one day and my soul wasn’t mine,’ and that’s pretty much what happened to me. When I hit bottom with alcohol and drug addiction, I had to hit rehab. 

“Thank God it’s been 17 years since I had a drink. I always felt that, prior to getting sober, I wouldn’t be able to be creative without all that junk in my system. It turned out that I’m more creative without it. Once my brain cleared up, I became much more creative. I mean look at what I’ve done in that time since – five, six albums.”

Guitar connoisseur: Ace talks Les Pauls, Epiphone Coronets and the ’59 ’Burst he still regrets selling.

You’ve played all different types of guitars, but you always come back to the Les Paul. What is it about the guitar that makes it perfect? Is it the shape? Is it the feel of the neck? 

“All of those things. Are you aware that on the Les Paul, the neck is attached to the body at an angle? It helps sustain and resonance. Les Paul was a genius. You can’t take a Les Paul and lay it flat on a table. There’s an arch. You can take a Strat and lay it flat because it is flat.”   

Was there a guitar you had that was unappealing visually but played great?

“My Epiphone Coronet. You’ve seen photographs of the Epiphone before I joined Kiss. It was similar to the one Steve Marriott used in Humble Pie, except his had a thicker body, like a Telecaster. The Coronet was a little thinner and lighter. 

“I pulled out the pickup and put a DiMarzio in there, and it sounded great. The neck was similar to a Les Paul, but the look of it wasn’t as appealing as a Les Paul or some flashier guitars. It didn’t look great, but it played very well and sounded great. And it was cheap.”

You’re a longtime collector of vintage guitars. When you left Kiss in 1982 you sold off your collection. Any regrets?

“The first time I quit Kiss, I was living in a big mansion in Wilton, Connecticut, and I ran out of money. I was broke. I didn’t realize how much money I was spending. I eventually had to sell the property and my guitars. 

“The one guitar that still kills me is the ’59 Les Paul that I used on my 1978 solo album. I bought it for $4,000 and used it on every basic rhythm track and on the solos, for the most part. And then several years went by, and I was with this crazy broad, and we were on our way to Atlantic City, and I didn’t have a lot of cash with me, so I stopped at We Buy Guitars on 48th Street in Manhattan. I hocked the guitar, and they gave me $18,000 for it. They certainly knew it was worth so much more. 

“And then I forgot about it, because at the time I was loaded and I wasn’t thinking straight. I never bought it back from them. I know the guy who bought it, and he said the last offer he got for the guitar was $350,000. It looks a lot like the guitar I use onstage now. Gibson got a hold of that guitar from the guy who bought it, and they took high-resolution photographs. 

“So when I came out with my ’59 Les Paul, it was pretty much a duplicate of that guitar. I went to the Gibson showroom in Las Vegas at the time, and they had all 75 of the aged models they’d made, and they wanted me to pick the best one. I sat there for two hours playing every one, and I couldn’t make up my mind. So I ended up picking one that I really fell in love with, and they let me take that home.”

• Ace Frehley's 10,000 Volts is available to stream or purchase now.

50 years ago, four New York City punks set the music world on fire with their swaggering brand of rock and roll and ghoulish costumes. It was a minor victory, seeing as the greater number of music listeners were simply shaking their heads in wonder at this band of cartoonish costumed wags. It took time, but within a few years, the tide began to turn — first in cities like Detroit, where teen fans made “Rock and Roll All Nite” a party anthem, and then in towns and metropolises throughout the country and, eventually, the world. 

Before then, Kiss had simply been a quartet: guitarist Paul Stanley, lead guitarist Ace Frehley, bassist Gene Simmons and drummer Peter Criss. Afterward, they were an institution, cutting 20 studio albums and seven live discs, and revolutionizing the industry with their elaborate stage sets and endlessly inventive merchandising.

But don’t let the size of the Kiss juggernaut obscure the fact that they were one of the most influential groups to emerge from that great decade. Don’t believe it? Just ask countless guitarists who grew up on the band in their greatest era, the 1970s.

And now it’s rolling to a close. On December 2, Kiss brought down the curtain on their 50-year reign as rock and roll’s biggest live act. Their next step is immortality, with a digital version of the band set to tour indefinitely. To mark the occasion, we reconnected with Paul, Gene, Ace and Peter, and conferred with former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick, current guitarist Tommy Thayer and a host of the group’s friends (Joe Perry, Rick Nielson, Tom Morello, Phil Collen, Bob Ezrin) for insights into Kiss’s influence on guitar rock — and more significantly, Paul’s enduring influence as a guitarist on some of rock’s most inspiring players.

GENE SIMMONS

Paul Stanley’s partner and musical foil since they teamed up in the pre-Kiss group Wicked Lester in 1971, bassist Gene Simmons knows better than anyone what Stanley brings to Kiss’s music. 

"When we first started the band in 1972, there was this sense that Paul and Ace would complement each other and try not to play in the same chord range. The result would be this big guitar sound with different voicings of the same chord. But clearly, a lot of that came from Paul, who is not given the respect and recognition he deserves. 

"Paul has never just been a rhythm player. He has also been mighty handy on lead guitar. That’s Paul doing lead guitar duties on “A World Without Heroes.” That’s Paul playing the harmony on the “Detroit Rock City” solo. That’s Paul at the beginning of “C’mon & Love Me,” and it was Paul who came up with the chordal intro on my song “Deuce.” Without those chords opening the song, it simply wouldn’t have the same impact. “Deuce” without Paul’s opening chords is more one-dimensional. 

"Paul’s musical background stretches from ’60s and ’70s English bands, especially Zeppelin, to the Byrds. But clearly, his lead guitar playing owes a lot to Jimmy Page and Page’s approach to the construction of a solo. Paul’s vibrato, when he bends a note, is overlooked for some reason. But any good guitar player will tell you his vibrato is as sweet as honey."

PETER CRISS

Kiss’s founding drummer, Peter Criss was part of the trio, with Stanley and Simmons, that made up the first Kiss lineup. The original Catman was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Kiss in 2014. 

"The music speaks for itself. Paul has always strived to be creative. He’s accomplished that. His guitar playing is part of our creation of Kiss, which has inspired many. That in itself is a great honor for him as a musician. In my opinion, anyone who’s inspired somebody musically should be proud that they’ve touched people’s lives in that way. That’s how I feel about Paul’s guitar playing. He’s touched people’s lives musically, in a good way."

BRUCE KULICK

During Kiss’s “unmasked” period, from 1984 to 1996, Bruce Kulick served as the group’s lead guitarist, appearing on Asylum, Crazy Nights, Hot in the Shade, Revenge and Carnival of Souls: The Final Sessions, as well as Alive III and MTV Unplugged. 

"Working with Paul Stanley for 12 years gave me a keen insight to his guitar playing and musical talents. In the studio, he’s a solid rhythm player. He has a large vocabulary of power chords in all positions, even complex inversions, as well as learning a few tricks from another hero of his, Keith Richards. He adopted the five-string tuning Stones sound from Richards for Kiss hits like “Heaven’s on Fire” and others. Paul was brilliant with lead guitar suggestions.

"On “Tears Are Falling,” one of the best representations of my contributions to Kiss solos, Paul guided me with the melodic start of that solo. We dressed it up with a sweet harmony line, and then he handed the tricky work over to me, with my choice of Steve Howe–like flashy riffs, and then a fast flourish to end the solo. That collaboration would continue throughout my years with Kiss."

TOMMY THAYER

Since 2003, Tommy Thayer has served as Kiss’s lead guitarist, as well as co-writer for many of the group’s songs. Even before then, he helped Frehley and Criss re-learn their parts when the original group reunited in 1996. He is, as he told Guitar World in 2020, “the glue that kept the band together for a long period of time.” 

"The thing that always impressed me about Paul were his voicings and the alternate rhythm guitar parts he would add to complement what the other guitar player was doing. For instance, on “Cold Gin,” the main riff is what I do, or what Ace did, and then Paul’s doing this suspended A chord thing that just kind of stays in one spot, but it’s really cool and interesting. 

"In “100,000 Years” he hits these kind of augmented E suspended parts — I’m not even sure what it is — but he plays all these really interesting chords that complement the two-guitar approach. 

"Last year, when we were in Australia, we decided to do “Shandi” [a Stanley-composed hit from the group’s 1980 album, Unmasked] as one of the encores, because that was a big song over there at one point. 

"We were rehearsing “Shandi” before we left, and I had always assumed it was played using big open chords. But Paul said, “Oh no,” and started showing me these different positions on the neck. I had no idea that this stuff was in that song. I grew up loving two-guitar bands and I thought Kiss was one of the bands that did that better than anybody. 

"But part of what makes the sound of Kiss is Paul’s approach. It’s very rhythmic and very soulful, with a lot of feeling. But his style is not a super-clean style; it’s kind of rough and loose and not a precise kind of approach. It’s a “feel” thing, so it creates a certain kind of a sound when you put all the guitars together. 

"When it comes to lead, he knows what he wants to hear, and that’s almost more of a pure approach, because he’s going to figure out what he hears in his head that actually can be more of a signature and more memorable. The solos he plays are very cool and you never forget them."

ERIC SINGER

Kiss’s drummer since 1991 — barring several years during the original group’s late-1990s reunion — Eric Singer has appeared on the studio albums Sonic Boom and Monster. He is the band’s longest-serving non-original member. 

"I always use the Rolling Stones analogy — Paul being like Keith Richards. Some people play really tight and on the money, and others play with a looser, scrappier approach. And that scrappiness, that rawness, is what helps create a person’s style and feel. I’ve noticed when somebody else plays a Kiss riff, they play it differently. 

"With Paul, since he wrote a lot of those riffs and those parts, it always sounds right. It’s his idea and his feel and interpretation of it, which makes it him. 

"Here’s the best example I can give: We were recording a new song we had cut with Tommy, Gene and myself. I said, “Paul, it needs your guitar. That’s what’s going to glue it together, and your guitar playing will give it that Kiss sound.” And as soon as Paul put the guitar on, it was like, Okay, now it sounds like Kiss."

Ace Frehley

As co-captains of Kiss’s six-string guitar army, both on record and in concert, Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley created a towering body of powerful anthemic music that rocketed them to superstardom and decades later earned them entry into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 

"In the early days, Paul and Gene were writing a lot of the songs. Paul was doing the chord work, and he laid down the heavy rhythm parts. Paul’s a really good rhythm player, Gene’s an underrated bass player, and I was the icing on the cake. 

Paul and I had a strong chemistry together, which really worked well. The way we’d divvy up guitar parts was pretty natural. There wasn’t much discussion. I knew what Paul was going to do. He played me the song before, and then I’d try to figure out a rhythm part that would complement what he was doing. 

A lot of times, Paul would come up with a rhythm part and I’d do an octave part above it. That would make the song sound thicker. 

"“Strutter” is a good example of that. Paul would be playing parts that were lower, and I’d be playing it in a high register. I learned that if two guys play chords in the same exact position, it can sound muddier. I was always trying to do inversions of what Paul was playing to make it sound thicker. It’s the same idea I use in the studio. I’ll put down a rhythm track with a Les Paul and then double it with a Fender, which has a completely different harmonic range. 

"I thought all the lead work Paul did over the years was good because it was simple, straight to the point and melodic. His riff that kicks off “Deuce” is really cool. Paul and I co-wrote “Rock Bottom.” I wrote the picking part in the front of the song, and he came up with something that complemented what I was playing. 

"Bob Ezrin was a big help in getting me and Paul to play together. For instance, the guitar solo on “Detroit Rock City” — that harmony Paul and I did together — always stands out in my mind as a dual lead that we played together. When I look back on our history, I wish we would have done more of that."

Joe Perry

In the ’70s, Kiss and Aerosmith were hard rock’s reigning champions. Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry wasn’t just a fan — he also appeared on Gene Simmons’ 1978 solo album and in 2003 would be the first musician to ever jam with Kiss onstage at two shows on the Kiss/Aerosmith co-headlining tour. 

“I remember hearing their album for the first time at [Boston DJ] Maxanne Sartori’s apartment — her boyfriend at the time was Billy Squier. I really liked it. ‘Strutter’ just struck me as a really cool song, and almost any kid can pick up a guitar and learn that pretty quick, which to me is a sign of a really good rock and roll song. 

“I look at Paul as a frontman who plays great guitar and great riffs. He plays exactly what needs to be played. Paul has a swagger, and the guitar is just part of his body. I can relate to that, because I feel the same way. It becomes an extension of your body and you move with the music. And he’s got a fucking lot of moves. He plays it over his head, between his legs, swinging it around. And he makes it all work. 

“We were out on the road with Kiss in 2003 and they asked me to come up and play with them, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah!’ I got to jam with them on ‘Strutter’ at two shows [Oklahoma City and Los Angeles]. I said the only way I was gonna do it was if I could wear the platform boots. Paul loaned me a pair of his. They’ve been wearing those boots for years and years, but man, it’s a bitch. [laughs]”

Bob Ezrin

As producer of three Kiss albums — Destroyer, (Music From) The Elder and Revenge — Bob Ezrin has also served as arranger, songwriter and band coach, spurring the band to their creative apex. 

“Paul’s superpower as a guitar player is his melodic sense. He has a unique understanding of the power of melody and rhythm, and he combines the two in his rhythm playing in particular, but also in his lead playing. There’s always a memorable, hummable component to Paul Stanley’s lead guitar. 

“To me, there’s a melodic structure to his rhythm, the positions of the chords that he plays. And when you add them all up, they actually create a melody. And I think he’s very sensitive to that as he’s putting his parts together, as opposed to many guitar players who will play the chord for that specific moment without regard to the next one that’s coming or the one that came before. 

“What Paul creates is a melodic structure to his rhythm parts. So the voicings that he selects from one chord to the next are the ones that feature the leading note. 

“When he and Ace would play together, you could hear each part individually, but they sound together as one. If Paul was in first position, Ace would move up, and vice versa, so they were not treading on each other’s toes. They were trying to be a bit of an orchestra between the two of them, and I think they did a great job. 

“I’ve heard from people from all genres — Garth Brooks to start with — who have said to me that Kiss was a huge inspiration and influence on them. I don’t think people looked at the individual membership of the band as being responsible for this note or that note. I think they just took the overall of the band and said, ‘Oh God, I want to be able to do that. I can do that.’”

Rick Nielsen

Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were such big fans of Cheap Trick that they brought them out as openers on their Can-Am Tour ’77. In the Cheap Trick anthem “Surrender,” Nielsen famously name-checked the band in the lyrics, “got my Kiss records out.” Like Joe Perry, Nielsen guested on Gene’s 1978 solo album and decades later jammed with the band at a 2016 gig in Cheap Trick’s hometown of Rockford, Illinois. 

“Gene and Paul saw Cheap Trick play in New York City at Max’s Kansas City. There was hardly anybody there, but they were clapping and really enjoyed the band. I jumped up on the table where Paul and Gene were, and there was a bill there, and I picked it up and I put it in my mouth and ate it. I think Gene told the story that it was a $100 bill, but I think I shit out a $20. [laughs] 

“We did three months opening for Kiss in June, July and August of 1977, which went across the whole United States and Canada. The Japanese press was there to see Kiss, because they were huge in Japan. They liked our band so much that we started getting a lot of press in Japan, and that’s what really boosted our career, which made us do that record at Budokan [1978’s Cheap Trick at Budokan]. 

“Back in the ’70s, I was at Paul’s New York apartment and he had a lot of guitars on the wall. He knew I was a guitar collector too. A few years ago he introduced me to a guy named Gordon Miller, and he’s built me some guitars and cases because of Paul. “My favorite Kiss songs are all the ones they played on the tour we did with them. But if I had to pick one it’s ‘Love Gun.’ Why? Because it reminds me of the Sex Pistols. Same word connotations. Love Guns. Sex Pistols. There you go.”

Tom Morello

The Kiss Army owes a deep debt of gratitude to Tom Morello. He single-handedly duked it out with the snooty Rock and Roll Hall of Fame brass over the merits of Kiss’s long-overdue induction. Victorious in his zealous mission, he’s responsible for getting Kiss on the ballot and paving the way for their ultimate induction into the hallowed institution. 

“What makes Kiss great is the chemistry of the members, especially the classic Kiss lineup, and Paul Stanley’s guitar playing is a huge part of that. ‘Strutter,’ ‘C’mon and Love Me,’ ‘God of Thunder,’ ‘Creatures of the Night’ through ‘Psycho Circus’ — he’s writing and playing those riffs, and those songs are some of the most rocking and important tunes in the history of rock and roll. 

“So, he’s not Yngwie Malmsteen or Nuno Bettencourt. But thank goodness, because he’s writing these jams that make up one of the greatest bands of all time. 

“Listen, rock and roll is not just about moving your fingers around fast on the frets. One of the most iconic and identifiable guitar players in the history of rock music is Paul Stanley, and his guitar playing is directly connected to his seven-inch heels and his hair. 

“His guitar playing is directly connected to his makeup and the tone of voice he uses when addressing the crowd, and the way that he’s swinging on guitars and swinging around the arena and pointing to the back row. His guitar playing is a part of all of that. It’s a crucial reason why Kiss is great, and it’s a crucial reason why he’s a very important guitar player.”

Phil Collen

Along with Joe Perry and Rick Nielsen, Def Leppard’s Phil Collen is in elite company as one of only a few axe slingers who have shared the stage jamming with Kiss. 

“Ace would play the solos, but the meat and potatoes of it was all the Paul Stanley rhythm stuff. It’s really substantial, and he gets the song over with singing and playing. Kiss created this kind of Marvel superhero thing and they put it to music. 

“What surprised me most about Kiss is that it’s all about the show. But they also had the concert anthems to back it up. When they asked me to come up and play with them, I was honored. I’ve known them for years and they’re great. I like their approach and their whole vibe to it; they take it very seriously. 

“The hardest part was trying to walk around in those boots! [laughs]. I had to walk around all day in them to get used to them. I wound up wearing a set of Paul’s boots, which had seven-inch heels. You had to be really careful, because you could easily bust your ankle. I had to have some supports around the ankles, like a skier. 

“As I was walking onstage, the production manager said, ‘Oh, by the way, don’t go past that line.’ I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Because the flames will get you.’ I was like, Oh my God! So I’m trying to stay balanced wearing these seven-inch boots playing ‘Deuce,’ and you could feel all this fire coming up from behind you. But that was such fun. It was such a thrill to play with Kiss. I was honored.”

Kiss’ latest album: Kiss off the Soundboard: Live in Poughkeepsie is available to buy and stream now

40 years ago this month, New York City rock legends Kiss released their landmark Creatures of the Night album.

With a change of image beckoning, this 1982 LP was the last to feature Kiss wearing their trademark face paint before the release of Lick It Up the following year.

It would also be Kiss's last album on Casablanca Records – the label that had nurtured the band since their eponymous debut release in 1974.

All was not well in the Kiss camp during the recording of Creatures of the Night. 

Casablanca founder Neil Bogart sadly passed away that year, and co-founding guitarist Ace Frehley was in absentia.

Although Space Ace’s face is featured on the album’s cover he did not play on Creatures of the Night and quit the band shortly after its release.

He was replaced by Vinnie Vincent who recorded guitar parts on several tracks including “Keep Me Comin',” “Danger,” “War Machine,” “Saint and Sinner,” “I Love It Loud” and “Killer” (though he was not appropriately credited for his work at the time.)

Although Kiss were aiming to return to their hard rock roots with Creatures of the Night in an effort to reconnect with fans, they extended a somewhat surprising studio invitation to jazz fusion whizz Robben Ford.

Known for his work with the likes of L.A. Express, Yellowjackets, Miles Davis and Larry Carlton he seemed an unlikely choice.

And Ford couldn’t agree more.

In this interview for D’Addario, the guitarist responds to a question from a fan who asks what his weirdest gig was.

Tentatively, Ford begins with the disclaimer: “There's been a lot of water under the bridge,” before confirming that his weirdest gig was, in fact, “doing nine days in the studio with Kiss.

“I played on their record Creatures of the Night… It turned out there are two guitar solos on that record from me. ‘Rock and Roll Hell’ was the first song and the other one is kind of a rock ballad called ‘I Still Love You.’

“I spent nine days in the studio with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. And that was rather unusual. That whole situation there was rather unusual. I’d heard a lot about their stories and was playing music that I don't play, and I never listen to.”

Pre-order the Creatures Of The Night 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Box Set here.

Nashville may be known for country music, but when the band Blonder Than Hell, fronted by the golden-haired guitar duo Philip Shouse and Jeremy Asbrock, began their fully costumed annual holiday KISSmas tribute shows in 2010, it quickly became a Music City tradition. Shouse, who plays guitar for Wolf Hoffman's Accept, and Asbrock – formerly of power-pop cult faves the Shazam! and an alum of John Corabi’s band – were lifetime Kiss fans who knew even their more obscure songs inside and out.

So was their pal, former Hair of the Dog frontman Ryan Spencer Cook, whose Big Rock Show homage to ’70s and ’80s arena rock was a mainstay on the bill of the first several Kiss Kruises.

Still, none of the talented trio imagined that within a few years they’d become the guitar frontline of both Gene Simmons’ and Ace Frehley’s touring bands, in many cases playing alongside their childhood heroes in the very venues where they’d first seen Kiss as kids.

“Yeah, it’s pretty nuts!” says Cook, whom Simmons invited to lunch aboard the Kiss Kruise years ago to ask for help forming a band for what was meant to be a handful of corporate gigs. “I said to Gene, ‘I know exactly who I’m going to call – you’ll love these guys,’” Cook recalls. “And he did. And it all went so well that two or three gigs became two or three years – the first Gene Simmons solo tours ever.”

At first, Cook recalls, Simmons was planning to leave his Gibson Signature bass at home and just sing. “I told him, respectfully, as a Kiss fan, if I came out to see you and you weren’t playing bass, I’d be pretty bummed.” Simmons, Asbrock says, “is absolutely one of the most underrated bass players in rock.

Shouse, who switches to bass in Ace’s band, agrees. “You’d think he’d hammer the bass really hard, but actually Gene’s touch is very economical and light,” he says. “He grew up on McCartney’s bass lines and ’60s R&B music, so Gene is a great walking-bass player.”

Cook, Asbrock and Shouse split the electric guitar duties three ways in Simmons’ band, allowing them to do things Kiss can’t, like have Shouse and Asbrock play main line and top harmony figures in “Detroit Rock City” while Cook holds down those syncopated backing riffs. And they encouraged Simmons to play more inside cuts like “Charisma” and “Got Love for Sale.”

When Ace Frehley joined Simmons for a show in St. Paul, Minnesota on that first tour in 2017, he was so impressed by the new blood – who collectively call themselves the Talismen – that he let his own band go and hired them on the spot.

Equipped with Vintage U.S. Pro Shop V100BLK and V120SM guitars and a VJ74MRGHB P-style bass for Shouse (all with Elixir strings), a Marshall cab backline, and a clutch of Kemper Profilers that lean on Michael Britt’s excellent vintage Marshall presets, the equally sharp Ace Frehley Band took to the road, performing Frehley’s 1978 self-titled solo record in its entirety at the Kiss Convention in 2018.

The Ace band recently completed a few months of arena touring alongside Alice Cooper. But even with all that firepower on the bill with him, Ace still proudly takes the solos himself – solos Shouse describes as “songs within songs. Ace’s solos in those classic Kiss songs are just as important as the lead vocal, and if you cover a Kiss song, you’d better not just ‘jam’ the solo, dude – you’d better learn it, and nail it. It’s that important.”

Beyond the precise arc and harmonies, Cook says, it’s the spirit behind them that makes it Kiss. “Can you deny how much those opening chords to ‘Love Gun’ hit you in the chest? Kiss understood that what people want from rock guitar is the bare essentials – not too much, but not too little. Kiss give you what you can digest, with a ton of attitude, and it hits you in that feel-good spot in the heart.”

Since Ace Frehley’s first departure from Kiss in 1980, the band’s lead electric guitar chair has been held down by many capable, creative players, including Vinnie Vincent, Bruce Kulick, Mark St. John, and, its occupant since 2002, former Black ‘N Blue guitar slinger Tommy Thayer. 

But if those players have served the band nobly, and even contributed a few fan favorites to Kiss’s repertoire – Kulick’s work on 1992’s Revenge is particularly noteworthy – the band’s melodic, hooky lead guitar legacy was framed, built, established and given enduring wings by one man: the inimitable Paul Daniel “Ace” Frehley, a.k.a. the Spaceman.

“Y’know, I can remember as a kid hearing Eric Clapton interviewed, talking about his solo on Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’” recalls the 70-year-old Frehley, fresh from a soundcheck with his recently reinvigorated Ace Frehley Band. “And Clapton said the solo on that song was basically the melody from Elvis’s ‘Blue Moon.’ I clearly remember him saying that the best and most memorable solos are the ones you can hum. I never forgot that, and that's stayed with me my whole life.”

He’s not the only one it stayed with: Entire generations of players – while simultaneously pledging allegiance to Frehley’s idols, like Clapton, Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend (“the master of chordal work”) – were equally inspired by Ace’s savvy synthesis of blues guitar bends, wicked triplet licks and smart chord-specific note choices that always stuck to the chordal skeleton of the track, never devolving into what Frank Zappa famously called “spoo.”

Not that it was an exercise in quantum physics for Frehley, a spontaneous player who doesn’t speak the language of minor-sixths and the Mixolydian mode, however much he may actually play those very things.

“You take the whole extended after-solo on ‘She,” from Kiss Alive!,” he explains. “I mean, I’m just having fun there. It was always about having fun for me.” A little too much fun at times, admits Frehley, who practically lived at Studio 54 in its decadent heyday and has been proudly sober for the last decade and a half.

And while Ace’s original solos and riffs may have helped launch a thousand hair metal and grunge guitarists, he wasn’t above a little, um, creative borrowing himself, the main solo on ‘She’ being a prime example.

“I stole the ‘She’ solo from Robby Krieger of the Doors!” Frehley confesses. “I’ve got to give credit where credit is due.” Indeed, the first eight bars of the “She” solo are a practically note-for-note swipe of Robby’s iconic solo from the Doors’ pounding 1968 album track “Five to One.”

“And you know the solo in ‘Love Gun’?” he asks, as if anybody doesn’t. “I stole that whole solo from the Blues Magoos’ hit song ‘We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet.’ Listen to it – you’ll hear it!”

Not only does Frehley happily cop to the source of many of his best ideas, he has even built a few albums around it. His Origins Vol. 1 (2016) and Vol. 2 (2020) records are among the best of his career: raw, raucous and ripping covers of the ’60s and ’70s stuff that inspired the then 16-year-old Staten Island rawker: Leslie West’s Mountain, Humble Pie, Deep Purple, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, and more. 

“I was resistant to the idea at first,” Frehley says, “but once I started working on those albums, I put my whole heart and soul into them.”

Kiss fans invariably have their heart set on hearing iconic Ace moments, like the lightning licks in “God of Thunder” and the bursting Berry-bends on “Shout It Out Loud,” both from 1976’s Destroyer. But Ace has his own favorites, too: “I also love the solo in ‘Strange Ways,’ [Hotter Than Hell] and I love the solo in ‘100,000 Years,’ [Kiss] as well as the solo I played in ‘Deuce,’” he says, with pride. “Those are all the classic Ace solos that come to mind off the top of my head.”

A bit further afield, though, are cool, more unexpected moments you might not associate with Kiss’s raw and unruly approach. There’s the downright experimental stippling and sound effects on Rock and Roll Over’s “Almost Human”; Destroyer’s “King of the Nighttime World” solo, where Mayfield-approved R&B rhythm licks give way to furious post-Blackmore pick attacks; or Dressed to Kill’s “Love Her All I Can,” a funky up-tempo groove machine over which Ace lets fly with flange-y southern rock triplets, and moves into a wicked series of motivic move-over-Trower quintuplet licks.

And no assessment of Ace’s lead work would be complete without the titanic Gorham/Robertson–style natural minor harmony lead in Db (technically C, but Kiss always tuned down a half-step in their halcyon days) on Destroyer’s “Detroit Rock City.” To this day, though, you can hear a slight shrug in Ace’s voice when he explains how producer Bob Ezrin essentially sang him the melody and harmony for the epic lead break in “Detroit Rock City.” But really, so what?

Sometimes guitar playing is about coming up with the perfect part; sometimes it’s about executing the perfect part. The D-flat Aeolian/Harmonic Minor–based solo to “Detroit Rock City” kicks ass because it’s a great melody, performed by Ace with a wicked tone, slick slides and pull-offs, a cool harmony in thirds, and a ton of attitude. “Ezrin always did say I was the most rock and roll guy in the band,” Frehley says with a smile.

Gibson Les Pauls have been essential to that stance ever since. On his recent U.S. tour with his old friend Alice Cooper, Frehley leaned on his sunburst, three-pickup Gibson 1959 replica Ace Frehley Les Paul Custom Signature model; his famous black 1978 Les Paul Standard that was later routed for a middle pickup, and a three-pickup illuminated “Light Guitar” Les Paul modified by noted boutique luthier Jim Cara. The obvious irony here? Ace never uses the middle pickup. Or the neck pickup. “The bridge pickup really is my tone, completely,” he confesses.

Those bridge pups, says his longtime tech Rocco Monterosso, generally include a DiMarzio Air Zone or the Tone Zone humbucker, underneath a set of D’Addario EXL120 Nickel-Wound 009–.042s, struck with Dunlop Medium picks. 

From there, Ace’s sound hits a Shure Axient AD4D wireless unit, followed by a modest pedal drawer: a TC Electronic PolyTune, an Xotic Labs EP Booster and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler – used almost exclusively on “Rock Soldiers,” “Shock Me,” and a slap-effect on “Detroit Rock City” – and straight into a 100-watt Marshall JCM2000 Dual Super Lead, paired with a Marshall 1960AV cab loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s. The Marshall’s effects loop passes through an MXR Custom Audio MC401 Boost/Line Driver and a TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb for a little extra space for Ace.

So the obvious question is: Why have a middle pickup at all if you never even use it? Oh, ye of little faith – this is the Spaceman we’re talking about here, people! That middle pickup cavity contains the open end of a hidden tube that passes through the guitar from the routed-out large cavity on the back. In that cavity, Velcro’d to the guitar, lives the current secret to Ace’s legendary – nay, mythical – “smoking Les Paul” stage routine, which he performs during an unaccompanied solo following the Love Gun song “Shock Me.”

“I used to just use actual smoke bombs for years,” Ace explains, “but that can be a little complicated and dangerous. So for the last 10 years or so, I’ve been using these mini fog machines called Tiny FX [by Look Solutions]. They run off lithium batteries, and they use the same fogger liquid you see in the really big stage smokers. It’s crazy shit!”

Which, if you’ve spent any time following the career of Ace Frehley over the years, is pretty much par for the course.

“Look, there’s no rhyme or reason to why anything happens, as far as I’m concerned,” Ace says cheerfully. “I believe we live in some kind of matrix and it's all being controlled by some master computer. Somewhere out there, God's pulling the strings and playing the whole thing… on a keyboard!”

Buy No Regrets: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir by Ace Frehley here. 

Every long-running band has its defining album, a creation that emerges from a seemingly perfect convergence of creative forces. For the Beatles it was Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band. For the Rolling Stones it was Exile on Main Street. Numerous other examples abound, from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

For Kiss, the magic arrived on Destroyer, an album on which the forces didn’t combine as much as they cascaded forth like a fountain of stage blood. Coming after the clunky opening trio of Kiss, Hotter Than Hell and Dressed to Kill, 1976’s Destroyer was the studio follow-up on which the New York City glam rockers fine-tuned their mix of brawny rock and roll and theatricality into a musical vision that was both sonic and cinematic in its scope.

Yes, it has the hits, including “Detroit Rock City,” “Shout It Out Loud,” “Gods of Thunder,” “Flaming Youth” and “Beth,” but Destroyer has something more: a cohesiveness of sound and vision – amid a sonic collage that includes choir, orchestra and keyboards – that in 1976 elevated Kiss to the ranks of rock and roll gods. 

To many fans, it was and remains their greatest achievement.

Although the album’s anniversary has been celebrated before – witness 2012’s Destroyer: Resurrected, on which producer Bob Ezrin sweetened and amended the production – Kiss have gone all out with the new Destroyer 45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe Edition. Comprising four CDs, a Blu-ray audio surround-sound disc mixed by Steve Wilson, a 68-page hardcover book and numerous collectibles – including a replica 1976 Kiss Army Kit – it’s a celebratory box every true fan will rush to own. Best of all, it offers a total of 73 tracks, 48 of which are previously unreleased. Bear in mind, the completed album had a mere 10 songs, including the hidden closing track, “Rock and Roll Party.”

But just what was it that inspired Kiss to such heights some three studio albums into their career? Remarkably, it was their first live album, Alive!, released one year earlier. The album had been a runaway success, giving the band its first smash hit.

“You know how McDonald’s have a sign that ticks over every time they sell another burger?” guitarist Paul Stanley asks. “Kiss Alive! was like that for us. We went from 70,000 sales to a million sales, and it just kept going.”

For America’s most flamboyant sons, Kiss Alive! was a genuine education, proving in Gold and Platinum currency that the appeal of the band was based on more than just music. Which is not to devalue the studio recordings from 1974 to ’75, as some of the most popular Kiss songs ever were put to tape in that period, including the chart hit “Rock and Roll All Nite.” 

Think of it like this: If Kiss, Hotter Than Hell and Dressed to Kill were the foreplay, the whisper in the ear and the hand on the thigh, then Kiss Alive! was the moment when the passion finally peaked. It was all there: the heaving and the humping, the solos and the raps… the whole nine yards.

“Kiss Alive! was what we stood for,” Stanley affirms, “the embodiment and the magnification of everything we were as a band. It was Kiss on steroids.”

For Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, the pressure was well and truly on. Achieving success is one thing; following it up is another. If Kiss Alive! was to be a springboard, they couldn’t afford to rest on their platform shoes. They returned to the studio – the Record Plant in New York – knowing that, however good their songs were, they needed a cheerleader and guru who would leave no stone unturned in the quest for musical greatness.

Enter producer Bob Ezrin.

“I’d first crossed paths with Bob up in Canada, where I was doing some promotion,” Stanley recounts. “He asked me if I liked the sound of my own records, and because I was young and full of piss and vinegar, I said that I did.

“However, I was well aware of what he could do in the studio, of the work he’d done with Alice Cooper.”

Ezrin had first joined forces with the Alice Cooper Band for their 1971 album Love It to Death. “Which was cinematic and atmospheric, yet still totally rock and roll,” Stanley continues. “His fingerprints are all over that stuff, so it was just a no-brainer that he should be our one and only choice for Destroyer.”

In making their first three albums, Kiss had simply written the songs, then gone into the studio to record them before heading out on tour. It was a straightforward process, the way presumably every record was made… except that in Ezrin’s world, there was a little thing called “pre-production” that had to be factored in. It was a first-time experience for Kiss, who must have suddenly felt like they were back at school.

“Actually, brutal boot camp was more like it,” Stanley says, wincing. “Bob definitely had a whistle round his neck. At the time, of course, we were basking in the glory of our success with Kiss Alive!, and we weren’t exactly open to outside opinion. But we listened to him because he was, well, right! With Bob, it was ‘Teach us!’ ”

Three years later, Ezrin would be in the studio with David Gilmour, Roger Waters et al helming the Pink Floyd classic The Wall, so the Kiss camp can at least reflect with pride that they put their faith in a hit maker. But it wasn’t a decision they reveled in at the time. Not only did the Toronto-born taskmaster insist that they tune their own instruments – he also arranged them in a circle, Alcoholics Anonymous style, going through the material with an attention to detail usually reserved for military maneuvers.

“Sometimes he’d ask for most of the band to leave the rehearsal space so he could focus in on a particular person,” Stanley recalls. “He might want to run through the drum beat to ‘Detroit Rock City’ with Peter, or maybe talk to Gene about the song’s bass part, which incidentally is based on Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Freddie’s Dead’ [from the soundtrack to the 1972 movie Superfly]. The rehearsals were long, but they were exciting. And it wasn’t just the music he was pushing us on; it was the lyrics too. The ‘fuck me’ songs were out.”

While most of the material was pieced together in the circle, with choruses, verses and bridges run up the flagpole in the hope of an Ezrin salute, a couple of Stanley songs were nearly in the can. “God of Thunder” was, to all intents and purposes, complete, while “Detroit Rock City” had a solid chorus but was still seeking a theme.

The song’s turning point came when Stanley remembered a show in North Carolina where, tragically, a fan had been killed by a car outside the venue. Straight away, Ezrin saw it could be the meat of the tune. He set about encouraging Stanley to complete the lyric, the end result being the story of a kid who hears about his own demise on the radio. (And despite what you may have read on the internet, Gene doesn’t voice the part of the radio reporter in the track’s intro.)

The choice of Detroit for the song’s setting was no arbitrary thing. It was the city that gave Kiss a boost early on. Though known primarily for Motown, the Motor City is a rock and roll town – witness acts like Bob Seger, Grand Funk, the MC5, Ted Nugent and the Stooges – and it embraced the group on its first tours. For that matter, when performing at the city’s Cobo Hall on January 26, 1976, Stanley introduced “Rock and Roll All Nite” as a song written in and for Detroit. Given the band’s relationship with the city, it was only natural to spotlight it in the title of Stanley’s new rocker. But in many ways, “Detroit Rock City” is about every place that likes to shake loose.

“God of Thunder,” meanwhile, would prove to be a double-edged sword for the man known as the Starchild. It was a great song, no doubt, but one Stanley had written for himself. “When Bob said Gene should take the lead vocal, I just couldn’t believe it,” he says, still sounding surprised. “That’s the thing about working with a real producer; he can keep the band focused by assuming control, and that’s generally a good thing… apart from when he disagrees with me.

“Of course, it was absolutely the right call, but it was hard for me to appreciate the logic at the time. I was speechless.”

And it wasn’t just Simmons who made his presence felt on the song – Ezrin’s young sons David and Josh were given a “big moment” too, providing the eerie-sounding vocals that stoke up the atmosphere. “They were wearing little space helmets with walkie-talkies built into them,” Stanley recalls, “and they were saying, ‘I’m King Kong, I’m King Kong…’ That’s what you hear on the track.”

“Kiss Alive! had all the muscle and the spit,” Stanley explains, “but Bob replaced that with a cinematic feel. It was a night-and-day difference to what we’d done before, an altogether larger picture of who we were.”

“God of Thunder,” of course, was destined to achieve great things, and swiftly became a signature tune for a man for whom breathing fire and spitting blood were already a way of life. That was the thing about Destroyer – it was a concept album, but only in the sense that the concept was Kiss itself. The tracks allowed the band members to further bond with the fans by exploring and expounding upon their individual personas.

Ezrin realized that turning these rock and roll heroes into rock and roll superheroes was the key to giving Kiss their biggest record to date, hence his insistence that Gene grab the mic for the self-trumpeting “God of Thunder.” Musical vehicles were duly constructed for other members too.

In Stanley’s case, it was “Do You Love Me?,” a song co-written with producer/songwriter (and Runaways manager) Kim Fowley. “It’s a song that deals with the age-old question, Do you like me for who I am or for what I have?” Stanley reflects. “But to be honest, I really didn’t give a rat’s ass. Back then, our lives were all about instant gratification. Commitment didn’t really come into it. We were enjoying our success.”

With Ezrin bringing the hammer down, there was little danger of filler creeping in below the radar, although the song that hovered closest to it was the tune selected for Criss: “Beth,” a grandiose orchestral outing that has been described by experts in the field of soft rock as the “proto-power ballad.”

Penned by the drummer and his former Chelsea bandmate Stan Penridge, the song received a serious sprinkling of fairy dust from Ezrin. Its roots stretch back to the early 1970s, when it had the title “Beck,” a name inspired by the girlfriend of Chelsea guitarist Mike Brand, who was forever on the phone while the band were in rehearsal. The title was tweaked to avoid confusion, and not only with Jeff Beck. “What’s a Beck?!” Stanley asks, with a shrug. “It just wasn’t a name that people could relate to.”

Originally released as the B-side of “Detroit Rock City,” the third single from Destroyer, “Beth” made an impact on radio as DJs flipped the seven-inch and gave it airplay. Soon after its release, the track received A-side status and charted at number seven, going Gold in the process and picking up a People’s Choice Award. Its success ensured Kiss’s hellfire-and-brimstone stage show would, for the foreseeable future, be tempered by the passing out of roses and the wafting of orchestral music through the PA.

Ideally, Destroyer would have seen the fast-living Ace Frehley taking vocals on a track, something the other members had been encouraging him to do ever since he turned up years earlier with the best part of “Cold Gin” in his pocket. Not wanting to fully embrace the limelight at this point, Ace chose to put all his effort into the melodic, in-the-pocket guitar work that made him Stanley’s most excellent axe-slinging partner.

It wasn’t until the 1977’s Love Gun album that a bona fide all-singing/all-dancing Ace song arrived by means of “Shock Me.” “And the funny thing with ‘Shock Me’ was that Ace did all of the vocals lying flat on his back in the studio,” Stanley recalls. “He wasn’t drunk; he just liked the extra pressure on his chest.”

Of course, the Space Ace wasn’t unfamiliar with the horizontal position, having quaffed deeply from the rock and roll goblet. But with Ezrin in charge, there were rules in place for the first time. “Looking back,” Stanley reflects, “this was the start of a new and necessary mindset for us. Basically, if someone doesn’t turn up, the show must go on.

“You know, Ace has got his life under control these days. I have great fun talking with him. But things were different back then. It’s all been written about already, but he was succumbing to the excesses of the rock and roll lifestyle rather than taking advantage of its perks.”

Ace did his best to fall in line with Ezrin’s approach and take direction. Listening to “Detroit Rock City,” the producer dreamed up the dual-lead guitar break that takes the whole thing to a higher level of enjoyment. “And Bob sang that solo section note for note, then asked Ace to learn it,” Stanley recounts. “Including the harmony.”

But Ace wasn’t always up to snuff, and one occasion when Ace was, to all intents and purposes, lost in space, Ezrin ushered in Detroit session player Dick Wagner to provide electric guitar and acoustic guitar. A session and stage pro who had previously played credited and uncredited with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Aerosmith, Wagner was the only musician, apart from the band members themselves, to play an instrument on Destroyer, most notably for the solo in “Sweet Pain,” and he made no attempt to disguise his presence by fretting in Frehley fashion. He was onboard to do the best job he could, guided by a producer determined to use every trick in the book to wring out the magic.

Of course, some of Ezrin’s tricks were decidedly low tech. Today, it’s normal for drummers to lay down their parts to a click track, but the technology didn’t exist in 1976. Which is why Ezrin opted for a cigar box with a microphone inside, which he would tap with a drumstick to keep the musicians as much in line as possible.

It was this kind of precision, married to an ambition larger than Godzilla, that was the hallmark of Destroyer. With the band having granted Ezrin the benefit of “final say,” the producer was free to execute his vision. There was no holding back – no idea too grand to execute.

Though it’s tempting to call it “kitchen-sink production,” Destroyer’s sonic execution is more like a rocket-firing washing machine, with all manner of extra-curricular elements boldly set on spin cycle. With the Bronx Boys Choir on “Great Expectations,” the New York Philharmonic on “Beth,” a calliope on “Flaming Youth” and the sound effect of a car crash on “Detroit Rock City,” Destroyer had plenty to catch the ear and spark the imagination.

Pianos and power chords worked closely together, and all sound effects were printed directly to tape. A less self-assured producer would have recorded everything au naturel and added the required delay, distortion and what-not in the mix, but not Ezrin, who preferred to add the icing while the cake was being baked. “If you were to play the multi-track of Destroyer back through the mixing desk, it would sound just like the album,” Stanley confirms. “Everything would already be there.”

In keeping with the mighty sweep of the music, Destroyer saw the band going for broke on the visual side too. Out went the old costumes. In came a suitably all-conquering post-apocalyptic comic-book-chic look that gave the group a much-needed update to go with their sonic rehab. It was this look that painter/illustrator Ken Kelly – a relative of fantasy/ sci-fi illustrator Frank Frazetta – was asked to capture for Destroyer’s sleeve, the result of which was perhaps the most famous representation of the band ever. 

It’s a magnificent piece of rubble-rousing art, sometimes copied, sometimes spoofed (as on the Sloppy Seconds album Destroyed), but forever loved. Unfortunately, when Kelly’s first painting showed the four members in their earlier Alive!-era costumes, he was forced to redo it.

Considering how much Destroyer defined Kiss at the back end of a decade that saw them move from rehearsal-room hopefuls to multi-Platinum gods, it’s interesting to speculate whether their growth would have been the same were it not for the complete merging of image, music and message that takes place on this album. The band would hook up with Ezrin again for both a low point – 1981’s (Music From) The Elder – and a celebrated return to form – 1992’s Revenge – but the mojo would never work harder than it did here.

The fact remains that time has been kind to Destroyer, a record still very much connected to its own hair and teeth. Even the previously hidden sonic montage “Rock & Roll Party” has come to sound like a relevant part of the album, when in fact it was put there purely and simply to soak up some time: Even with the inclusion of the roughly minute-and-a-half track, Destroyer clocks in under 35 minutes.

Ultimately, the album shows what can be achieved when the studio gods are grinning away like fools.

“I guess ‘swagger’ is probably the right word,” Stanley offers. “The songs have a truly majestic feel, without coming across as either pompous or contrived. Bob was just a joy to work with – the first genuine producer we’d put our trust in.”

Remarkably, for all Ezrin’s control over the proceedings, he couldn’t dissuade the band from their choice of title. “I know that he didn’t really like it,” Stanley says. “He thought ‘destroyer’ sounded negative, but for me it was too good not to use. This was one of those records where – from the music right through to the name – the planets were all in perfect alignment.”

Buy the Destroyer: 45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe Edition here.

Buy the Destroyer: 45th Anniversary Deluxe Edition here.

If you grew up in the 1970s and were smitten by loud, fast rock and roll, there’s a solid chance it was Kiss’s Ace Frehley who first inspired you to pick up a guitar – or, at the very least, sparked your urge to mime an air axe with unabashed gusto.

Kiss took showmanship into the stratosphere with their cooler-than-hell futuristic outfits, quasi-superhero makeup and tightly choreographed concert extravaganzas that included fire breathing, smoking electric guitars and tons of pyro.

All spectacle aside, however, the band played tight, solid hard rock and wrote some damn catchy tunes, too. And while bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons and rhythm guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley have kept an incarnation of Kiss going since the early ’70s, it’s the original lineup, which lasted until the departure of Frehley and drummer/vocalist Peter Criss in the early ’80s, that most fans consider the definitive one.

A wide range of guitarists, including Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Guns N’ Roses’ Slash have cited Kiss – and Frehley in particular – as a key early influence.

In his Kiss heyday, Frehley relied heavily on minor pentatonic box patterns, often approaching them with a clever logic based on sequenced patterns and impressive displays of flash. Before we begin, make sure you’re familiar with three specific pentatonic forms. Ex. 1b shows the familiar root-position Box 1 form, which is based on the first note of the scale (the root), starting on the low E string.

Examples 1a and 1c detail, respectively, the Box 5 shape below the root, starting on the fifth note, or degree, of the minor pentatonic scale, which is the minor, or “flatted,” seventh; and Box 2, which begins on the scale’s second degree, the minor, or “flatted,” third.

Ace likes to weave in and out of these three adjacent, overlapping patterns, using Box 1 as a foundation. We’ve illustrated the boxes here in the key of A minor, which was a common key in early Kiss songs, although the group would often tune their instruments down a half-step, to Eb standard.

You can easily transpose the visual and physical shapes to any other key simply by shifting the box patterns up or down the fretboard to different tonal centers.

Ex. 2 is based on the C# minor pentatonic scale (C# E F# G# B) and is inspired by a sequenced two-string pattern Frehley delivers during his solo in the frequent Kiss concert opener “I Stole Your Love.” Notice how the pick-hammer-pull trill pattern works its way up through the Box 1 shape.

Ex. 3 is a similar C# minor pattern, this time incorporating the cool, low-string perfect-fourths double-stops that provide heft to the song’s main riff.

Ex. 4 is based on a lead break Ace plays in “King of the Nighttime World.” The song is mostly in the key of D, but the progression under the chorus and instrumental break works its way through a series of chords that are fourths apart.

Instead of changing keys and scale patterns, however, Frehley cleverly sequences a tasty bent-note motif up the top three strings of a Box 2 D minor pentatonic (D F G A C) shape to smoothly sail through the changes.

Ace’s guitar break at the beginning of “Love Gun” is arguably one of the most exciting and propulsive musical moments in Kiss’s early catalog, and although Ex. 5 is not an exact transcription, it’s based on a similar idea: a sequenced triplet motif that starts on the low strings of a Box 5 E minor pentatonic scale (E G A B D) and ascends upward through the next two forms (Box 1 and Box 2), climaxing with a series of whole-step bends on the high E string within the Box 2 shape. Pick cleanly and pay attention to the fret-hand fingerings to make the position shifts as smooth as possible.

Loosely based on Frehley’s epic lead in “Firehouse,” Ex. 6 demonstrates three of its key components: articulated bend-and-release moves in the first two bars, ascending hammer-ons in bars 3 and 4, and a four-note melodic riff sequenced up the neck in the final four bars.

Bars 1-4 are played within the A minor pentatonic pattern. In bars 5-8, a sequenced pattern ascends through different tonal centers and breaks with the scale, but the physical shape remains consistent as it moves up the neck to match each chord.

For Ex. 7, we drew inspiration from Ace’s unaccompanied solo at the end of “Shock Me,” which was a highlight of almost every Kiss concert back in the ’70s. Like Frehley, here we predominantly stick with A minor pentatonic forms.

We’ve transcribed the solo in 4/4, but in concert the Space Ace would often play the phrases quite freely. Kiss fans expected plenty of flash and spectacle, and Ace certainly delivered the goods, so let’s begin with some ear-grabbing rapid-fire double-pull-off triplets to open strings, grounded in the Box 1 A minor scale pattern (bars 1-4).

Next, use the bend at the end of bar 4 to transition to the high strings of the Box 2 A minor pentatonic form in bar 5, which features a chromatic passing tone and double pull-off on each string. In bar 6, this lick is displaced an octave lower to the middle two strings of the Box 1 shape, and, in bar 7, another octave lower to the bottom two strings in the Box 5 shape, before finally resolving with a few boldly articulated power chords in bar 8.

These are some cool licks for sure, but the raddest part of Ace’s in-concert feature is still the smoke and fire that shot from his Les Paul’s dummy rhythm pickup cavity during the solo’s climax. For that level of showmanship, you’ll have to experience Ace and Kiss in concert for yourself.

The dawn of the ’70s saw hard rock emerge as the predominant form of rock, a loud and brash style that excelled in arenas and stadiums, to which touring acts had graduated. 

Next to Led Zeppelin, two of the biggest groups of the time were Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad. After exploring pop and prog in the late ’60s, Deep Purple found their groove with their Mark II lineup in 1970, releasing In Rock, the album that broke them into the mainstream. Meanwhile, Grand Funk Railroad became massively successful with their updated power-trio format. 

Despite critical denunciations and little radio airplay, the band sold millions of albums and in 1971 sold out Shea Stadium in just 72 hours, something that had taken the Beatles several weeks to do in 1965.  

Hard rock remained robust throughout the decade, branching off into glam rock with groups like Queen and the New York Dolls and growing proggy in the hands of acts such as Journey and Styx. 

Others, including Boston, Foreigner, and REO Speedwagon, forged a slick and radio-friendly style of songcraft with anthemic choruses and dramatic arrangements that played well in large arenas, earning it the “corporate rock” tag.   

As the decade grew to a close, two new guitar heroes emerged: Eddie Van Halen and Angus Young. As the guitarist for Australia’s AC/DC, Young was in many ways a throwback to an earlier era, with his Gibson SG, use of bluesy pentatonic licks, and appropriation of Chuck Berry’s duck walk. 

Van Halen was in every way his opposite, a blazingly fast and innovative shredder unlike any other, who played guitars he’d heavily modified to meet his playing demands. Both would give hard rock the kick it needed to remain vital into the 1980s.

Brian May

His backline of up to 15 Vox AC30s was referred to as the Wall of Death for its sheer volume. That alone might qualify Brian May for inclusion on any list of hard-rock guitarists, but there is much more to his style. 

As Queen’s guitarist for 50 years and, along with the late Freddie Mercury, one of its main songwriters, May expanded hard rock’s stylistic palette, combining rock and roll with the theatricality of Led Zeppelin, the glammy camp of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era, and the musical diversity of the Beatles. 

Along the way, he’s made his ringing, harmonized lead work one of the most distinctive and recognizable guitar tones in all of rock. 

His signature sound was nearly fully formed when Queen arrived in record shops in 1973 as a quasi–heavy metal/progressive-rock act. Their self-titled 1973 debut played to those strengths, but 1974’s Queen II introduced elements of glam and found the band developing the multilayered overdubs and vocal harmonies that would become their trademark.

“Led Zeppelin and the Who are probably in Queen II somewhere, because they were among our favorite groups,” May said at the time. “But what we are trying to do differently from either of those groups [is] this sort of layered sound. The Who had the open-chord guitar sound, but our sound is more based on the overdriven guitar sound. I also wanted to build up textures behind the main melody lines.”

Indeed, May’s fretwork was the group’s distinctive second voice to Mercury’s own. While he’s used a number of guitars over the years, including Fender Telecasters and Gibson Les Pauls, his main axe has been his homemade Red Special, sporting three Burns Tri-Sonic pickups, each of which can be put out of phase and used singly or in combination with the others, providing a vast range of tones.

As for May’s use of AC30s and a treble booster, he gives credit to his hero Rory Gallagher, whom he met in the late ’60s following a gig by Gallagher’s band Taste at the London Marquee.

“I said, ‘How do you get the sound? What is it?’” May recalled in 2015. “And he said, ‘Oh, it’s very simple. I have this amp – an AC30 amp – and I have this little [Dallas] Rangemaster Treble Booster.’ So I went straight out and got the AC30 and the Treble Booster, and it gave me what I wanted. It made the guitar speak.” 

But they were only part of the formula. May’s distinctive lead tone comes from plugging his treble booster into his custom Deacy amp, built by Queen bassist John Deacon from a discarded transistor-radio amplifier circuit and a bookshelf speaker. Warm, smooth, and sustaining, the resulting tone allowed May’s Red Special to sound like a violin or even a human voice.

The amp would prove especially useful starting with 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, where Queen settled into the hard-rock/pop amalgam that became their signature for much of that decade, allowing May’s multi-tracked harmonized guitar lines to shine on countless Queen tracks, from “Killer Queen” and “Tie Your Mother Down” to “Stone Cold Crazy” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

So remarkable was the sound that, for a while in the 1970s, Queen’s albums carried the disclaimer “No Synthesizers!” in their sleeve notes, lest listeners mistake May’s remarkable layered guitar work for keyboards.

Top Track: “Keep Yourself Alive”

Paul Kossoff

With the British blues-rock band Free, as well as his later solo project, Back Street Crawler, Paul Kossoff proved himself to be a dynamic and expressive guitarist with a blazing style that called on two of his biggest influences – Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. 

His tough, sinewy phrasing with a Les Paul or a Strat through Marshall 100-watt amps is captured on the two-CD set from 2006, Free: Live at the BBC. He died tragically in 1976 on a flight from L.A. to New York.   

Top Track: “Songs of Yesterday”

Ronnie Montrose

He began as a journeyman guitarist, playing with Van Morrison, Herbie Hancock, and Edgar Winter, among others. But it was with his own group, Montrose, fronted by an unknown Sammy Hagar, that he established his legend as the precursor to the virtuoso likes of Eddie Van Halen. 

To many fans, Montrose was America’s answer to Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath, and Ronnie had the chops to go up against any of their guitarists.   

Top Track: “Rock Candy”

Buck Dharma

Blending rhythm and melody into a distinctive lead style, Dharma (born Donald Roeser) applied his memorable licks and riffs to Blue Öyster Cult’s songs, many of which he penned, including the hits “Burnin’ for You,” “Godzilla,” and “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” 

Despite being lead guitarist for one of the era’s most successful hard-rock acts, his playing never got the widespread acclaim it deserved, probably because he played no more than the songs required.   

Top Track: “Burnin’ for You”

Ace Frehley

Most guitar fans wouldn’t consider Ace Frehley to be among the most technically advanced players in the hard-rock universe, and Ace would probably agree.

“I don’t know shit from Shinola,” he once said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m original – I never took lessons or had any formal training.” And make no mistake, Ace is indeed an original.

To paraphrase a line commonly uttered about the Velvet Underground, a case could be made that practically every kid who heard and saw the Spaceman play in the 1970s went out and grabbed a guitar for themselves.

Which is to say that while Ace Frehley doesn’t tap, sweep, or shred, he has nevertheless served as one of rock guitar’s most influential and pivotal figures almost from the day in 1972 that he walked into a New York City rehearsal space wearing one red and one orange sneaker and nabbed the lead-guitar slot in Kiss.

And while his bandmates Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley did most of the visual and sonic scenery chewing throughout the ’70s, it was Frehley’s lead style – characterized by long pentatonic runs, wobbly vibratos, and slurred triplets – that inspired generations of future guitar heroes, including Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell, Skid Row’s Dave “Snake” Sabo, and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, to pick up their guitar and play.

Of course, Frehley – armed with his arsenal of two- and three-pickup Les Pauls – knew how to make an onstage spectacle of himself as well, whether it was planting smoke bombs in the guitar’s pickup cavity, shooting rockets off the headstock, or hanging his axe on a hook and having it fly up into the lighting tresses.

Since the 1980s, Ace has been in and out of Kiss, and he’s launched his own band, Frehley’s Comet, as well as a successful solo career. With nearly half a century invested in the music business, his influence and impact are firmly set in stone. 

“It’s a combination of my songwriting, my voice, my attitude, my persona,” he’s said. “It’s the package. I know great guitar players that don’t have any image or personality. You need it all.”  

Top Track: “Shock Me”

Joe Perry

There’s a reason that, for decades now, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler has introduced the man to his left onstage as “Mr. Joe fucking Perry.” It’s because the Massachusetts-bred Perry plays guitar, to put it one way, like a mutha. 

Whether keeping it tight and funky on “Walk This Way,” groovy and heavy on “Sweet Emotion,” fast and frantic on “Toys in the Attic,” or bluesy and deep-in-the-pocket on “Same Old Song and Dance,” he tackles every riff, lick, and lead with unmatched cool, class, and charisma. As he’s said, “It’s all just attitude.”  

What’s more, Perry is an avowed gear hound. He’s brandished a mouth-watering array of guitars over the years, from classics like ’59 Les Paul Standards and vintage Strats and Teles to unique examples that include his custom-built Tele-Rat, a Guild X-100 Bladerunner, a Chet Atkins Classical Electric (for the solo on “Janie’s Got a Gun”), and his own signature Gibsons, among others.   

But perhaps the most distinctive thing about Perry’s guitar approach is how intuitive and innate it feels. His funkiness never comes off as imitative or labored (check out his hard-grooving Fender Bass VI work on “Back in the Saddle”), and his blues riffs and phrases, in comparison to many of his peers, feel less weighted down by any strict adherence to tradition. 

What’s more, he’s also a stone-cold killer on slide, whether handling a Lucite Dan Armstrong for “Draw the Line” or a Chandler lap steel for “Rag Doll.” As for his rock credentials, there’s a reason Aerosmith are often called America’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band. And while they’re also the biggest-ever-selling hard-rock band in the U.S., as far as Perry’s concerned, that’s just coincidence. 

“People spend their careers trying to figure out what makes a hit single,” he has said. “But I learned a long time ago that you can’t anticipate what people want, because it’s always going to change. Play what you want to play.” 

Top Track: “Walk This Way”

Neal Schon

When Journey formed in the early ’70s, it was a mind-blowing experience to witness this spectacular young guitarist – who as a teenager had turned down a job offer from Eric Clapton and left his gig with the Santana band – step out on his own and play with such fire, passion, and intensity.

As Journey moved away from their early fusiony sound and began transforming into the pop-rock megaband we know and love, Schon’s playing remained incredibly soulful and bluesy.

He’s always crafted his solos with great compositional skill that moved the music and kept the listeners wanting more. Schon wasn’t labeled a “shredder” per se (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on one’s perspective), but he’s had a certain willful restraint in his playing that few pop-rockers have been able to display so naturally. 

He’s always sounded perfectly in sync with the songs, and was never one to blow solos for the sake of, well, blowing. Just listen to Schon’s lead work on “I’ll Be Alright Without You” or “Patiently,” or when he goes all-out on “In Self Defense,” and you’ll hear that soaring, voice-like quality in his playing.   

Top Track: “World Gone Wild”

Tom Scholz

Boston are often maligned as “corporate rock,” an ironic categorization for a band whose debut album was conceived largely by one guy working alone in his wood-paneled basement after getting off work as a product design engineer for Polaroid. 

That guy, guitarist and songwriter Tom Scholz, not only managed to come up with Boston’s self-titled, multi-Platinum-selling 1976 debut album – he also revolutionized rock-guitar tone using little more than a goldtop 1968 Les Paul with a “neck like a log” that he recorded at extremely low volume due to his less-than-adequate studio environs.  

Scholz has identified that tone – characterized by a sweetly distorted and heavily sustaining guitar sound – as the combination of his Les Paul running into an old 100-watt Marshall head and a prototype power soak that he built “because of the need to bring down the gain, but without losing the saturation of the sound.” 

It wasn’t just the sound of Scholz’s guitar that was unique, however – it was also the notes he played on it. The solos he constructed for Boston (and co-guitarist Barry Goudreau must be recognized here as well) are towering marvels that dip, soar, and mount to explosive climaxes. 

Spiked with unusual harmony lines, bends, and note choices, and just the right amount of flash, they can be listened to as mini compositions in and of themselves. Despite the corporate rock tag, Scholz’s influence on critic-approved artists is now widely recognized. (Consider Kurt Cobain, who put more than a little of “More Than a Feeling” into Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”)

Scholz also changed guitar tone with his development of the Rockman, the pocket-sized headphone amp simulator used by, among others, Def Leppard on their bajillion-selling 1987 album, Hysteria.

After more than 40 years, Scholz’ tone and touch remain as unique and awe-inspiring as ever. “That sound grew out of what I did naturally,” he has explained. “It’s that simple. Left to my own devices, with no outside interference, the sound of Boston is what I come up with.”

Top Track: “Hitch a Ride”

Angus Young

Angus Young and AC/DC have been accused of making the same album over and over again for the past 45 years. But if you achieve high-voltage rock-and-roll perfection on more or less the first try, why would you change a thing? 

The Aussie guitarist is certainly one of the most explosive and captivating players in rock and roll, with guitar and sartorial styles all his own. 

Mixing hopped-up Chuck Berry rhythms with blues boogie, pop songcraft, and a hint of heavy-metal thunder, Angus and his late brother, rhythm guitarist Malcolm, constructed the riffs that power some of rock’s most monumental and iconic songs, including “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” “Highway to Hell,” “Back in Black,” and “You Shook Me All Night Long.” 

Regarding these riffs, Angus once said, “We always look for something that’s a little bit special. And a lot of it has to do with rhythm. We tend to go for, if we can, a bit more blues, a more rhythmic thing. Our riffs transport you. We don’t know where, though.” 

His solos and melodies are just as immediate, hook-laden, and “transporting,” mixing bluesy pentatonics with repeating motifs, open-string pull-off licks (hello, “Thunderstruck”), subtle hybrid-picked figures, and teeth-rattling double-stops, among other signature touches.

What’s more, he’s often performed them sweaty and shirtless while convulsing on his back, duck walking across the stage, or being paraded through the audience atop his singer’s shoulders.

And let’s not forget that sound. Is there a more revered or sought-after tone in all of hard rock than the bright yet thick, spongy yet gritty, distorted yet somehow insanely clean sound of his Gibson SG through a 100-watt-Marshall?

It’s as impressive and distinctive today, on AC/DC’s brand-new Power Up album, as it was on 1975’s High Voltage. And maybe there’s a reason for that. “If you’re playing it right,” Angus once said, “it’s going to sound right somehow.” Perfection, indeed.

Top Track: “Let There Be Rock”

Eddie Van Halen

In almost any other case, it would be outrageous to say that rock and roll would sound entirely different were it not for one artist. But when the artist in question is Eddie Van Halen, who passed away in October 2020 at age 65 after a long battle with cancer, it’s the stone-cold truth.

It took just 30 seconds of brain-scrambling, two-handed tapping in 1978’s “Eruption” for Eddie to completely change guitar’s vocabulary. But that was just one act in his rewiring of the electric guitar’s DNA. Eddie also blurred the line between rhythm and lead playing and made every song a thrill-a-second rollercoaster ride with his screeching pick slides, dive bombs, superhuman shredding, syncopated grooving, and fiercely aggro-metal riffing.

He may not have been the first player to use any of the above techniques, but no guitarist before him had combined them to such thrilling ends. In Ed’s hands, six strings not only sounded like an orchestra – they also sounded impossibly alive. Beyond his playing style and technique, Eddie changed rock tone.

His coveted “brown sound” – created by running his homemade, humbucker-equipped Frankenstein guitar into a Marshall 100-watt with the voltage dampened by a Variac – quickly became the gold standard for tone. Every ’80s shredder attempted to replicate it, but no one came close.  

And as much as Ed transformed the sound of guitar, he also changed its look. With a body and neck purchased for roughly $130, a PAF humbucker, a rudimentary tremolo, and some gaffer tape and spray paint, he helped birth the Fender/Gibson-style hybrid now known as the superstrat – a hot-rodded, built-for-speed, often wildly finished shred machine. The Frankenstein, as Ed’s guitar became known, was only the beginning. 

He continued to make gear advances later on with Kramer, Music Man, Peavey, and, finally, his own EVH brand. 

In the end, it would be impossible to sum up Eddie Van Halen’s contribution to rock – contribution to music, even – in a few hundred words, or even a book, although his own thoughts begin to get at the heart of his approach: “You have 12 notes, and the 13th one is the octave,” Eddie said in 2016. “Do whatever you want with them. It’s really that simple. There are no mistakes.”  

Top Track: “Eruption”

It’s taken the better part of 40 years, but Ace Frehley has finally come to terms with his stature as a guitar hero. “People say to me all the time, ‘You’re the greatest guitar player ever,’” he says matter of factly. “Or, ‘I picked up the guitar because of you.’ I get that one a lot. It’s weird, because I always looked at guitar playing as my job. Even when Kiss was at its height of popularity, I couldn’t take the acclaim seriously. It made me feel guilty, like I was pulling the wool over people’s eyes. I just did what I did, and things worked out.” 

Notable guitarists who have dissected his licks over the years include Dimebag Darrell, Slash, Mike McCready and John 5, to mention a few. When reminded of this, Frehley lets out a laugh. “I guess they just liked good riffs, same as anybody else. You take something like ‘Cold Gin,’” he says, referring to his classic Kiss-era tune. “It’s a catchy riff in a catchy song. There wasn’t a science behind it. I wish there was, then I’d write a lot more of them.” Frehley applies his blissfully instinctive approach to riffology throughout his newly released eighth solo album, Spaceman, on which the 67-year-old Bronx-born guitarist blitzes his way through a robust collection of gutsy originals, such as “Rockin’ with the Boys,” “Mission to Mars” and “Pursuit of Rock and Roll.” The album’s other highlights include a ripping take on Eddie Money’s soul-pop gem “I Wanna Go Back,” and two stomping tunes Frehley penned with his old Kiss mate Gene Simmons: “Without You I’m Nothing” and “Your Wish Is My Command.” Though there was bad blood between the two men for years, they’ve been on good terms as of late. In addition to making musical contributions, Simmons suggested Frehley name the new album for his former Kiss “Spaceman” persona.

“It was pretty easy working with Gene,” Frehley notes. “I called him up and said, ‘Do you want to write something for my new album?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ He came to my house, and we wrote two songs. Gene came up with the basic riffs, and then I wrote the words and restructured the arrangements. After all these years, things are sort of the same between us.”

You left Kiss when the band was still an enormously popular outfit. Any regrets?

No, not at all. Everything got to be too much. I felt like I lost my identity. I had some alcohol and substance abuse problems, and I wasn’t playing the guitar anymore. I had to rediscover who I was, and I had to reacquaint myself with the guitar. Once I got my health back, my love affair with the guitar came back hotter than ever.

Is making records as exciting as it was back in the ’70s? So much about the music business has changed.

We definitely had the best of it. We made records, and they sold like crazy. Since I started, we went from records to eight-tracks to cassettes to CDs and then DVDs. Now people hear music on the Internet. Yeah, we had it made back then. I just found out that Best Buy doesn’t even carry CDs anymore. That surprised me a bit.

What’s your process for recording an album? Do you simply collect a batch of songs, or is it a more formal undertaking?

I don’t have a formal process for anything. [laughs] I can’t force myself to write — I have to be inspired. Gene Simmons used to tell me that he wrote a song a day, but you know, he’s a very disciplined guy. I can’t do that. I’ll play around and see if a riff hits me. If it does, I’ll work on it. If it doesn’t, I’ll wait till the next one comes.

What did you learn about recording guitars from producers Eddie Kramer and Bob Ezrin? Anything you still apply to your own records?

I do everything now at home in my studio in San Diego. I’ve produced my last three albums in five years, and I couldn’t have done it without those guys showing me the ropes. They showed me how to mic guitars and how to use preamps. I put two mics on a cabinet — usually an SM57 and a ribbon mic — and I blend them. The placement of a mic near a cabinet makes all the difference in how a guitar sounds. A lot of people don’t realize that.

In the studio, do you still stack a lot of guitar tracks for your rhythm sound? A lot of guitarists think that fewer guitars makes them stand out more.

Oh, yeah. I stack ’em high. I like layers and layers of Gibsons and Fenders. That’s how I get my fat sound. I’ll record one track with a Les Paul and then put a Tele on top. Usually I have six guitars on a rhythm track. I also put acoustics behind the electrics. I learned that from Pete Townshend.

He told you how to do that?

No, I can hear it! [laughs] I listened to the records.

Let’s talk about some of the new tracks. “Bronx Boy” has a pretty crazy riff. Do you always write riffs first?

It varies. I just play what feels good.

Your solo on “I Wanna Go Back” sounds structured in parts and improvised in others. Do you have a bit of an idea of what you want to play in a solo?

All of my solos are improvised. There isn’t one recent solo that I’ve planned out. I usually have my engineer record half a dozen solos, and then we piece them together. Sometimes I’ve made demos of solos, but I always wound up changing them to something different. I can’t read music, so I just do things as I do them.

What were the main guitars for the album? I assume a generous amount of Les Pauls.

A lot of Les Pauls, a lot of Fenders and a lot of acoustics. Gibson did a ’59 Les Paul reissue, and I’ve been playing that one a lot. Then I’ve got a bunch of Teles and Strats, and a lot of old Fender tweed amps. I use Marshalls — whatever I have sitting around. I just got a new Marshall at a pawnshop. It’s a solid-state, but it sounds great. A lot of people don’t like solid-state amps, but this one sounds good to me.

Any new effect pedals?

I don’t use pedals. I don’t like them onstage because I trip over them. If I want some reverb or delay, I add that later. I play pretty much clean. I’ll use plug-ins when I record, but that’s after the fact.

I recently watched a clip on YouTube of Kiss on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder from 1979. You were cracking Tom up, but it looked like Gene was kind of mad at you.

I was kind of loaded for that show. It was live television, so there wasn’t much they could do. I felt a little bit of animosity from Gene and Paul [Stanley], but halfway through they realized that they couldn’t win, so they joined in with me. That’s when they started telling stories about me to Tom. [laughs]

Okay, the question everybody wants to know is… Will there be another Kiss reunion with the original band?

I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Gene and Paul about that. I haven’t been asked to do anything.

If you were asked, would you be up for reuniting the band?

Yeah, if the price was right. [laughs]

Last question! Is there anything on the guitar you want to do but still haven’t?

In guitar design, yeah. I have a couple of new ideas for special-effects guitars. I invented the smoking guitar, the rocket guitar and the light guitar. I have a few other guitar ideas, but I can’t disclose what they are.

Not even a little hint?

I can’t say anything. I see them in my head, but I need to work on them and make ’em real.