In May 1983, the guitarist Ace Frehley was driving his DeLorean sports car along the Bronx River Parkway in New York when he was asked to pull over by a police officer. In an intoxicated state, Frehley “sped off”, as the charge sheet later phrased it, reaching 90mph and colliding with four other cars. He was caught, arrested and charged with drunk and reckless driving.
“My licence was revoked, I had to pay a large fine, and I received a bunch of negative publicity,” he recalled, adding: “The other consequence was a court-ordered two-week stint in a hospital detox unit, and some mandatory AA meetings.”
Frehley, who has died aged 74, led a life punctuated by similar incidents, whether self-inflicted or inadvertent, such as a life-threatening electrocution that he narrowly survived on stage in 1976 with Kiss, the American rock band with whom he is most closely associated.
In December that year the group – then Frehley plus the drummer Peter Criss and bassist Gene Simmons, who shared lead vocals with the guitarist Paul Stanley – took to the stage at Lakeland Civic Center in Florida. Walking down a flight of steps, Frehley – somewhat unsteady on his feet – clutched a metal railing for balance. As was frequently the case in the pre-health-and-safety era, the railing was unearthed: a connection was made with his electric guitar and he suffered a serious shock, falling several feet to the ground. Recovering, he wrote the song Shock Me for Kiss’s 1977 album Love Gun.
Serious though they may have been, such incidents simply added to the lore surrounding Kiss, whose importance to a generation of 1970s and 80s rock fans is difficult to overstate. Portrayed in popular culture and in their own merchandise as a collection of cartoon superheroes, the group enjoyed enormous success in their early career, eventually going on to sell more than 100m albums.
While Simmons and Stanley ran the group and were its most recognisable faces, in or out of their trademark makeup, Frehley was their wild card, an untrained but compelling guitarist whose “Spaceman” persona matched his otherworldly performances.
Born Paul Frehley in New York City, he was the youngest son of Carl, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Esther (nee Hecht). His father was a church organist and his mother a pianist, so Paul and his siblings, Charles and Nancy, were encouraged to take up instruments.
By his early teens he was playing guitar, inspired by British R&B bands of the day such as the Rolling Stones and the Who. He was more interested in music and sport than education, and was expelled from several high schools, gaining the nickname Ace for his success at securing dates with girls. He also joined a local street gang at one point, later recalling: “I was stabbed in the stomach on my 13th birthday. Luckily it wasn’t a deep wound.”
Frehley played in several bands before finding success, among them the Outrage, the Four Roses and Molimo, the last of which signed to the RCA label but failed to progress. He worked in a sequence of jobs – postman, furniture deliverer and taxi driver among them – before auditioning for Simmons, Stanley and Criss in late 1972. Simmons later told the musician Billy Corgan: “We’re going, ‘Boy, he’s a weird guy. He’s got one orange sneaker, one red sneaker. Just pigeon-toed and all,” and added that Frehley quickly irritated him: “Ace [comes in and] plugs in and starts playing while we’re talking to another guy, 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.’”
However, the band were impressed by Frehley’s guitar skills and asked him to join, using his double lightning-bolt design for their new band name, Kiss. When they adopted stage identities, Frehley conceived the Spaceman persona. A self-titled debut album was released by the Casablanca label in early 1974 and Kiss began to attract interest for their theatrical live shows, which featured Frehley’s extravagant guitar solos, later delivered via a guitar adapted to emit clouds of smoke.
Always in the shadow of the more media-savvy Simmons and Stanley, Frehley often revealed some insecurity about his abilities: “I don’t know how to read music, but I’m one of the most famous guitar players in the world,” he said in 2009. At first he rarely contributed songs to Kiss albums, although he did write the classic Cold Gin in 1974, and when his eponymous 1978 solo album was released alongside solo records by the other three members, his was the most successful of the four. Towards the end of his first stint in Kiss he was more prolific, writing two songs for Dynasty (1979) and three for Unmasked (1980).
However, Frehley was beginning to suffer from the pressure of being in a successful touring band, and developed an addiction to alcohol. “That was my downfall … most of the time I really had no idea where I was,” he said in 2017. “We went from city to city so fast. You know, pretty much you spend most of the time in a hotel or the venue. They all pretty much look the same, so it became a blur. That’s why a lot of rock stars go crazy.” Simmons and Stanley later recalled an incident in which the guitarist, yearning for a drink while ensconced in a limousine, downed an entire bottle of perfume in the absence of other options.
After Criss was replaced by a new drummer, Eric Carr, in 1980, Frehley often found himself outvoted by Simmons and Stanley, and decided to leave two years later. His solo albums, Ace Frehley (1978) and Frehley’s Comet (1987), were hits, but by the late 80s Kiss – and by association, Frehley – were experiencing a career decline. From then on his solo releases were only moderately successful. A 1996 reunion of the original lineup proved popular, however, and lasted until 2001.
Frehley finally quit alcohol in 2006 and wrote a bestselling autobiography, No Regrets, five years later. By this point he was held in high esteem by younger musicians influenced by Kiss’s early albums, with one notable appearance taking place in 2006 alongside members of Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe at the VH1 Rock Honors in Las Vegas.
Frehley’s relationship with his former bandmates remained largely adversarial, and he declined an invitation to perform on their final tour in 2019.
He is survived by his wife, Jeanette Trerotola, their daughter, Monique, and his siblings.
• Ace (Paul Daniel) Frehley, guitarist and songwriter, born 27 April 1951; died 16 October 2025
