You heard it here first: we are on our way to 100 years of Ace, and we couldn’t be happier.
As a member of Kiss and as a solo artist, Ace Frehley has been one of the most celebrated rock guitarists in the world for five decades now. Tri-state fans will get the chance to see his electrifying performance when he and his band play at New York City’s Sony Hall on March 13 – a show that Frehley says is especially important to him because it’s in his hometown (he was born and raised in the Bronx), so he has many friends and family members who will be in attendance that night.
It’s also special to see Frehley in concert because, not that long ago, there was some question about whether he’d be able to continue playing the guitar at all. “I hurt my arm about two-and-a-half years ago – I fell down a flight of stairs,” he tells The Aquarian during a recent phone call. “It’s been a struggle because I landed on my right arm, and that’s the arm that I strum with when I play guitar.” Fortunately, after going through intensive treatment, he feels normal again. “So it feels great to get up onstage because I wasn’t sure if it was ever going to get back to the way it used to be.”
And, he adds, he’s simply excited to play with the musicians who’ve been backing him since 2018. “I always have so much fun when I play with my band – they’ve been killing it!”
When Frehley puts on concerts, he knows he’ll always be expected to play certain songs, such as his signature 1978 hit “New York Groove,” but he says he never grows weary of performing them. “The audience makes it special because every night it’s a different audience, so it’s new to them, unless they’ve seen me play,” he says. “Sometimes I see the same faces following me around, but 97% of the people, they’re all new. And I’ve noticed recently, especially with the release of my last album, [2024’s] 10,000 Volts, that I’m getting a much younger audience, and parents are bringing their teenagers. It’s cool.”
When Frehley himself was very young, he started on the path that would lead him to rock stardom – but he could’ve gone in a very different direction in life. “Everybody in my family is an academic wizard,” he says. His father was a noted electrical engineer who was so talented that NASA had him under contract, building transformers for lunar rover vehicles. His siblings were also intellectually gifted, earning prestigious degrees.
But there was another thing that all the Frehleys could do: “Everybody in my family plays an instrument. Everybody plays piano. I was the youngest of three children, so I used to have to listen to my sister practice her scales, and then my brother, who’s two years older than me, took piano. Then when it came time for me to take piano, I looked at my mom and dad and I said, ‘I’m not taking piano lessons.’”
Instead, he asked his brother, who had begun playing folk guitar, to teach him a few chords. “And once I learned those chords, I started figuring out Beatles songs and Rolling Stones songs,” Frehley says, “but I gravitated more towards the Rolling Stones, because they were kind of like the bad boys of rock at that juncture.”
Frehley also drew from many other influences as he created his own distinctive playing style. “I copied Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and all the great blues guitar players like B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King. And when you copy the guitar solos of the best blues guitarists in the world, you end up learning what makes them tick. Basically, my style is a conglomeration of all those guitar players, and you can hear it if you study my guitar work.”
It quickly became clear that Frehley was an exceptionally gifted guitarist. “I learned at an exponential rate,” he says. “Within a year, I far surpassed my brother’s ability on guitar. I never took a guitar lesson, but now I’m like one of the top 10 heavy metal rock guitar players in the world, so go figure.”
He’s not exaggerating. He was the lead guitarist for the hard rock band Kiss from 1973 until 1982, and during his time in the band, they reached their commercial peak, landing more than a dozen songs in the U.S. charts. All nine studio albums he recorded with them reached gold, platinum, or multi-platinum sales status in the U.S. (and in several other countries).
In 1978, the four members of Kiss each simultaneously released a solo album, and Frehley’s became the most successful thanks to the swaggering hit single “New York Groove.” After he left Kiss, he had further hits with “Rock Soldiers” and “Into the Night” (both from his 1987 Frehley’s Comet album). He has gone on to release several more albums under his own name.
He’s currently working on Origins Vol. 3, which he plans to release later this year. “The whole concept behind the Origins records is, I do remakes of songs that influenced me when I was growing up as a musician, so I do remakes of Beatles songs, Jimi Hendrix songs, Rolling Stones songs,” he says.
As for the legacy he’s created so far, Frehley says, “I think it’s going to live on for hundreds of years. I do what I do very well, and I have the respect of my peers.” Many notable guitarists have cited Frehley as an influence, such as Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, and Dimebag Darrell of Pantera.
Even after being a professional musician for five decades, Frehley says he never struggles to continue to stay creatively inspired. “If you said to me, ‘I need a song about A, B, C, and D,’ I could write it over the weekend and record it and have it finished by the end of the week, because I just have the ability to imagine,” he says. “My third eye is really developed, and inside my brain, I can see things in 3D and color and spin them around.
“I can’t explain to you how easy it is for me to write a song,” he continues. “I will wake up one day and I’ll have a song in my head. I just built a recording studio in the basement of my mansion. I go down there at four o’clock in the morning if I get a brainstorm, and I just record it because I know how to engineer, and I know how to run Pro Tools. I can’t write a song in an hour, then something’s wrong. I’m 18 years sober, so that’s helped me tremendously, because I don’t have drugs and alcohol blocking my creativity.”
It also helps that Frehley clearly understands which type of songs he should write. “I have an innate sense of what I think my fans want to hear. And if you listen to my 1978 solo album with the big hit ‘New York Groove,’ and you listen to [my latest album] 10,000 Volts, my style hasn’t changed very much, and my voice still sounds the same. People listen to my vocals and they go, ‘You sound like you’re in your twenties,’ but I’m 73 years old,” he says.
And Frehley foresees that he still has a very long career ahead of him: “Luckily, I have good genes. My dad lived to be 96 and my mom lived to be 86, but her older sister lived to be 99. I mean, we have longevity in the family on both sides. I just spoke to a psychic. She goes, ‘Ace, you’re going to live to be a hundred.’ So I said, ‘No problem!’”
FOR TICKETS TO ACE’S HOMETOWN SHOW AT SONY HALL ON THURSDAY, CLICK HERE!
