Founding Kiss lead guitarist Ace Frehley died last night. He was 74.
This is much more personal to me than most celebrity deaths. Ace has been an important part of my life soundtrack for just short of 50 years. I got Destroyer for my fifth birthday, and it was all over. It was the greatest thing I’d ever heard. When I got a little older I worked my way back through all of the Kiss catalog (as my budget allowed; Spotify wasn’t a thing in the ’80s) and found a lot more magic—magic I still cherish today. And then I finally got to see him twice on the reunion tour, and that circle was complete.
You know what, though? It’s the first Frehley’s Comet album that means the most to me. We had moved to the Huntsville area barely nine months earlier when it came out in April 1987. I had just gotten my driver’s license. I worked at Taco Bell. And I listened to very little but that cassette driving my dad’s ’79 Ford van (which had a righteous stereo, man) for a month or so. I hadn’t quite found my people yet—that would be mostly early in my senior year at Bob Jones, and this was the end of my junior year—so music I could get excited about was all the more important for that too.
I never met Ace, or really even tried. I suppose such a desire would have responded to even modest effort anytime at all recently, but I never had it or made it. He toured supporting six different (mostly excellent!) new albums in the past 15 or so years, but it didn’t seem like he was ever particularly close, and…there you go. It was always a little too much for a single night round-tripper, but a little too little to bother with a hotel room. Maybe there’s a little twinge of regret now that it’s impossible.
So I started yesterday with the 1978 solo album, and then I played that first Frehley’s Comet record top to bottom. I imagine I’ll hit it all by the end of the weekend. So many will say more, and better, than I can, but no one sounded like Ace. What a tremendous splash(down) in this world this goofy kid from the Bronx made! Farewell and thank you, Ace. RIP.