“Reflecting on all of his incredible life achievements, Ace’s memory will continue to live on forever!” Ace Frehley, larger-than-life Kiss guitarist, dies at 74

Ace Frehley, the larger-than-life guitarist whose fiery licks, flashy solos, and outrageous stage antics helped make Kiss a household name, has died at the age of 74, Variety reports.

“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,” read a statement from the guitarist's family.

“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!”

No cause of death was given, though Frehley cancelled all of his remaining 2025 tour dates earlier this month after a fall in his studio.

Under the persona of The Spaceman, Frehley – with his similarly makeup-clad bandmates – epitomized Kiss's blend of unprecedented-for-the-time onstage theatrics with a straight-ahead hard rock sound.

Though, he was, in his own words, “always old school” (“My sound is simple: a Gibson Les Paul dimed to ten, plugged into a vintage Marshall tube amp, also cranked to fucking ten,” he explained to Guitar World in 2024), Frehley set a new bar for guitar showmanship, famously outfitting his Les Pauls with a neck pickup that emitted smoke on command.

Though he left Kiss in 1982 (he would later reunite with them from 1996 and 2002), Frehley was – in the view of many guitarists especially – irreplaceable, an integral ingredient of the band's halcyon days.

Frehley was never a technical wizard, (“I’m a sloppy fucking guitar player!”, he shrugged to Guitar World in 2024), but he made the most out of spontaneity and simple ingredients.

Shock Me, a standout from Kiss's 1977 Love Gun LP, is often seen as the thesis statement of his playing.

Cited by the late Dimebag Darrell as one of his all-time favorite tracks, the song is capped by what Guitar World readers ranked as the 43rd greatest guitar solo of all time, a “greatest hits compilation for the pentatonic scale that distills the first 25 years of American rock guitar into 50 seconds, ready to be plagiarized for the next 25 years.”

Born in the rough-and-tumble Bronx in 1951, Frehley took up the guitar in his teen years. The guitar heroes he was introduced to in his late teens – he cited Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck specifically in a 2024 GW interview – would shape his style and approach for the rest of his career.

After playing in a carousel of bands in his late teens and early 20s, Frehley auditioned successfully for a new band featuring bassist Gene Simmons, guitarist Paul Stanley, and drummer Peter Criss. They'd become known simply as Kiss.

Though it took years for Kiss to pick up steam, once the band's swaggering hooks and pearl-clutching-inducing on- and off-stage antics saturated airwaves and TV screens 'round the nation, the band were nigh-on unstoppable. Alive!, the 1975 double-LP that captured one of the band's boisterous performances on record (with some crowd noise and overdubs added here and there, mind), made Kiss a sensation.

“A lot of players have told me [Alive!] was the record that made them want to pick up the guitar,” Frehley told Guitar World earlier this year. “Years ago I was in Texas and I saw Mr. Big. When Paul Gilbert did a solo, he pretty much did a complete copy of a solo from Alive!”

Kiss rode high for the remainder of the '70s, becoming a musical touchstone of the era – Frehley's licks and solos an accessible counterweight to the unapproachable technical geekery of other rock guitar giants of the time.

He even, improbably, met with some solo success, a 1978 effort being by far the best-received and best-selling of the four simultaneous self-titled solo records issued by each member of Kiss.

Ever with an eye for business, though, Simmons and Stanley began to push the band in musical directions both lucrative (disco) and experimental (a much-derided concept album) as trends and tastes changed rapidly in the '80s.

Disillusioned by the band's move away from the bare-bones rock he loved, and struggling with ever-worsening substance abuse issues, Frehley slowly backed out of the band in 1982.

Leaving the Kiss fold only deepened the latter problems, as Frehley – in the following year and change – drunkenly led police on a high-speed chase in his DeLorean, and sold one of his most cherished Les Pauls to fund a drunken gambling outing to Atlantic City.

The warmly-received 1987 self-titled debut album from his solo band, Frehley's Comet, proved to be the outlier in what was a bleak decade and a half for the guitar hero. Hugely successful 1996-2002 reunion with Kiss aside, Frehley would only get sober in 2006.

From there, though, Frehley kickstarted his solo career anew, releasing crowd-pleasing full-lengths at a clip you'd expect from someone half his age.

Asked what lesson he could pass on to Guitar World readers in a 2024 interview, Frehley said, “In retrospect, I should have practiced more. There are times I don’t know what the fuck I’m playing, but it just comes out alright anyway!

“I do my best work when I’m not thinking, when I just empty my head. I’ll be fine if I know the key and have a few takes. What can I say? I know how to make a good song. There’s no explaining it beyond that.”