Ace Frehley
Guitarist — born 1951
Ace Frehley is an American musician who is best known for ‘Kiss’, a band he co-founded.
Ace Frehley is an American hard-rock guitarist best known as the lead guitarist and co-founder of Kiss — alongside Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Peter Criss. He was born Paul Daniel Frehley on April 27, 1951, in New York City. He started playing guitar at age 13 and worked across multiple New York-area cover bands through his late teens and early twenties before joining the Kiss lineup in January 1973.
Frehley's Kiss face-paint persona was the Spaceman (sometimes called Space Ace) — his face-paint built around the silver-painted right-eye-and-cheek star pattern. His guitar style — characterized by aggressive blues-rock-pentatonic phrasing, distinctive vibrato, and his smoking-Les-Paul stage gimmick — made him one of the American hard-rock guitarists of the 1970s.
Kiss's 1973–1982 Frehley-included peak period produced the albums Kiss (1974), Hotter Than Hell (1974), Dressed to Kill (1975), Destroyer (1976), Rock and Roll Over (1976), Love Gun (1977), and Dynasty (1979). The 1978 simultaneous release of four solo albums — one by each Kiss member — produced Frehley's 1978 self-titled solo album, which was the most-commercially-successful of the four (it produced the Kiss-related single "New York Groove," which reached the US top 15).
Frehley left Kiss in late 1982 amid escalating substance-abuse problems and personal disputes with bandmates Stanley and Simmons. He launched the band Frehley's Comet in the mid-1980s and continued releasing solo material across subsequent decades. He returned to Kiss for the 1996–2001 original-lineup reunion tour and the subsequent 2002 album Psycho Circus, but tensions resumed and he left again in 2002. He has continued to tour and record solo through the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s.
His name Ace — used as his stage and chosen name — derives from the English noun "ace" (the highest-ranking playing card), used as a nickname meaning "expert" or "top." Ace has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2010s as part of the vintage-revival wave for short, distinctive boys' names.