The Bronx never produced a saint — just one guy who stole electricity from God and taught it to howl.
Paul Daniel Frehley, our silver-eyed Spaceman, gone from a brain bleed at 74, left behind a trail of ozone, burnt fretboards, and laughter that smelled like cosmic dust.
You don’t mourn a guy like Ace — you turn him up until your neighbors file noise complaints with the universe.
A delinquent kid from the Bronx, hair full of static, hands too shaky for factory work, too stubborn for silence. He wasn’t born to play guitar. He crashed into it.
One day he sees an ad — “Guitarist wanted.”
That’s how galaxies collide: four freaks, one dream, and a mountain of eyeliner. KISS was born not in inspiration but combustion with Ace holding the match.

Shock Me, Shock You, Shock the Whole Damn Planet

Florida, 1976. Ace steps on a metal staircase and takes 220 volts straight through his soul. Most mortals would’ve fried. Ace recorded a song about it. “Shock Me” more of a resurrection than just a tune. A riff that said, “Death tried to plug in. I blew its amp.” You just gotta admire that baddass attitude he had. That solo still sounds like what it feels like to wake up inside a lightning bolt.
When he played live, his solos fucking detonated. Notes spiraled like drunken satellites. Bends screamed like jet engines melting midair. Every pick scrape was a spark. Every pause, a heartbeat in zero gravity. He didn’t care about theory or phrasing. No, he cared about impact.
Each phrase was a raw, radiant, meteor doomed to burn but damn beautiful while it lasted.

From the Bronx to the Big Bang

When KISS went supernova, Ace was the cosmic core.
While the others were calculating merchandise royalties, Ace was half-drunk, fully alive, and somewhere between stage lights and starlight.
His solos on “Cold Gin,” “Detroit Rock City,” “Deuce,” “Shock Me,” “Love Gun” were alien languages carved into soundwaves.
You can actually feel the kid from the Bronx trying to escape Earth one note at a time.

And when he finally broke orbit to leave KISS to go solo — it wasn’t bitterness. It was gravity.
Ace Frehley (1978) is still the best of the four KISS solo albums. Why? Because it feels human. “New York Groove” swaggered like a drunk robot on roller skates, but beneath it, you could hear the Bronx heartbeat. He was never chasing perfection. He was chasing truth through distortion.

Frehley’s Comet and the Eternal Feedback

Frehley’s Comet wasn’t just a band that was a continuation of the myth. The Spaceman returned from orbit with a hangover and a grin, still firing riffs like meteors.
He came, he left, he came back again. KISS, solo, relapse, redemption.
Every fall followed by another liftoff. Every silence split by another screaming Les Paul.

When Ace played, he wasn’t here. He was somewhere between Earth’s heartbeat and the hum of a dying star, bending his way home.
Even his mistakes sounded cosmic. You could hand him a broken string, a busted amp, and half a beer and he’d make that son of a bitch sound like the universe crying out for one more encore.

The Last Note Still Rings

Now he’s gone — not with a whisper, but a feedback loop.
Brain bleed, they said. No, man, it was the pressure just got too high in his head from all those goddamn riffs fighting to escape. The Spaceman didn’t die. He phased out. He’s feedback now, permanent, looping through time and reverb.

Listen. If you turn your amp just right, between 3 and 4 on the gain, you’ll hear it. That faint whine that isn’t feedback, isn’t wind — it’s him.
It’s Ace, still hammering the strings somewhere out past Orion, laughing his Bronx laugh, saying:
“Play it loud, you bastards. Make the stars shake.”

Long live Ace Frehley.
The only man who ever made outer space sound like a dive bar.