Hulton Archive
Ace Frehley said he’s come to expect blindside insults from Gene Simmons. So he wasn’t totally surprised by the recent spate of comments made by his former Kiss bandmate, who Frehley said “has no friends — he’s not respected by his peers.”
Frehley, talking with Q104.3FM’s Eddie Trunk (via Blabbermouth), chalked up Simmons’ lonely existence to the Demon’s alleged focus on business to the exclusion of personal relationships. “I mean, from the very beginning, his only motivation was money,” Frehley told Trunk. “He’s pissed off thousands of fans.”
Simmons’ latest jab at his old guitarist came during a talk with Radio.com two weeks ago, when he compared working with Frehley and fellow co-founding ex-member Peter Criss to having a “cancer in your system” — something that had to be excised “as fast as you can.”
Simmons and Paul Stanley have continued on as Kiss after the early-’00s departures of Frehley and Criss, releasing the ‘Monster’ album last year with replacements Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer.
Still, Frehley said, there’s no getting away from the successes Kiss had with the original lineup. The band was so big at one point that all four members released solo albums simultaneously, with Frehley scoring the quartet’s lone Top 20 hit, ‘New York Groove.’ Even his success in battling addiction, Frehley claimed, has made his story more interesting than Simmons’.
“He’s never had a hit single, like I’ve had,” said Frehley. “I had the most successful Gibson signature-series guitar in history. He didn’t. It goes on and on. He took the safe route: He never got loaded, he never partied. I took the same route Elvis Presley took and [Jimi] Hendrix and Keith Richards and Jim Morrison … it’s endless. I have all this life experience and thank God I can live to talk about it. What’s he gonna talk about? All he can do is badmouth other people.”