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Ace Frehley was always a great lead guitarist in Kiss, but it took a long time for him to make his mark as a lead singer.
It was on the band’s sixth studio album, Love Gun, that Ace finally recorded a lead vocal – on a song he wrote, called Shock Me.
Speaking toMusicRadar, he recalls how he wrote, played and finally plucked up the courage to sing that song.
“How do I come up with anything?” he says. “How does anybody write anything? Sometimes riffs come first, and sometimes it’s lyrics. It can be a chord pattern, a melody, or a rhyme I wrote. Whenever I’m inspired… that’s when it happens. It’s really that simple.
With Shock Me, I was sitting around, fooling around with my guitar, and a riff came into my head. I developed a melody line, but I mean… to me, writing a song is really easy. I’ve written songs in minutes.”
His lyrics for Shock Me were based on his own near-death experience – being electrocuted on stage during a Kiss concert in 1976.
“I almost died in Lakeland, Florida,” Ace says. “I was standing on top of four Marshall cabinets on a staircase when I got shocked. I had a heavy Les Paul around my neck, and my body should have fallen forward—but I didn’t.
Ace admits he finds it difficult to explain how he writes and plays.
“Shock Me is a chord inversion – that’s as much as I can say about that. I’m not really good with musical terms!
“Funnily enough, I tried to do an instructional video on Shock Me for YouTube, which was ridiculous. There was a guy sitting off the side explaining to me what to say, and they’d stop the camera, he would tell me, and then I’d do the video.
“I was like, ‘Fuck, man! I don’t know how to explain what the fuck I’m playing!’ I play by ear. I just turn the volume up and play.”
Ace says of his solo in Shock Me: “If my memory serves me correctly, I did the solo in just one take. Back in the day, it was a lot harder to edit. If you didn’t get it right, the editing process was using a razor blade to cut the tape. There was no picking the best parts and piecing them together like nowadays.”
“As for the gear, I used all sorts of stuff in the studio. A lot of people don’t realise it was that way by the time we did Love Gun.
“I’d use acoustics, Strats and Les Pauls to layer sounds on top of each other, like Pete Townshend would do with The Who. It added thickness.
“I did that a lot on Love Gun, but with Shock Me, I think it was mostly a Marshall and my Les Paul. I had a few old Vox amps. I might have used one of those, too.”
But what made Shock Me such an important song for Ace was the fact that he sang the lead vocal for the first time on record.
He had written key songs on previous Kiss albums, including Cold Gin on the band’s self-titled debut album, and Parasite on the follow-up Hotter Than Hell.
But while rhythm guitarist Paul Stanley, bassist Gene Simmons and drummer Peter Criss all sang lead vocals from the first album onwards, Ace had always lacked the confidence to do so.
Ace Frehley recently spoke with Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation. During their conversation, Ace discusses new music in development and reflects on the passing of Karl Cochran.
SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation, hosted by Eddie Trunk, airs daily at 3 PM, ET on SiriusXM’s Faction Talk. Audio clips and transcript below courtesy of SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation.
Ace Frehley talks new music in development:
Eddie Trunk: “You working on the next record? What are you working on in the studio?”
Ace Frehley: “Origins Vol. 3.”
Eddie Trunk: “How far along are you?”
Frehley: “Origins Vol. 3 and I decided to reconnect with my old producer, Alex Salzman.”
Trunk: “Oh, okay.”
Frehley: “So it won’t be me and Steve Brown. It’ll be me and Alex Salzman collaborating on that record since Alex did Origins Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. And we have a formula that we came up with and it seemed to work. I was listening to the records last night on YouTube, you know. In my office, on my desk, I have a set of both speakers and the album sounds just as good as the new album, 10,000 Volts. So I’m gonna keep that. I’m gonna go back to my old formula with Alex and maybe I’ll bring back Steve to do the studio album since he’s a very, very good songwriter and guitar player and engineer as well.”
Trunk: “Have you decided what you’re gonna cover yet? And are you gonna also do remakes of some KISS songs like you did on the last one too?”
Frehley: “I haven’t decided. I have a list of about 50 songs, so you know, I really don’t want to give anything away. It’s too soon.”
Trunk: “You want to get it out this year?”
Frehley: “I could have it ready, but, you know, I can do the album in a month because I don’t have to write the songs. That’s the beauty of the Origins series. I don’t write. So the recording process is pretty seamless. And wrap it because all I have to do is “Ace-ify” it.”
