Growing up in the Bronx, Paul Frehley had a problem: He wanted to be a guitar god at a time when rock guitarists were everywhere.
When he joined Kiss, after years of playing with bands that were going nowhere, he took the name Ace Frehley. By this time he knew he needed something more than skill to make it big, and he found himself more than willing to adopt a gimmick or two, maybe even three or four, to achieve his aim in life.
In his days as a halfhearted high school student, he had devoted much time and energy to art classes. His rise to stardom began when he put his graphic-design skills to use in creating the Kiss logo, making the last two letters into lightning bolts.
When his fellow band members decided to wear makeup for their stage debut as Kiss in January 1973, he was more than happy to go along with it.
“It didn’t bother me at all,” he said in an interview for “Kiss: Behind the Mask,” the authorized history of the band by David Leaf and Ken Sharp. “I was always into wild things. The first night, I painted my face silver. The second night, I thought, ‘That’s boring. I’ll have to think up something more imaginative.’ I started painting stars on my eyes.”
The sharply painted stars helped transform this workaday club musician into the superhero known as the Spaceman or Space Ace. Mr. Frehley, who died on Thursday at 74, saw himself as an alien from the planet Jendell in the Klaatu solar system and spoke in jovial interviews of wanting to live far from Earth.
The other musicians in Kiss — Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss — were equally enthusiastic about working some old-fashioned show-business gimmickry into the act. Mr. Stanley even made himself into a de facto fashion designer, stitching the costumes that made them look like characters out of a low-budget horror or sci-fi movie.
At an early show in Manhattan, Mr. Frehley and his band mates performed at top volume in front of a four-foot illuminated sign of the Kiss logo he had designed. They had yet to master the pyrotechnics that would become a staple of their act, and the eyebrows of a kid in the front row were singed, reported Will Hermes in “Love Goes to a Building on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever.” But the audience loved them.
Kiss had come along at just the right time. After the rise of singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon, who presented their nuanced songs in bare-bones fashion, many music fans were in the mood for something circuslike.
With their comic-book look and fire-breathing tricks, Kiss made rock simple and fun, as it had been in the days of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. The band’s message can be summed up in the refrain of one of its best known songs: “I wanna rock ’n’ roll all night / And party everyday.”
Critics weren’t impressed. Lester Bangs, who regularly praised raw rock music in the pages of Creem and Rolling Stone, was aghast to find that his children preferred Kiss to Aerosmith.
But as the music writer Sylvie Simmons noted, Kiss had a special appeal. The band was “metal bubblegum more than scary stud-rock,” she wrote in a 1998 reassessment for Mojo, and it produced “punch-along anthems with just the right pauses for the fireworks, bombs and solos.”
By joining the carnival, Mr. Frehley got everything he had always wanted — which inevitably led to the usual rock-star excesses. In 1981, he was driving a DeLorean at 90 miles per hour when he led squad cars on a chase down the Bronx River Parkway. He was arrested and charged with driving under the influence. (No one was hurt.)
By decade’s end, he had calmed down. “I really don’t race cars anymore, because that got me in trouble,” he said in a 1989 interview with Musician magazine. “For the past couple years I’ve kind of slowed down on all that nonsense and I’ve gotten into a health kick.”
While some artists who perform in character come to regret the bargain they have struck to become rich and famous, Mr. Frehley took delight in his Spaceman persona and seemed most alive in costume, with its spangled V-front top and Flash Gordon-style cape. For him, the exchange of his old Bronx identity for something more exotic was worth it.
“I was the loser, the black sheep of the family, until I joined Kiss,” he said in an interview with the authors of “Behind the Mask.” “Now, I’m the big winner.”
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