Before there were fireballs and smoke bombs, before the face paint became part of the American flag of rock, there was a kid from the Bronx named Paul Daniel Frehley who dreamed himself into the cosmos. He didn’t play guitar; he built a galaxy out of distortion.

When he became Ace, the Spaceman, it wasn’t an act. It was escape velocity. The rest of us were bound to Earth; Ace made his Les Paul sound like it was punching holes through the atmosphere.

I first saw him on Dick Clark’s “In Concert” in 1974, Kiss’s national television debut. The stage lights spun, the smoke curled up like a ritual, and there they were–four figures painted like comic book saints.

When Ace stepped forward, the camera caught that sly grin beneath silver makeup. The guitar snarled, the lights exploded, and I was gone. It was chaos and melody, danger and delight. I was too young to understand the theater of it, but I knew instinctively that something in the world had changed. These weren’t only musicians; they were avatars of noise.

My brother bought Kiss “Alive!” soon after, and that was it. Hooked for life. The double album sat on our family stereo like a sacred text. The crowd noise, the explosions, the raw pulse of guitars–it all sounded larger than the world I lived in. I studied the album sleeve like it was a map to adulthood. Every solo Ace played felt like a message from a world where music was freedom, rebellion, and laughter wrapped into one.

My bedroom walls became a shrine. Posters of Kiss stared down at me–Ace, Gene, Paul, Peter–flanked by Farrah Fawcett in her red swimsuit and Merlin Olson in full Rams gear. That was my holy trinity: beauty, strength, and rock and roll. I joined the Kiss Army and wore it like a badge of honor. At that age, you don’t like a band; you belong to them. Kiss made the world seem louder, bolder, more alive.

My obsession didn’t stop at the records or the posters; it spilled into everything I touched. I had the Kiss action figures lined up on my dresser like sentinels guarding the universe. The Marvel comic books were gospel, each one promising another glimpse behind the makeup.

And my prized possession was the Kiss lunch box, a metal badge of honor I carried to school with more pride than any kid should have for a piece of tin. Other kids brought peanut butter sandwiches; I brought the band. Every clank of that lunch box in the hallway was a declaration: I was part of something louder, flashier, and far bigger than the classroom walls around me.

Ace was always the heart of it for me. His riffs drove Kiss. Gene and Paul wrote the songs and wore the spotlight, but Ace was the spark, the sound that made kids pick up cheap guitars and dream about stadiums. His tone wasn’t just distortion; it was personality. Every note carried a smirk, a wink, a sense of fun. Even when he was burning the fretboard, it never felt like showing off. It felt like storytelling.

He didn’t play like a virtuoso; he played like a guy who’d figured out how to make a guitar laugh. When he leaned back and fired off those solos, smoke rising from the pickups, blue light reflecting off chrome paint, you could see the kid from the Bronx who’d turned every hardship into electricity.

Seeing them live made everything real. The first time I watched Kiss in person, it was like stepping into a comic book drawn by God himself. The explosions hit you in the chest. The lights were blinding. And then Ace stepped forward, his guitar literally smoking as he soloed. You could feel the floor shake, but what stayed with me wasn’t only the noise; it was the grin. Ace always looked like he was in on the joke. He knew that beneath the makeup and the fire, it was all supposed to be fun.

When each member released a solo album in 1978, the world learned what I already knew–Ace Frehley was the real rock star of the group. His record was the best of the four, by far. New York Groove became his signature, an anthem that captured everything about him: city swagger, cosmic cool, and pure joy. He was the only one who managed to stand alone, and that told you something. Ace didn’t need a stage full of fireworks to shine; he needed six strings and a riff.

He left Kiss in the early ’80s, came back in the ’90s, and drifted away again. The band went on with other faces under his makeup, but to me, and to millions of fans, it was never quite the same. You can copy the costume, but you can’t fake the soul. Ace had a rare thing in rock and roll: an unmistakable sound. You could hear two notes and know who it was.

Ace influenced not only a generation of fans; he rewired a generation of guitarists. Everyone from Dimebag Darrell to Slash to Tom Morello has tipped their hat to the Spaceman. You can hear him in the swagger of 1980s metal, in the sneer of punk leads, even in the restraint of modern rock players who understand that one perfectly bent note can say more than a thousand.

He proved that feel mattered more than flash, that melody could live inside mayhem. His solos were singable, his riffs memorable, his tone instantly recognizable, a mix of Bronx grit and outer-space shine. For every kid who plugged a pawnshop Les Paul into a too-loud amp, Ace Frehley was the north star.

Frehley’s influence can’t be measured in sales or stadiums. It’s measured in the thousands of kids who picked up guitars after hearing “Shock Me,” or who saw that first in-concert appearance and realized rock could be both spectacle and sincerity. He made rebellion seem accessible, like something you could join. He turned distortion into a form of joy.

He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, long after the paint had faded and the fights had quieted. By then, Ace was more myth than man, half legend, half survivor. But that’s the beauty of him. He was the myth. The silver boots, the smoking guitar, the cosmic laugh–it wasn’t theater, it was identity.

Now that he’s gone, there’s an ache that feels strangely familiar, like the end of a concert when the lights go up and the feedback dies. You stand there, ears ringing, heart still racing, knowing you’ve seen something that can’t be repeated. That’s what Ace gave us.

He gave us noise that felt like faith. He gave us fire that felt like freedom. He gave us permission to be larger than life for a few minutes, to believe that makeup and volume could be art.

When I think back now, it isn’t only the riffs or the fireworks I remember. It’s the feeling of possibility. Sitting on the floor as a kid, staring at that Kiss “Alive!” cover, I believed that the world was wider than anyone had told me. That music could turn a Bronx kid into a spaceman, and a small-town kid like me into a believer.

Rock has lost plenty of guitar heroes, but Ace Frehley was something else–a bridge between the Earth and the stars, between theater and truth. He didn’t just play for us; he let us see ourselves in the noise.

And that’s why this hurts. Because for all the spectacle, Ace was one of us, a dreamer who made his fantasy real.

So tonight, I’ll put on New York Groove again, volume up, lights low. I’ll hear that swagger, that spark, that laughter in six strings. Somewhere, the Spaceman is still floating through feedback, still playing for the kids staring up at their posters, still teaching the universe how to swing.

He’s gone, but the echo remains. And for those of us who saw that first flash of silver on Dick Clark’s stage in ’74, we’ll always remember the moment when rock and roll left the ground and never came back.

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Brian Carson is a reporter for the Lewistown Sentinel and the editor of the County Observer.