“I should have been dead that night!”: Former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley recalls the moment he almost died on stage

Former Kiss star Ace Frehley has told MusicRadar that he was lucky to survive an onstage accident in the ’70s - and says that his brush with death inspired him to write one of the band’s classic songs.

Ace had two periods in Kiss - from 1973 to 1982, and then from 1996 to 2002. He was a founding member of the band alongside guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley, bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons and drummer Peter Criss.

Speaking to MusicRadar, Ace begins by admitting that wearing platform boots on stage was always problematic for him.

“I used to fall a lot in those boots,” he says. “A lot of times. Paul would cover for me by walking over to me like it was part of the show. He made it look like it was choreography or something.

“If nobody realised I’d fallen, I play on my knees and get back up. It was just part of the show!”

In the ’70s and also after the band’s original line-up reunited in the ’90s, Ace would drop to his knees during the outro solo of the song Black Diamond. This was planned… and painful.

“I screwed my knees up doing that,” he says. “I would drop to my knees, and the weight of the Les Paul really killed them.

“During the Reunion Tour, I ended up chipping a bone in my knee, and the doctor said, ‘Listen, you gotta stop doing that, or you’ll end up in a wheelchair.’

“We ended up putting a pad under the carpet where I’d fall. I tried to hit it—and if you look at old videos, you can see that I’d go down one knee at a time.”

Ace’s famous stage prop was his rocket-firing guitar, which almost led to disaster.

“I fired one of those rockets at Gene and it almost f**king hit him,” he laughs. “It flew right by his head. It would have burned him pretty bad.”

Ace himself wasn’t always so lucky. The rocket-firing guitar was also fitted with smoke bombs, of which Ace says: “I burned my leg real bad once back in the ‘70s, man. A smoke bomb ignited too early inside the cavity of the guitar, and it melted the asbestos—which our f**king costumes were made from—to my thigh.”

But the closest shave for Ace came during a show in Lakeland, Florida in 1976, when he was electrocuted due to a grounding issue, which left a staircase rail electrically charged. It nearly killed him.

“I should have been dead that night,” he says. “The fact that I got electrocuted and didn’t fall forward was a godsend. There must have been angels pushing me back.

“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.”

Remarkably, Ace not only survived to tell the tale, but he finished the show.

“If I fell forward, I would have broken my f**king neck,” he says. “But I fell back, and the road crew dragged me back off of the staircase. I had no feeling in my hands for five to ten minutes.

“I went on to finish the show,” he says proudly. “But I maybe had feeling in half of my fingers by the time it was done. It was crazy shit, man, but I did get Shock Me out of it. So, I guess it wasn’t all for nothing.”

The song Shock Me was included on the band’s 1977 album Love Gun, and was the first Kiss track to feature Ace on lead vocals.

Looking back on his time with Kiss, Ace adds: “I hope the fans realise that I’m for real. All the stuff I’ve done was not contrived or remotely premeditated. It was always spontaneous. That’s just how I am. With my guitar work, how I wrote songs, and how I play live, none of that spontaneity has changed.”

He concludes: “That makes things magical. You can do the same thing over and over again if you want, but eventually, it’s gonna get stale. But if you come out with something that’s magic, man, that’s the one. My career is a testament to that.”