“It was my first lead vocal. I was nervous. I sang it lying on my back. I still don’t know how I did it without singing from my diaphragm”: How a great rock guitarist finally proved himself as a singer

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.

“So that inspired Shock Me. But what also inspired it [musically] was a couple of Free songs, Fire and Water and All Right Now. It was a combination of those things.”

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.

In that sense, Shock Me was a pivotal moment for him.

“It was my first lead vocal, and I was nervous about it,” he says. “I sang it lying on my back and had [producer] Eddie Kramer lower the lights in the studio…

“I never thought I was a lead singer. I just kind of felt it out as best I could, even though I just wanted to play guitar. I did it because I had to.

“I was crazy back then. And I still don’t know how I did it without singing from my diaphragm so I could belt it out easier.”