“Kiss just had an attitude back then. The four of us were so different, but when we got together it was magic!”: How lead guitarist Ace Frehley wrote and recorded his first classic Kiss song

On 18 February 1974, the self-titled debut album by Kiss was released - and one of the key songs on that record was Cold Gin.

Most of the songs on the album were written by rhythm guitarist/lead vocalist Paul Stanley or bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons.

But the hard-rocking Cold Gin was written by lead guitarist Ace Frehley, and as Ace now tells MusicRadar: “It just all came together really quickly.”

He recalls: “I was going down to rehearsals, and I remember writing Cold Gin on the subway. I wrote it without a guitar. The riff just came into my head.

“When I got to rehearsal on 23rd Street in New York City, I started fooling around with my guitar and figuring out the rest of the riff. Then I played it for Paul and Gene, and they really liked it.”

Ace admits he was too afraid to sing any of his songs at this early stage of the band’s career. Instead, it was Simmons who sang Cold Gin - and who also contributed to the writing of the song but refused to take credit.

As Ace explains: “I’ll be honest with you: Gene never took credit for it, but he wrote the bridge for Cold Gin. In those days, it was all for one and one for all, you know? We didn’t really think about publishing for this, that, and the other thing.

“I hadn’t written a lot of songs at that juncture in the band, so Gene said, ‘You take all the writing credit for this,’ which was very nice of him.”

Ace says with tongue in cheek: “There wasn’t much to my sound then, and there still isn’t! It just is what it is.”

But he says of Cold Gin: “It’s all about the tone. And aside from that, Kiss just had an attitude back then. The four of us were so different, but when we got together, it was magic."

Cold Gin - YouTube

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In terms of gear, Ace kept it simple.

“With Cold Gin, I would have used a Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall," he says. "As long as it’s a Marshall, has a preamp on it, and is 100-watts, I know I’ve got the goods.

"I always thought that way. If I had that, I knew I was good to go, man. The rest of it came from inside, you know? I really can’t explain it.

“See, I never thought about it beyond that. I didn’t use a lot of crazy gear then and don’t now. I was just my Les Paul Standard, the Tobacco ‘Burst one, and a Marshall. I don’t know the model, but it would be a 4x 12. We used different mics to blend sounds together, probably a Shure 57 and some kind of ribbon mic. That was it, man. That was Cold Gin.”

The teetotal Simmons sang the words to Ace’s drinking song with real conviction, but at the end of the day, it was Ace’s balls-to-the-wall approach that defined Cold Gin.

“Really, I don’t know how I came up with it,” he says. “I have no idea how I do anything! People ask me these questions, and I’m not a schooled musician, so I don’t even know.

“I just needed a Marshall head. All I did was crank it up to 10 and start to rock and roll. That’s what it was all about.

“And when you stand in front of a Marshall stack and crank it, nothing sounds better!"