Desperate Times AI Music
Some friendly exchanges have occurred in the past few years between Ace Frehley and Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, his former Kiss bandmates (e.g., Frehley and Stanley joining forces for a cover of Free’s “Fire and Water,” Ace helping Simmons promote his “Gene Simmons Vault,” Ace joining the others for a Kiss Kruise show, etc.).
But, there have also been some less than amicable exchanges, such as when Frehley hinted that Kiss might be playing pre-recorded songs live, when Stanley famously called out “Piss” for suggesting that the original members might get back together, when Simmons said that Frehley didn’t have the “physical stamina” to perform a full show with the band, and many more.
During a recent interview on Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk, Frehley took aim at his former band once more – who between 2004 to this year’s just-completed End of the Road Tour, featured guitarist Tommy Thayer playing the role of Frehley’s Spaceman and Eric Singer adopting Peter Criss’ original role of the Catman (while Simmons and Stanley carried on as the Demon and Starchild).
When discussing the topic that the casual fan may not have been aware that it was not all original members touring as Kiss for the last 20 years or so, Frehley stated (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):
“A lot of Kiss fans aren’t the brightest people of the world… I mean, Ace fans are sharp. As little as a few years ago, I used to get phone calls from people and they would ask for Kiss tickets. And I said, ‘You know I’m not playing in the band anymore.’ And a lot of people don’t even know it.”
Frehley also feels that Kiss may have tried to pull the wool over some fans’ eyes.
“When I quit the band the second time [in 2002], they kind of buried it and really didn’t make a big press release about it – because Tommy was wearing my makeup, and they kind of just wanted people to think that maybe it was still Ace Frehley.”
And while watching a recent Kiss performance in Indianapolis on YouTube, the original Spaceman wasn’t impressed with what he saw and heard.
“I think the fans go for ‘the show.’ But now with the canned vocals… I mean, I couldn’t believe it – Paul Stanley was doing ‘Detroit Rock City’… no, he was doing ‘Love Gun’ [Ace may have been referring to this performance]. He wrote that song – he’s not even singing on the choruses. He was like, dancing around on this platform. And that’s absolutely bewildering to me. How you could write… that’s like me performing ‘Shock Me’ and not singing it, y’know?”
