When Ace Frehley played what would be his final concert last month, he took the stage with a rhythm guitar player who had been by his side longer than any other in his solo bands: Nashville shredder Jeremy Asbrock. Together, they tore through Kiss classics like “Deuce” and “Cold Gin,” Frehley solo staples like “New York Groove,” and Frehley’s Comet’s enduring battle cry “Rock Soldiers.”
Asbrock, who played in bands like the Shazam and with John Corabi before joining up with Kiss’ Spaceman guitarist in 2018, was the ultimate rock soldier. He calls playing with Frehley, who died Oct. 16 at 74, a dream gig for a Kiss superfan like himself.
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“Ace isn’t just an influence of mine. This is the person that laid the path before me when I was four years old. I’ve never wanted to do anything else, and he was the guy that brought it all to me,” Asbrock tells Rolling Stone. “Some nights onstage, it was extremely surreal, especially when he was having a really great show, and he’d get in that stance and start doing his thing. It was like, ‘Man, there it is. That’s it right there, and it’s standing right beside me.’”
Along with Asbrock, Frehley’s final solo band included fellow Nashville player Ryan Spencer Cook on bass and Scot Coogan on drums. Ironically, perhaps, the group was born out of Gene Simmons’ band. Asbrock says they were playing with the Kiss bassist on a tour of Australia that Frehley was booked to open when Frehley asked Simmons if he could borrow his players.
“Gene said, ‘If it’s OK with them, it’s OK with me,’” Asbrock recalls. “Later on, Gene pulled me into his dressing room, and the Kiss cruise was coming up, and he told us that Ace was going to ask us to do the cruise. Then we went to Japan from there with Ace and he asked us to be the band. I joined in September of 2018, so I’ve held the guitar-player position longer than any musician he’s had, consecutively.”
Nashville’s Philip Shouse also performed in Frehley’s solo band, playing bass from 2018 to 2022 until he took a full-time gig in German metal band Accept. He, Asbrock, and Cook are longtime friends and are essential to Nashville’s vibrant rock scene: For years they hosted a weekly hard-rock showcase called Thee Rock N Roll Residency that featured surprise guests like Alice Cooper, Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander, and more of the local rock community.
Shouse says that touring with Frehley was a chance to see the guitarist’s keen sense of humor up close. “He was really funny. He was really goofy. And I mean this in the best way, sometimes it was like, ‘Wow, he is from another planet, isn’t he?’” Shouse says. “He just had this way about him that was unlike anybody I’ve ever met.”
Like his pal Asbrock, he credits Frehley with his decision to become a guitar player. “Ace taught me how to play lead guitar. I was taking guitar lessons and learning the scales, but nothing sounded like music to me. It never made sense until I heard Ace, and that was in 10th grade,” Shouse says. “When I heard his solos, it all clicked.”
Asbrock and Shouse, who also lost his father a few months ago, are still struggling to make sense of a world without the Space Ace. But Asbrock says fans should be aware of just how much of a regular guy Frehley was behind the face paint.
“He’s totally human. We’ve had conversations where he’s been very vulnerable to me, just like, real dude conversations,” he says. “Gene was not going to call me up and talk about real-life things. And, you know, Ace has.”
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