Former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley doesn't much care for his replacement Tommy Thayer.
"[Tommy is] not Ace Frehley by any stretch of the imagination, number one," Frehley told Eddie Trunk on his podcast recently, Blabbermouth reports. "Number two, what bothers me the most is that I know the new fans that KISS are getting don't know it. A lot of people that see Tommy up there think he's the original guy that created the makeup, that wrote great songs and wrote all those solos that he's performing, but he's not. He's just a guy up there copying me and trying to move like me and trying to sing like me and trying to play like me. And that's what bothers me the most. I mean, the real hardcore fans know. But the new fans, a lot of them don't know."
Frehley also said that Thayer is "just a guy up there copying me and trying to move like me and trying to sing like me and trying to play like me."
Aside from a brief reunion tour in 1996, the original Spaceman hasn't played with Kiss since 1982, but some fans have yet to figure that out. "I can't tell you how many times I get phone calls and people say,' Hey, Ace, I heard you're playing here, I heard you're playing there. Can you get me tickets?'" he said. "I go, 'I'm not in the band anymore.' Some people, still, are oblivious to that whole thing."
In a recent Rolling Stone article, Thayer explained that he's fine with wearing Frehley's signiture makeup. "And the only thing is, you've got a lot of push-back from some of the diehards. And that's understandable. Hey, you know, if you lived in the '70s and KISS was your favorite band, and that's what you grew up with, and suddenly there's another guy wearing that makeup, I can understand how some people, it might not have appealed to them as much. But as time as gone by, a lot of people have changed their mind."
Frehley and the rest of the band got together in April to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but they did not perform.
