KISS: A band for the ages

KISS on the cover of their definitive album "Destroyer".

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyer_%28Kiss_album%29

(May be subject to copyright)

It was like a shot heard around the world. It was something never seen before. Now, it seems almost impossible to believe that it was a big deal.

Gene Simmons of the band KISS, was caught on camera coming out of Studio 54 in New York without his makeup on.

It even filtered down to Lethbridge where my cousin Carl, who not only introduced me to KISS but was the biggest KISS fan I knew, had saved the photo from the Lethbridge Herald.

That was more than 40 years ago, and KISS has kept on performing since then.

Today, I ran into my friend Bob who is going to the KISS concert in Calgary on Sunday, Nov. 12.

It is part of their farewell tour, and gave me pause to reflect on their career.

First KISS
My cousin Carl has always been big into music, still has a band and plays regularly. When we were growing up, I worshipped him. He is almost exactly four years older than me, and I wanted to be like him.

He loved KISS and accumulated a number of their albums, either buying them himself, or getting them for Christmas. His parents always took photos of Carl and his sister Nina opening their presents. There is at least one photo I recall where he is holding up a KISS album.

We would regularly go to visit Carl’s family in Lethbridge when we were in the city. I always gravitated to Carl’s room where he was not only playing KISS, but had posters on the wall.

He also drew portraits of the band – Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, Paul Stanley, and Peter Criss – and had those in his room. At that time, each member of KISS released their own solo album, and they were marketed together. I loved Peter Criss, who was the band’s drummer, so I bought his album. Carl bought the Gene Simmons one, but used the four album covers, which were all portraits done in the same style, as the source for his pencil-drawn portraits.

Carl was getting into playing his own music, so he had more and more equipment. One Saturday, we were visiting and he asked if I wanted to put on these head phones and listen. They covered the whole ear and cancelled out any other surrounding sound. I did. While I listened, Carl had it so loud I could not hear myself, when I started singing along to the words. When the song was done, Carl said I sounded not bad. To prove it, he would record me singing the next time I visited. That never happened. I have wondered what I would have sounded like.

Halloween KISS
Living on a farm, and being pretty isolated, meant my parents would take me to Lethbridge on Halloween night to go trick or treating with my cousins. It was always a lot of fun.

One year, the movie “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park” was being advertised. We went out and did our trick or treating and got back in time to actually watch the whole movie. It was wild. The members of KISS played themselves as they did battle with a crazed amusement park employee. He was actually kidnapping teenagers and using them, under his influence, as real-live mannequins in his attractions. He even frams KISS for a crime they didn’t commit.

At one point, one of the guys exclaims, “Gene’s clean!”, proclaiming his innocence.

Carl laughed. He had a magazine with biographies of KISS, and he read that Gene Simmons was a stage name. His real name was “Jean Clean.” I actually think, looking back it is Klein, but still.

Drum kit
I always wanted to be like Carl back then. When he got an actual set of drums, I decided to make my own set of drums out of stuff we had around the house. I flipped over a couple ice cream buckets for the bass and snare drums. I had some Tinkertoys, so I stuck a stick into a wheel for a cymbal. I used a can opener to cut the silver, circular bottom out of a Pringle’s potato chip canister and tacked it flat on top of the stick. That was my cymbal. Two more green Tinkertoy sticks were my drum sticks.

To top it all off, I took a brown paper bag, and sketched the portrait in pencil of Peter Criss off his record. I fit it into one of the ice cream bucket lids, cut it out into a circle and pasted it on the top of the 

Carl and his family actually came to visit that weekend, and he liked the drum set. He made one change though. I had nailed the cymbal flat onto the top of the stick. He pried the nail up and the chip-can lid with it, so when struck, it moved up and down, just like a real cymbal would.

1980s KISS
Being four years older, Carl got busier with his friends and his music, and I got interested in other things. One of the casualties was KISS.

I had pretty much forgotten they existed when I started listening to music regularly in 1984. However, heavy metal music was pretty big in some circles when I started high school. By then, KISS was considered heavy metal.

The costume of the time was a black concert shirt, often with white three-quarter or full length sleeves. KISS adorned more than one head banger’s chest.

That’s also when I became re-acquainted with KISS. They had declined in the early 1980s, with the departures of first Peter Criss then Ace Frehley, who were replaced by Eric Carr and Vinnie Vincent.

Then, in 1983, they shed their make-up and costumes, and began a resurgence with the album “Lick it Up”. The albums “Animalize” in 1984, “Asylum” in 1985, “Crazy Nights” in 1987, and “Hot in the Shade” in 1989 followed, and that’s where I picked up their trail again.

The title track from “Lick it Up” peaked at number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Animalize” yielded the single “Heaven’s on Fire” which went as high as number 49, “Tears Are Falling” from ”Asylum” went to number 51, and “Crazy, Crazy Nights” from “Crazy Nights” peaked at number 65.

I can still hear you calling
A funny thing happened in the Spring of 1986. One of the radio stations in Lethbridge, 1090 CHEC, had a phone-in request show on week nights called “Rock and Roll Your Own”, hosted by Jim Shoots. The station would compile a top 10 list of the most-requested songs of the day too.

My friend Mat turned me on to “Rock and Roll Your Own” in the Fall of 1985. That’s when I first heard what became one of my favourite songs of all time – “Beth” by KISS. It is a ballad sung by Peter Criss. Originally released in 1976, it peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 singles.

That phone-in show exposed “Beth” to a whole new audience, so much so something really cool happened. One day, I was wrapping up work at the greenhouse my friend Chris Vining and I worked at, when he called out from across the building.

“You’ll never guess what was number one last night?”

I shrugged. I had no idea.

“Beth.”

It had made it all the way back.

“Beth” would find a new audience yet again when it was performed on “Glee” a few years ago.

Towel on the wall
Vining and I would go off to university in the Fall of 1987, and room together in the student residence. He had been more into heavy metal and KISS than me, especially before I met him in Grade 10.

He had actually gone to see KISS in concert, so he hung up an “Animalize” scarf in our res room on his bulletin board.

It was pretty cool.

The years after
KISS continued to perform right up until the present day with makeup and costumes, without makeup and costumes, with the original lineup, and with different combinations. Gene Simmons had a reality show called “Family Jewels”, and he and Paul Stanley even owned an Arena Football League team called, fittingly, the Los Angeles KISS. Sadly, Eric Carr died in 1991.

The original four members – Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss – were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, and were set to conclude their farewell tour next month.

Parting thoughts
When I lived in res, they had regular dances and that’s where I really began to get to know the music of KISS as a fan. Me and my friends and floormates would dance to everything from “Rock and Roll All Nite”, “Shout it Out Loud”, and “Beth” to “I Was Made for Lovin’”, “Lick it Up”, “Heaven’s On Fire”, and “Crazy, Crazy Nights”.

It’s funny that, as much as I listened to KISS when I was young, I was more interested in being like my cousin Carl than the music itself. So, I may have been listening to KISS for close to 50 years, I really only heard them starting in the 1980s.

What I heard was a band with songs we could dance and sing along to, but also a band that could tug at the heart strings with an understated love ballad, telling a compelling story.

Put it all together and KISS is a band for the ages.