PSSST! WANNA BUY THE SISTINE CHAPEL?

Business art is the step that comes after Art... Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business — they'd say "Money is bad," and "Working is bad," but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. Andy Warhol, from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B& Back Again)

If you swallow Andy's premise, Kiss is Michelangelo. They represent the most spectacular and the most spectacularly successful marketing achievement ever in the music division of the Business Art school. In fact, it may just be belittling them to put their accomplishments beside such tediously conceived and executed works as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the Pieta. Lacking emotion and intellect and equipped with nothing new or vital either musically or theatrically they have managed in the short space of two years to scale the pinnacles of the music business: they now sell out huge arenas across the country and are on the verge of their first platinum album with Kiss Alive! In effect, Kiss has sold us the Brooklyn Bridge.

Me, I hate their music. I hate their make-up. I hate their clothes. I hate their stage show. I hate their album covers. Have I left anything out? If they own pet ducks, I hate their pet ducks. But here I sit. Kiss Alive! is playing itself out on my turntable while I leaf through the accompanying picture book and tap my toes. And later on, here I sit in the office and this song is running through my head and suddenly I let out with "OY WANNA ROCK UN ROLL AWL NITE UN PAWTY EVVVARY DEH!" And I am totally repelled as a small, scaly gentleman appears before my desk with four creatures in stupid make-up to announce in a clipped adenoidal voice: "Here ya go, bud. One Brooklyn Bridge."

So now listen. You have to understand. As long as I have this thing sitting here, all deeded out proper and legal to me, I gotta justify it. I gotta rationalize. Come on, would you admit point blank that you'd been taken like this? That you, the amply-warned Sophisticate, had purchased the goddamn Brooklyn Bridge? Let me explain.

"OY WANNA ROCK UN ROLL AWL NITE UN PAWTY EVV-VARY DEH!" You tell me: who the hell else puts-on a more dynamic show in the whole of rock 'n' roll? Can that wimp Steve Tyler breathe fire?!? Huh? Can the Bay City Rollers spit up blood?!? —

I mean when they're not real sick or something, of course. And can you honestly from your heart tell me that Bob Dylan's Kiss make-up was anywhere near the real thing? And gawd, are they the sexiest things, man — all that leather and studs and them chicks just soakin' their little panties to get a piece of that action. I'm gonna start dressing just like 'em and you will see how much action I get, fella. You wanna look at it from the old Robert Christ -gau Memorial Historical Viewpoint? Well I can cut ya there, too. Because not in the history of the rock 'n' roll game has anybody—I include Elvis, Berry, Beatles, Stones, Led Zep, the Dead, Tull-thas anybody been able to put the whole shebang into one walloping word: "PAWTY!" Because that's what I like to do every nite and day, and that's how I do it. I don't party or parrrty or parrrteeee, I PAWTY!!! I mean...

I may just end up having to keep this thing — Kiss, I mean — in my apartment, which, what with the garbage of the ages and me, is small enough as it is. Do you think that if I put them in a couple of inches of water they would begin to putrefy and deteriorate after a few days and then 1 could fit them in the refrigerator, which at this point contains this tub of butter that looks like it's sprinkled with pimentoes, though I know that those red things are mould or some similar type of mini-plantlife?

Maybe I could take them over to the Chinese restaurant. They'll buy anything to round out that night's chop suey. In Manhattan they buy these scuzzy diseased Hudson River-bottom scavenger fish, among other things. In Detroit a friend swears he has actually seen the kitty-cat heads in the garbage cans behind his favorite slant joint. Hey, they would probably grab up that chunky little silver-nosed bewhiskered Peter Criss in a second! ("Ah so! Rots big fish you gots there, boss. How much payee for big silver-nose kitty?") And if I cut 'em in on the profit I bet they'd let me film the entire beheading and grinding process for a sort of culinary snuff movie. Julia Child Press nts...

w Can you honestly from your heart tell me that Bob Dylan's Kiss make-up was anywhere near the real thing?

"OY WANNA ROCK UN ROLL AWL NITE UN PAWTY EVV-VARY DEH!" Fact: the manager of Kiss used to be head of the camera crew for Supermarket Sweep which was the sickest game show this side of Money Maze.

Andy Warhol! Jesus Christ, why didn't I think of that sooner. Andy is in desperate need of a new riff (see The Philosophy of Andy Warhol) and, sure, this riff is as old as the Mothers and Alice Cooper and Capt. Beefheart and Dionysus in '69, but listen, Andy's got to know that history runs in cycles and that this may be the next big avant or anti-avant thing. I mean, it could be camp for Andy to take on my Brooklyn Bridge and set them up as the new Velvet Underground. I tell ya, Andy, what you could do is put a signed Warhol kissing lips painting on the back of Kiss's next album that peels off to reveal jagged, bleeding flesh. Smoking lips could become a new drug craze. Sure, Donovan ain't got nothin' going for him these days, we could hire him to write some catchy little nothing with oblique references to Chinese restaurants and eating lips. It could be HIP or UN-HIP or just NOTHING (which is actually something, you said). Look, here's a framed picture of Kiss without their makeup, Andy:

Fact #2. Neil Bogart, President of Casablanca Records, used to be president of Buddah Records and got his picture in Newsweek because he invented and was for a long time the sole exponent of Bubblegum Music — remember "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," and "Chewy, Chewy" and all those other masterworks of Business Art?

Do you think I could sell them to Revlon if Lauren Hutton or Catherine Deneuve were ran over by subway trains? You know, for makeup ads or something?

Do you think I could sell them to a barber shop as stropping straps?

Perhaps I could convince some custom car shop to take them on as upholstery and hubcaps?

Maybe, just maybe, I could sell them to the Brooklyn Bridge. The group, I mean. That would be i-ronic. Just think how much more money — a.k.a. business art — everybody could make if there were two Brooklyn Bridges on the road!

Gene Simmons said: "I always wanted to be famous — not necessarily a rock 'n' roll star — famous. I can't see John Lennon on TV with a Clark bar saying, 'Hey! Guess what?.. .1 eat Clark Bars!' Celebrities should be household words like the Thirties concept of the star."

Did you know that they actually allow a certain amount of rodent hair and rodent excrement in the contents of candy bars? And they don't have to even list those ingredient^, not even somewhere down there under the monosodium glutamate. Forget the TV commercials. I bet I could slip my entire Bridge into about five million candy bars — Clarks, if they like — and we could even list the ingredients right up at the top. Because that would be of great commercial value. Now those girls theft grab at their crotches in concerts could actually ingest them in toto. It would be consummate Business Arti Michelangelo physically merging with his art: The artist as art which is still ,a product of the artist. Listen, I might be able to pull it off. I used to go to school with this kid whose father owned the Charms Candy Company. I think it was located in Brooklyn, too. There could be a lot of artisie threads tied up there. What a hell of a statement! What a commitment of artist to art (as engineered by the unwitting victim of Brooklyn Bridge fraud; why I could become a one-man Sotheby-Parke Bernet!)!

Paul Stanley said, in answer to the question "Why is Kiss so popular?": "We have a sense of humor about what we do. Plus I think there's so much sincerity in what we're doing.. .It might sound obnoxious, but we reek it." Sincerity, that is. Because they do not yet reek from being stood up in two inches of filthy water in my filthy kitchen. Though someday soon they might, arid then into the bags for them!

But the point is sincerity. It's a rare quality fqund in Business Art. In fact, it is almost anathema to the genre. Sincerity. Commitment. Kiss as a Clark bar: I know I could swing it with Tony Brimo, though I haven't seen him in ten or fifteen years.

Fact #3: Omaha, Nebraska.

But enough of this gibberish. I have to unload a goddamn Brooklyn Bridge. I cad a friend in New York.

I saV'I HATE KISS! I AM DOING A KISS STORY!" He says: "I don't firtd them that offensive. They're just not really offensive." He says this with an immeasurable degree of interested disinterest.

As the conversation progresses, we get around to the subject of the proliferating New York punk bands, and I relate to him the apocryphal tale of a certain Cleveland punk band who shall go nameless (a spin-off from another band there called Rocket from the Tombs). It seems that this band is having a tremendous amount of trouble getting club work these days—even rqpre than usual (their sound comes out of the threshold-of-pain school of muscle). You see, I explain to my friend, they feature a lawn mower in their act. One night, just after they had yanked on the ol' chop machine, the club owner's dog wandered by the front of the stage. Inspiration apparently struck and the band members waylaid the pup onstage, ostensibly—arid now I'm interpolating in the interest of humanity —to give him a haircut with their power mower. As one can imagine, it is a delicate procedure to shave a dog with , a lawn mower, a procedure easily botched. Well, botch it they did and exit one canine in a spew of blood and guts and fur. (They got fired from the gig.)

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 33.

My friend laughs hysterically (Good sense of humor, no?) and allows as how the Kiss/Blue Oyster Cult New Year's Eve show at Nassau Coliseum is strictly "pussy stuff' relative to the stage atrocities of the Cleveland group. My friend says to me: "Now that would be the way to bring ip the New Year! Some goddamned dog spraying out of a lawn mower all over the audience." And you know, in concept, I really have to agree with him. And I'll tell you wh^t (if I really have to wrap this whole thing up) I've figured it all out. I HAVE UNLOADED THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE!

Kiss is not outrageous. Kiss is nothing. Though as Andy says, nothing is something and this something is Business Art. But you know what? Business Art is not Art.

But throw in a lawn mower...

Ace Frehley to interviewer (out of the clear blue) : "I used to sniff glue."

Interviewer: "Oh, yeah. Did it do anything for you?"

Ace Frehley: "Yeah. It expanded my consciousness better than acid.