ROLL OVER SHOGUN

There's this group called Kiss. We've dealt with their history, their rationale of themselves, etc., in our own way [i.e. the General and Foot Soldier interviews of the Bat Lizard and the Pirate Dog]. Now we have decided to tumour attention to Kiss as Sociological Phenomenon —that's right, take out your notebooks, you'll be quizzed on this. War correspondent Carl Arrington filed this report from Japan [revenge for Pearl Harbor, for that wayward Sony, that plastic shirt...], and we are printing it in an effort to understand just what it is our younger brothers and the Japanese hordes see in this corporation known as...Kiss...

Consider the odd swaps: We send them wire and transistors that make their way back to Times Square as discount radios. We barter our baseball for Kung Fu. They get re-runs of "Bonanza" and "That Girl" and pass along Ultra Man and Godzilla us. Megallon in return. We peddle them franchises of Kentucky Fried Cardboard and we get Sushi bars that serve saki. Our latest exports are the four chrome-and-leather puppets collectively known as Kiss.

During their recent Sneak Attack Tour of the Land of the Rising Sony, the quartet visited six cities and played to more than 60,000 almond-eyed fans. During this, their first Oriental trek, the group (for some delightfully inexplicable reason) brought along a baker's dozen of scribes and pharisees representing an assortment of journals including Playboy, Melody Maker, The Soho Weekly News, Swank, High Times, Bravo and others. My solitary commitment to avail myself of this exotic junket was to guarantee an article in CREEM about the tour and mention Pan Am Airlines, who furm ished the transportation for the trip. I have now made good on both promises, but keep in mind while reading this report that I have had about $6,000 worth of tabs picked up by Kiss & Co. To their credit (and my enjoyment), Kiss always goes first class. I won't go into the decadent details, but the Hotel Okura we stayed at in Tokyo was so ritzy that you could order plastic surgery from room service. ("Uhh, yeah. I'll have a couple of cheeseburgers, a small salad, some fries and a Farrah Fawcett-Majors nose.")

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Gene...is particularly compulsive about his sex habits.

One of the basic cultural facts about Japan is that the hottest thing to hit the country since the A-Bomb is Occidental rock 'n' roll. Or "lock 'n' loll" as it is known to the natives. But they have schizophrenic tastes. Consider this: the five most popular rock artists in Japan are John Denver, Aerosmith, the Bay City Rollers, Olivia Newton-John and Kiss. I have spent the better part of a moon trying to solve that cbltural conundrum.

Whatever the reason, last year Kiss sold well over a half million albums in a market where the LPs sell for an average of $8. This year, with the help of their Sneak Attack concerts, they expect to triple their sales.

About the only common thread that links Japan's musical tastes is their affinity for bland, cheap imitations. That's why they like Olivia rather than Linda Ronstadt, Denver rather than Willie Nelson and Kiss rather than Led Zeppelin. They have been conditioned to enjoy slick, well-crafted and disposable commodities—which is exactly what Kiss is selling. Given the choice between the original and a counterfeit, the Japanese (like most Americans) chose the fake. And when it comes to music, Kiss is the Clifford Irving of rock.

They have taken every cliche of sound and performance and imaginatively put them in one show. Even Gene Simmons admits it: "Any bar band in the country could learn all of our songs in one day. Most of our stuff is just recycled riffs by the Stones, the Move and the Beatles."

Kiss has even managed to synthesize elements of the Japanese culture without knowing it. First, their get-up and make-up are amazingly similar to the looks of the players in the Kabuki theater. Simmons, chief architect of the group's costume, pleads innocent to ripping off a good idea. "I had never even seen a Kabuki until we got to tJapan. The black-on-white masks just seemed like a good way to project an image from the stage."

About the only common thread that links Japan's musical taste Is their affinity for bland, cheap imitations.

Second, the Kiss characters with their exaggerated gestures and largerthan-life appearance are very much like the superhero monsters of Japanese television cartoons. Even their stage finale with the confetti, bombs and fireworks brings to mind the final moments of a Jap-destructo movie with the 10-story turtle crashing through skyscrapejes and displacing half the water in the Pacific Ocean.

Third, Kiss appeals to the unique blend of violence and that has developed in Japanese culture. Similar to the poetry of karate masters, the flashy drama of "Firehouse" and "Shout It Out Loud" are entirely valid forms of artistic expression.

Even the landscape of Japanese cities is very similar to the sprawl of industrial Midwestern cities. Nagoya, Fukuoka and Osaka might as well be Cleveland, Buffalo and Detroit. Tokyo with its mess of concrete and highways could be Los Angeles. Likewise, dressed in full Kiss regalia, the Oriental fans could pass for New York punkateenies.

And finally, Kiss' full-speed-ahead music style has apty been described as kamikaze rock.

For all these similarities, Kiss seemed oddly out of place among the polite and generally well-mannered Japanese. Yet it is a country full of strange juxtapositions. In the middle of a frantic business district will be an ancient Buddhist temple; in a subway packed with Japanese dressed in denim and polyester will be an old woman wearing a traditional silk kimono; in the heart of a traffic jam will be a hand-pulled rickshaw.

Kiss did little to alter their show for Japanese crowds. Paul Stanley gave his audience rap in English and got about the same crowd reaction in Osaka as he might have received in Omaha. Gene spit the regular amount of blood, Ace still thought he was on Mars and Peter's only cultural nod was the addition of a Japanese gong to his normal drum kit.

The major stage alteration was a new set that Kiss will use in future U.S. tours. The new decor replaces the Destroyer city with a wall of chrome Marshall amps fitted with two lighted staircases and a mobile center area that will move Criss forward for his drum solo and high into the air for the finale. When the set is finished, it will also have several mechanical tenacles that will take Ace, Gene and Paul out over the audience.

One member of the road crew helped explain why they decided to try out the new stage paraphernalia, "I guess they decided not to use the Destroyer set because playing in a demolished city in Japan could have been a little tacky."

Japanese audiences for Kiss were generally more enthusiastic than crowds in the U.S. and are amazingly well-behaved. One explanation is that since drug laws are strictly enforced in Japan you don't have rows of grassmellowed Quaalude-jaded kids reacting to the show. What you do have are all of these hyper, straight kids reacting to the group's effective pandering. In the past this rabbled pandemonium has left teens trampled and dead under the feet of the anxious masses, so for the Kiss concerts, there was an usher assigned to every row whose entire job was to intimidate the kids. These private goons used high-powered flashlights to shine in the eyes of fans who so much as stood up. If the light didn't work, a quick karate chop did. Throughout the concert there is this teeming tension of quelled enthusiasm.

The repression may have been particularly rife during the Kiss tour because of the presence of journalists at the concert. Always conscious of their image abroad, Japanese officials wanted to be sure that there were no embarrassing incidents at the concerts. We were told that before every show, an announcement is made to the audience along the lines of: "Tonight we have a group of American hacks that will be watching every move you make. If you don't conduct yourselves like good girls and boys, we will exhumethe remains of your grandmother and make chopsticks out of her bones."

When it conies to music, Kiss is the Clifford Irving of rock.

Another common practice in Japan is to keep a guy out in the audience with a decibel gauge; when the.noise level goes beyond the threshold of pain, bands are required to lower their volume.

By the way, those of you with an interest in exotic pharmaceuticals should know that the most widely used drug in Japan is something called Royal Jelly. It's a kind of natural speed, the chief ingredients being glucose, caffeine and nicotine.. Consume two candybars, three cups of coffee and two cigarettes in rapid succession and you will get the equivalent buzz. Usually, the stuff is sold in drugstores in two ounce minibottles. There are various flavors and mixtures of the stuff so you can match the Jelly to your mood. It sells for about $1.50 per bottle.

So rather than the fierce ups and downs rampant among American chemical consumers, you have the Japanese cruising comfortably at a mild speed. You can't avoid the word "industrious" in describing their culture. In fact, it's so upbeat that even their cigarettes have names like "Hope" and "Peace."

There must be a factory just outside San Francisco where all of the groupies in the world are cloned from one stupid, resourceful and striking girl with silver high heels. The Japanese models showed up wherever Kiss was with the same tiresome fashions and diseases that are common to the human cesspools of the West. In broken English they introduced themselves, with names like Bosco, Nabisco and Let's Go.

One thing that two weeks on the road "with Kiss did was illuminate the separate personalities of the band. To their credit they allowed themselves to be relentlessly probed, interviewed and observed. Here are some ruminations and facts.

During most of the tour, the group might as well have been in a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Milwaukee for all the interest they showed in their surroundings. The Sneak Attack Theme Song goes something like this: "I wanna rock and roll all night/and stay in my hotel room ev-er-y day..."

But several members showed themselves to be voracious consumers. Often they spent as much as $1,000 a day on gadgets, toys, cameras and junk. Ace spent most of his time stalking the wild beer can or wiling away his time in Pachinko parlors. (For those of you who don't know, Pachinko is a game somewhat like playing pinball on a vertical board with hundreds of tiny steel balls. The Japanese go for this the same way they go for raw fish and rice.) Both Ace and Peter brought their wives along.

Gene is the calculating hedonist of the group. He is particularly compulsive about his sex habits. He was said to have spent most of his off-stage energies creating a photographic memorial to the Japanese groupies he picked up, adding their faces, breasts, behinds, etc., to his collection of pornographic Polaroids. Ho hum.

Actually, Simmons remains the most intriguing member of the group because his hang-ups are so well camoufalged. I mean, Ace is like the goofy guy in your gym class that was always getting in trouble. Peter is a joker, but worried enough about his age so that he won't give you a straight answer when you ask about it. Paul is a reasonably normal guy who would have been more at home in the Victorian era.

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Surprisingly, Peter is probably the most musically talented of the group and has the greatest knack for writing Top 40 singles. Ace has little talent or imagination with his guitar, but he can fake it well enough to get by. Paul and Gene fancy themselves as sort of a latter-day McCartney/Lennon team, yet neither has shown an ability to do more than re-tread old sounds.

What the four have in common is a driving ambition to keep the illusion they have created alive. That, coupled with shrewd management, has given these four guys the ability to parlay common looks and marginal talents into an international phenomenon.

The problem is that they have effectively saturated the U.S. market. The symptoms of this condition are the same in any business: When a company starts to diversify (sing ballads and publish comic books, in this case) and turns to foreign markets (like Japan and Australia) it means the folks at home have had enough.

Oh, just in case you're interested, their ireal names are Paul Frehley, Stanley Eisen, Gene Klien and Peter Crisscoula. fib