THE TONGUE HAS IT

The end of a perfect summer's day is the perfect end. And, as fifteen thousand young people know, the end to a whole lot else: baseball, football, and hey-get-your-cold-beer-here; the flag, the family, the Fonz, and Laverne and her stuck-up Shirley; Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikowsky, and Coltrane; Miles Davis and Miles Laboratories; Wall Street, Basin Street, Bleecker Street, and Bloomingdale's. The end goes on, and now the young minds teem with the possibilities: And maybe even rock 'n' roll? The death of rock 'n' roll...and then the Night? The end of the night, the beginning of the dawn, new light, new air, new life...Could it be? Could it be that they are bearing witness to the inexorable black dawn, the fertile Armageddon, the new music, the new reaction, the new thrust forward?

Paul Stanley, alive with his star, screams into the mike: "Good Evening, Jersey City!!!" And the band is off: "Deuce."

Yes! thinks the crowd as the bass rumbles in their bowels, the drums pound back to unseen cavemen, guitars twist and burn, and Stanley belts forth the song from eons beneath his heart. Yes! they think. And it is energizing and completely frightening at the same time. Yes! As flames fly and lights swoop and in chrome and leather the ban stands up to its own sweet holocaust of quarter-notes. Yes! This is nothing less than doom's thundering peace. And Kiss is the conquering demi-legion of the Night, the bearer of the New Age. The New Age of Fire.

The four members of the band— Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss—in costume (or is that their real skin?!?) stand close to seven feet tall. Their black-and-silver costume/skins variously transform them into reptiles, spacemen, diamond-studded puppy (dogs (the Diamond Dog, perhaps, of David Bowie's song/fantasy?), and alley cats. Some say the black, white, and silver faces of the members of Kiss are evil incarnate. Some of the people who say this come readily, others are drawn against their will. For whatever one says about the faces and the costumes they wrap around their beings, there is no way one can resist looking and looking and looking again.

When all this physical presence is couched in terms of the Kiss stage show, one can only become weak.

Explosion? Well, it's more than just a physical detonation on a stage. It's more than just sixteen flashpots ignited simultaneously across and around a stage. The moment the stage spotlights dim completely, the moment before all is lit in the blinding flashpowder detonation is one of the most delicious moments one can ever experience.

It's not the kind of thing that happens before Crosby, Stills & Nash come out on stage. It's not the same as when they dim the lights before Aerosmith comes on stage. The moment before Kiss comes on stage is most nearly akin to the moment before your very first girlfriend slips the very first strap from her shoulder for the first time. It's a moment that is so tentative and so certain at the same time, so vivid and so blurred, so eagerly anticipated and so reluctantly approached that it is over before it began and invariably looms as the dominant —if least explicable—mood of the evening as it fades to memory.

It may be that the aniticipation of Kiss is better than the anticipation of first sex.

That the time spent driving in from Philly and Hartford and Rye and Dayton to see a concert in Jersey City's Roosevelt Stadium creates a more intense anticipation for Kiss than years of looking at dirty magazines creates for the sexual experience.

Some might say at this admittedly extreme point: You gotta be a fan, I guess. The point is: But you don't. Come to a Kiss concert and see what I mean.

In other words, the explosion that happens when Kiss appears on stage is an explosion in the heart, the mind, the soul, the groin, whatever you want to call it,of every one of the 15,000 assembled in this stadium tonight.

By the time one can think, Ace Frehley is marching down from his turret emplacement at the rear of the gothic stage set for the solo in "Strutter." "Strutter" is about a nasty girl, and no one is so nasty as Ace when he stomps down frpm his spot ten feet „ above the stage in his rolled, silver | naugahyde boots, wielding his Les Paul to express his musical disdain for The Strutter. As he is wont to do, Ace almost never looks into the faces of the crowd below him, preferring to stare off, grimacing, into some interplanetary space, which lies somewhere along a tangent that might be drawn from the trajectory of a home run ball hit over the left field fence. The Left Field Planet—that must be where Ace is from. That Strutter girl cpuld not be farther beneath him.

All except for the Kitty Kat, the alley denizen^ they are fill stage front now, wrangling with some of the loudest music ever exhibited before humans, coaxing the audience ever onward into the sonic oblivion. "Nothin' To Lose" and Paul is skidding over to stage right to wag heads with Ace, as Gene tells the audience what's what— that they "got nothin' to lose." BatLizard Simmons is faced front-andcenter to the audience, his eerie batwing eyes staring them down as his Long Pink whips out periodically, taunting.

But it's only the beginning.

Sixteen hundred pounds of flashpowder later; beyond the flashing red lights and Paul's camping around with the fireman's hat in "Firehouse"; after Ace and Gene have travelled up and down their respective turrets, several more times; after the strobes have strobed and the eyes of the mastiffs that guard Peter's platform have lit horribly; after Gene has breathed real and true fire from deep in his hot soul —all that while later, past all that information that is too much to absorb, comes the climax. It's a climax that serves to focus the audience on the deepest and darkest core, the black hole center, of Kiss.

It is a climax that focuses on and through and mercifully back out from the mind of Gene Simmons.

There is a bass solo in "Rock Bottom." Simmons steps to the edge of the stage, grinding. His shoes, the audience can see, are actually the faces of angry silver gargoyles whose red eyes bug out not unlike those of Simmons himself beneath his bat-wing eyebrows. Gene is leering at the crowd beneath him. As if to hurt, perhaps.

More likely, as if to violate in toto.

Suddenly the tongue—the longest any of them have ever seen—begins to unfurl from his mouth and slither . down his chin as he falls into a hideous squatting position, the silver of his black leather and metallic codpiece winking light lasciviously out at those who can still look. He is leaning this way from his squat and then the other way, all the time the tongue lapping at the air, the eyes bugging, the eyes on the shoes bugging, the crotch winking. In a moment, the line between sex and violence—so thoroughly discussed in the Ivory Towers of academia—here becomes ultijmately blurred—for real.

What does this Bat-Lizard want? What does he intend?

His fingers run up and down the fretboard of the bass, the black dangles attached to his gauntlet gloves working furiously in some contradictory direction.

■ And then there is blood.

Blood pouring all over the stage from the impenetrable void behind the black lips of the bat creature. Suddenly, his sex is violence—and viceversa. Puddles of the discharge form on the stage beneath his face and a bloody trail obscures his white chin. Sometimes the blood from his mouth splashes across the front rows.

And the madman leers.

Is he sick? Is he dying?Is he regurgitating some horrible dinner that is beyond the comprehension of civilized humankind?

And just as precipitously as his carnage has begun, it is over, and Ace and Paul and Peter are back in their places on the stage and the entire unit of destruction/redemption roars gloriously into the metal thunder finale of "Rock Bottom."

The squeamish have lost lunch.

Is violence sex? Is sex violence? What are we to make of this modern world?

Or are we just afraid of the night?

Kiss is in triumph. The black shroud conquered, submissive—if not actually vanquished.

That the show continues, that there are more explosions does not matter at this point. That they perform their incredible anthem, their rallying cry (and what may perhaps be the rallying cry of a generation) (you know...), that Peter Criss' drums rise twenty feet in the air and every time he hits the cymbals lights pop andrsizzle, almost does not matter. All of that is almost showbiz put up against the bloody tongue of Gene Simmons.

The fact that much of the audience is drunk or drugged out or hysterical or comatose from the proceedings barely matters.

It's the tongue.

The tongue is saying it all. The tongue is speaking for posterity. It's this bloody tongue that derides the baseball and the football and the beer and the bluesmen and the jazzmen and all things surrounding them. It's that damnable and repulsive bloody tongue.

Not the hysterical drunken and/or drugged up ravings. Not the terror of the firecracker wads. Not the trampling and the dying. Not the pretty young girl with the tiny gold necklace who is comatose and lies by the back gate, completely unaware she is awaiting an ambulance. None of that.

It's the tongue.

And here in the late 1970s it is the climax of the show—no, the climax of an era: an horrifically extended crimson tongue spills chicken blood down through the ages—which is just about how long it's been—onto a skinny little greaseball with wiggly hips who thinks he ain't nothin' but a hound dog. He's dead and gone to fat, the grotesque dribblings of the tongue tells us. Hope I die before I get old, they used to say. Done, even forgotten, says the red dribble-dribble. Billion Dollar Babies come Billion Dollar Old Men: go away, it says. Down through the ages, all over those ages, the tongue drips its sloppy substance without mercy...'til the ages are where they're supposed to be: Back There. Old. Decrepit. And, worst of all, wavering. Goodbye, Elvis. Goodbye, Rolling Stones. Goodbye, Pete Townshend. Good riddance, Alice Cooper, The Kings is dead. The crimson tongue demands:

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 33

OY WANNA ROK UN ROWL AWL NOYT UN PAWDY EV-VARY DEH!!!

A stadium in America cheers and blows some brains out.

The following means more to some people living in this decade than does any religion, job, emotional involvement or even their own name: Kiss.

And if that sounds a little like John Lennon's famous statement of 1966 regarding his band, the Beatles—the one where he said "We're more popular than Jesus"—well, the effect is not altogether unintentional on my part— or on the part of Kiss.

The members of the rock group Kiss^ are part of a generation that is, if nothing else, a semi-cohesive unit due to the fact that they're all children of the Beatles. Perhaps even more than television, this generation, which is now between 23 and 30 years old, was nurtured by the music, the lyrics, the movies, the public pronouncements and activities of the four moptops.

Nurtured thusly, the generation also became defined by the Beatles. When they grew their hair, we grew ours. When they dropped acid, we dropped acid. When they knocked organized religion, we knocked it too. And, ultimately, when they broke up (in 1970, for all intents and purposes) so did our generation, fragmenting to individual pursuits—some cutting their hair, some leaving it long, some continuing further into the drug world, some retreating, some taking up with jazz, some with folk, some with classical music, some staying with rock.

The Beatles blew out all the old realities. The old parameters, the old possibilities went out the window. They showed us the possibility of incredible wealth, seemingly limitless adulation. In essence: the ability to have power. Anybody, it was presumed, could be a Beatle, a modern monarch-withoutportfolio; anybody could have vast power. To a teenager, that has a singular appeal.

Millions of fat, pimply teenagers started forming bands—to show 'em! And some of these' teenagers lived in the outer boroughs nf New York Cify.

Paul Stanley was always fat, still has a tendency to it. Gene Simmons, while tall and not overweight, was, nonetheless, no prize. Peter Criss, who had always considered a career in music, was just a little bit older—not getting any younger, as they say—and maybe a little too short. Ac6 Frehley was just' plain angry—a rebuilt cheekbone attests to his pugnacious nature as a teen. All in all, these four kids from the "Outer Boroughs"—Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens; places sophisticated Manhattanites will barely acknowledge—were perfect fodder for the Dream Machine that the Beatles fostered. And, in the mid-Sixties, to turn around John Lennon's later, more apocalyptic statement; The dream had just begun.

It would be over a decade before the dream would be realized by these four boys, before Gene Simmons, the demon Bat-Lizard of Kiss, would fling his tongue out to drip his crimson disdain for the ages down on the Old Heroes. But some never doubted for a second that the, dream would come true.