KISS: NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE EXCESS

Oh, glory that was Kiss...Who cared, that under their pancake and out of their platform boots, the members were four ordinary looking guys from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan? What did it matter that the bass player, who manifested himself as a monstrous comic book creation, had been a copyboy at Vogue, elementary school teacher, and a 90word-per-minute typist (ask Gene, he’ll show you)? When Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss laced themselves into leather and became the men behind the masks, the effect was immediate—worldwide, profound, and long-lasting. In retrospect, what Kiss’s songs sounded like pales behind the band’s visual shell-shock. For Kiss, the medium was truly the message.

Hoping, but far from realizing that they would singlehandedly revitalize the moribund New York music scene, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley formed Kiss in 1972. Searching for a drummer, they lucked onto Peter Criss, who had advertised in Rolling Stone as “willing to do anything to make it.” How perceptive of him. Figuring that they’d never get airplay if the band was named “Fuck” (their first choice), Kiss was chosen to inherit the earth.

Nowhere near overnight wonders, Kiss played regularly in a series of small bars around Long Island, until they decided to showcase themselves at a midtown hotel called the Diplomat. Curious about the promotional letters he’d received from the band, manager Bill Aucoin stopped by the Diplomat ballroom, and couldn’t believe his eyes. Faced with the sight of four grown men masked by white clown makeup, strapped, chained and elevated off the ground, taking Alice Cooper’s outrage one giant step further, Aucoin immediately signed the group. He brought them to Neil Bogart's fledgling label, Casablanca, which released Kiss in 1974. For the rest of the decade, until Donna Summer came along, Kiss albums would be that label’s biggest (and frequently only) best-sellers.

To put it mildly, Kiss were attention-getters. They had to be caught in concert to be lieved—and even then, you weren’t quite sure that this was reality. As the band grew in scope, from movie-hall size venues to the world’s largest arenas, the Kiss show became ever more elaborate. Whatever volume it took to catatonize a place, that’s the level at which Kiss would perform. Let’s face it, with titles like “God Of Thunder” and “Hotter Than Hell” to live up to, they couldn’t get away with halfway measures. Towering like seven-foot giants in their platform boots, Simmons, Stanley and Frehley would hurtle down flights of stairs. Simmons, especially, brought along a whole bag of tricks—he breathed fire, he spit blood...his pointy tongue seemed larger than life. (And considering that he preserved many early tour antics in albums full of Polaroids, perhaps it was.)

That Kiss’s albums were rarely played on radio, and that it took a ballad, “Beth,” to give the band its first hit single, didn’t slow down their takeover of American (and Japanese) youth. The mystery of the band’s members’ identities, those peculiar letters in the group’s name—that some immediately charged were modeled after the Nazi SS (this in a band with two Jewish boys), the fan club being called the Kiss Army, the fervor with which followers dressed as minor-league Kissoids at every concert, all helped turn Kiss into perhaps the single most notorious American rock band of the 1970s.

Kiss’s achievements, and its critical brickbats, were equally monumental in scope. On the one hand, a Gallup poll reported that Kiss was the top group in the U.S. among teenagers. The band was signed to make a movie, Kiss Meets The Phantom. They issued a comic book, “dyed with real Kiss blood.” On the other hand, after marveling at the group’s original gall in marketing themselves, most reviewers tore them apart. Kiss were even less liked by certain religious fundamentalists, who decided that the band’s name stood for Kids/Knights/Kings in Satan’s Service. Nervous parents felt the need to protect their offspring from going out to “Rock and Roll All Night.”

Sadly, in the end it wasn’t the right wingers or the reporters who did Kiss in. It was the band itself. Gene and Paul, always the most intelligent and articulate members of the group, started believing that they really were larger than life. While Simmons was prophesying that fans would be satisfied with the same routines indefinitely, a whole new generation of aggressive heavy metal and punk bands was rising.

Several disastrous recordings helped reduce Kiss to a shadow of its former self. Attempts by all four members to simultaneously release solo albums in 1978 backfired miserably. Only Ace Frehley’s single of “New York Groove” survived that disaster. Kiss’s subsequent release, Dynasty, was an even worse mistake. They recorded a colorless disco song at the height of that craze, convincing many diehard rockers that Kiss had sold out. When Kiss returned to rock with Unmasked, it was too late.

Dissatisfied with the group for some years, Peter Criss left in 1981, and was replaced with Eric Carr. In retrospect, Kiss is one band who should have been content to represent a blazing moment in musical history—and quit while they were ahead.