KISS Metal Legends of the Taaastiest Kind

KISS Metal Legends of the Taaastiest Kind

Sylvie Simmons

The perfect meritocracy. Gene Simmons does not pout, Paul Stanley doesn’t stick his tongue out, they each do what they do. How much is real anymore, how much habit, how much the musical equivalent of that curious wave the Queen Mother does that looks like she’s pleasuring a corgi in midair, something that has to be done regularly, in other words, and with a certain show of professional enthusiasm if you wanna keep the beans on the table, the gold in the coffers and the picture in the press, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is in these dark days of hair sprayed whippersnappers with secret green-grocery bags in the front of their pants taking over the charts, a band old enough for the archeology books, a band that’s had its licks and looks stolen so often these days it should by rights be in the gutter in rock ’n’ roll rags, can still stomp out just about every American metal band born of woman! Platform boots in human form strutting in perfect, sleazy rhythm! Superman studs on the happy bump-bump ride to Hades! There’s always room in rock (give or take the disastrous ’79-81 period) for Kiss. Like McDonalds they’ve got the cock-rock stadium stuff to an art that gives whole new meanings to standard. Same walls, same tables, same outfits, same spiel— only with Kiss you’re getting real meat!

Paul Stanley is pouting for the camera, a pout by which all other pouts are defined: Stephens Pearcy and Tyler’s, Tommy Lee and Pia Zadora’s, all sucked up into the vortex of this one supreme pucker. Gene, taking it in with one side of his brain, making simultaneous serious business calls with the other, “doesn’t do that sort of thing.” His turn, he puffs out his chest, leather legs twinkling in the flashbulb light, and rolls out his tongue like it’s some velour red-carpet for Arabian princes to walk from the Rolls on, a tongue that looks not only like it has a life of its own but not even the National Enquirer would buy its life story! I mean to ask him, when he’s done with the photo session, whether it’s true what I heard, that he had a snip-job operation done on that gristly little stalactite that joins it to the bottom of his mouth, to make it stick out further than is seemly. But I forgot. Still I did ask him about the wig he was wearing when I saw him last year and that looked in imminent danger of sliding off one side every time he agreed with something—the occupational hazard of taking short-haired roles in movies. Was it hard to live with, I wondered? "Maybe the question should be was I wearing a wig.” If he wasn’t, I know a good lawyer for the case against the hairdresser. "I’ll think about that.” Any more haircuts or movie roles in the pipeline?

"I was literally going to start one about a month ago, and I just quit three days ago. They were late, and I was afraid that the lateness was going to get in the way of our rehearsals.” Shame. Sounds like a good one. ’’There was an Englishman in it, George Lazenby, one of the James Bonds, and I was playing two characters—a transvestite-hermaphrodite and a CIA agent, and in the movie we find out it’s one and the same person...” Kind of answers my next question as to whether he’d plan an unflattering movie role, a gay senior citizen for example?

"Yes in a second! I don’t care at all about keeping up an attractive public facade. Historically, at least, in Kiss whatever it is that I was onstage may not be classically defined as attractive—the demon form—but shit, there were certainly enough girls that wanted that thing! Still, I would like to play some attractive roles as well.”

And would Paul? "No, I think we choose our places,” says the vocalist, “and really, honestly, I’m not interested in a lot of the stuff that seems to be offered more readily. Last year there was a new musical on Broadway that looked like I had the lead role in, but...I’m not all that eager to do things unless I can do them properly. I don’t want to talk about it; to me it’s either put up or shut up. So yes, I want to act, I want to do feature roles, I want to do all kinds of things— but in their own time.”

“Historically, in Kiss whatever I was onstage may not be defined as attractive.” —Gene Simmons

In the fab new video, which you’ve probably already seen by now, but which they were just making over here in Britain when Metal Rock ’n’ Roll got a hold of them, he gets to do some acting of sorts: swinging through the air on a Tarzan vine rope, while all around him papier-mache volcanos explode and a naked woman weeps “Tears-Are-Falling” tears. “Back breaking work,” says Paul, being brave about the aches and pains (“I like to push myself to the point where I know I’m living. A little muscle is a nice reminder that you’re using your body...It’s just like home—I’ve got a trampoline in my room and vines hanging from the ceiling, basically like the jungle, and I monkey around a lot”) but showing me the rope-burn callouses on his hands. Gene doesn’t do that sort of thing either. “While he was swinging on a rope, I had a girl at the back of the stage...” Which has probably made Kiss as durable as it is, two quite different men with one quite similar plot of common ground. For instance, as they explained over beer and Coca-cola and chocolate bars (the immense size of our coke and beer cans and the superior flavor of our chocolate being a couple of things they’ve managed to like in this god-forsaken country) the new album, Asylum.

“I monkey around a lot.” - Paul Stanley

“Asylum is a safe place, a fortress, a bunker, and it's also a place where crazy people are, which counts pretty much as what we’ve been doing,” says Paul.

“We were in the studio,” says Gene, “24 hours a day, pretty much living there for a couple of months. We actually had a guy come and work us out there, gym equipment and so on, brought food in, television, pool.”

“It’s real peaceful,” back to Paul, “but at the same time you program the insanity. It’s as peaceful as you want it, or it’s as crazy as you want it. You can have women come in, which was great, because there were times you wanted to see women and you couldn’t go out so they came in the studio. In more ways than one!”

“Once you go inside the studio,” says Gene, “it’s a lot like being back in the womb. In the recording womb.”

“And without trying to be too intellectual,” Paul picks up the metaphor, “you never know what you’re going to give birth to. You can go into the studio with this plan for this baby, and the best-laid plans can run amuck. There’s always a certain element of chance and excitement.”

An easy labor this time?

“Asylum was just the easiest. A piece of cake! The feeling we had when we made the album was it’s almost too good. It's just us doing what we wanted to do. We just wanted to go in and utilize everything we learned on Animalize and on tour and make the best album we could.”

Is it harder or easier making these albums as time rolls on?

‘‘Harder and easier,” Gene gets Zen on me. ‘‘It gets easier because you know what to expect, what the studio’s like, what sounds you’re going for. The things that are not as easy is making sure you don’t give in to the first impulse, the easy impulse, because the first thought that comes to you is probably something you’ve done before.”

Paul: “When you’re doing your first couple of albums, there’s a hunger that later on gets replaced by a different kind of hunger—the hunger that you have after 20 albums is to keep up a level of excellence. You also have a pressure on you not to fall prey to being so insulated that you no longer reflect what’s going on around you. If there’s a danger with becoming a rock ’n’ roll star, it’s leaving the rock ’n’ roll environment. And if you leave that environment you might as well quit, because you won’t know what the hell you’re writing about anymore! If you lose sight of who you are, you’ll lose sight of your music. Honesty will keep you fresh.”

“My idea of adventure is working my way through a pina colada!” - Paul Stanley

Is it hard to stay fresh writing about sex all the time? Only wondered...

‘‘I think we sing about life,” states Paul. “And sex is a large part of life.”

“I think if you can say anything about our stuff,” adds Gene, ‘‘it’s sensual.”

‘‘It’s real,” says Paul. ”lt may not be everybody’s cup of tea and it may not be everybody’s lifestyle, but it’s always real for us.”

‘‘It’s not outer space or underground with the Behemoth that pops out and bites you,” Gene says, quite reasonably.

Paul ‘‘can’t remember the last song” they did ‘‘about sorcery or putting pins in your eyes.”

But back to sex! If their songs are real and honest, is ‘‘Secretly Cruel,” about the snakeskin booted groupie, true, and if so who is it? We should be told!

‘‘It’s about a couple of girls,” says the discreet Mr. Simmons, ‘‘but one girl in particular. The lyrics are pretty graphic: ‘I saw my picture hanging on her wall, she cut it out of that magazine...’ and it was one of those girls on the road who took me home instead of coming back to the hotel. And when I walked into her room there were pictures of me all over the wall.” But it takes more than that to deter our brave bassist! ‘‘This girl, after our, uh, liaison, she wanted more. And it was obvious if she couldn’t—you know, hell hath no fury like a groupie—what’s the word?”

Scorned.

‘‘Scorned! Some of the songs are autobiographical, almost like sexual itineraries, and some are just symbolic glimpses, images we get from meeting people.”

I’m not the only one who’s commented that Gene can write these crotch-grinders in his sleep, if that’s the right expression, by now; that he’s got the formula down pat, leaving the more adventurous writing to Paul.

“Yes, but you have to’write what it is you write. It has to feel comfortable. At least at this point of my life, if I tried to write a song called Tears Are Falling,’ I wouldn’t believe what I was saying.’’ He sings a line or two just to show how fake it sounds. “Not coming from my mouth!”

So it’s not a case of thinking, “I've got to come up with four songs for the album” and knocking them out in five minutes?

“No. I write many more songs than Paul does for each record. I’ll write about 30 songs per record!”

“Gene and I have been playing together for so long, but in many ways we’re very different people,” says Paul. “So to expect one person to look at the world in the same way as the other does is selling everybody short. The common ground is rock ’n’ roll and fun, but what’s on the periphery can be real different.”

“Here’s the way an album works,” says Gene. “I will write throughout a tour and gather maybe 20 songs by the end, and when I get off I’ll write another 10 before the record starts. Paul will usually start writing three weeks before the record, and then out of all those songs Bruce”—Bruce Kulick, the latest and possibly greatest Kiss guitarist—“will come up with ideas, as he did on this record, and Eric” drummer Eric Carr, who’s been around since Creatures— “and I wrote two other things,” and they pick the best.

Whereas Paul puts 24 hours a day into it. I’ll stay home, instead of going out in the evening, and write.”

“And I can’t do that,” says Gene. “I just sit there in short spurts, if you’ll pardon the expression, and do that for months on end if I have to. The thought of sitting at a desk for three hours is too much!” And you wondered why they haven’t written a song together since Destroyer back in 76!

“We see things differently," says Paul. “And I think one of the freedoms that we have at this point is to be able to see a song through totally the way we want it to be. I think that makes for a more varied feel to the record, a wider perspective— because we’re not just metal, we’re not just rock, we’re ourselves, and our limitations are only what we impose on ourselves.”

Paul, as anyone who’s been reading the credits on recent albums will see, has been co-writing with Jean Beauvoir, the ex-Plasmatic who’s got his own solo stuff on the way soon, and Desmond Child, of the disco Desmond Child and Rouge fame.

“Desmond suffered a real slight,” says