KISS’ PAUL STANLEY ON VINNY VINCENT AND ERIC CARR’S MAKEUP/NEW CHARACTERS: “PEOPLE DIDN’T BUY IT,” PLUS 18 OTHER TIDBITS ABOUT THE BAND

kiss-return Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone reports:

1. KISS may have gotten the idea for their makeup from two other acts. “We loved the New York Dolls,” says Peter Criss, who grew up with the Dolls’ drummer, Jerry Nolan. “But when we tried that, we looked like four old drag queens. Then we saw Alice Cooper one night at the Garden, and thought, wow, he’s the only guy up there wearin’ somethin’ – what would it be like if four guys wore it?”

2. The current and former members disagree over the definition of “rock & roll.” Ace and I were wilder, we were rock & rollers,” says Criss. “We wanted to be at the parties, we wanted a lot of girls, we wanted to cause trouble, we wanted to wreck rooms like Keith Moon. It’s not a science – maybe the chord’s off a little, or maybe you speed up a little, or you maybe you slow down.”

Retorts Paul Stanley, “Once Ace was playing guitar in the studio with rings and a bracelet on that were just hitting the guitar. And I said, ‘Ace, you’ve gotta take that stuff off, it sounds terrible.’ He goes, ‘That’s rock & roll.’ I go, ‘No, there’s rock & roll and then there’s awful.’ You can’t use rock & roll as an excuse for doing something that’s sub-standard or not good or out of tune, or not showing up on time. That’s not rock & roll, that’s just fucking up.”

3. Ace Frehley, who quit the band in the early Eighties, doesn’t like to be lumped in with Peter Criss, who was fired a couple years earlier. “They talk about me as if it’s the same as what happened with Peter,” says Frehley. “I get a bad rap. So a lot of times I’d rather distance myself. I love Peter to death, but, you know, I’m a different guy with a completely different story.”

4. When Gene Simmons was 12 years old, his hero was Jiminy Cricket (he covered When You Wish Upon A Star on his debut solo album): “I saw this little bug singing, ‘Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Me?’ It was a religious experience. Jiminy Cricket was my Christ. This kind of dawning of consciousness of, ‘I can be great.'”

5. Frehley always knew he would be famous. “By age 16, I knew I was going to be a professional musician and be successful,” he says. “If I wouldn’t have been successful with Kiss, I would’ve been successful with somebody else. Because I just had the drive. I used to go see the Who and Led Zeppelin and Hendrix and there was always a voice in my head saying, ‘You can get up there and do that.’ I used to tell people in my family, I used to tell my friends. And they used to say, ‘What are you, crazy?'”

6. KISS’ founders see the band’s fans as proud outsiders. “I always looked at our fans as the big heavy kids in the back of the room bein’ made fun of,” says Criss. “Or the kid who had long hair in the neighborhood when no one had it. And those are the kids who really needed a hero.”

7. The British band Slade (who recorded Cum on Feel the Noize years before Quiet Riot covered it) are often cited as a major influence on KISS, but Stanley feels that’s exaggerated. “That gets kind of taken out of proportion,” says Stanley. “I loved Slade because of the sing-along directness of their songs. I loved Noddy Holder as a front man. My mirrored guitar came from seeing him with a mirrored top hat. But I don’t believe they were part of the blueprint.”

8. Frehley believes he had a Keith Richards-like ability to function under the influence. “No matter how crazy or fucked up I was, I could still deliver,” he says. “I knew I could get drunk in the afternoon and snort a couple lines of coke and then I’d be fine for the show. It wasn’t the healthiest thing to do, but I didn’t want to let down the fans!”

9. But now Frehley is proud to be an example of sobriety. “My greatest days are when I’m doing an autograph session and a guy walks up to me and he says, ‘Hey, I got six months sober because of you.’ Because I used to get fan letters from kids, and they’d say, ‘We heard you smashed up your car. I smashed my car up last week, Ace! What do you think of that?'”

10. Criss had to re-learn the band’s catalog from scratch when KISS reunited in 1996 ­­– but he says anyone would’ve had to do the same. “I really forgot all the songs after 17 years,” he says. “I was so frustrated at needing to relearn Peter Criss. Like, why did I put that intricate part in there? And now I’ve got to redo that part! I would go home, I kid you not, and watch old shows from the Seventies like a football player.”

11. Simmons has little sympathy for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. “I don’t think it’s sad at all,” he says. “He was white in this racist world. He was fuckin’ rich. And he was a movie star. If you wanna take your life, good luck to you. You know what’s sad? A loving husband or mother who crosses the street and gets run over by a truck. That’s sad. Because you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

12. For all their hard living, both Frehley and Criss are in good health. “I just got the cleanest bill of health I’ve had in 10 years,” says Frehley, 62. “I don’t have any damage to my internal organs. I’m the luckiest guy. As long as I stay sober, I’m good for easily another 20, 25 years.”

Adds Criss, 68, “I’ve never been in better shape. I take no blood pressure medicine. I don’t have diabetes, thank you, Jesus. I don’t have cancer anymore. Recently, I had a hernia finally taken out after 15 years ’cause it was like an alien, you know the movie Alien?”

13. Stanley has long had a gift in mind for Simmons: “My joke used to be that for a birthday present, I was going to have a device made for him that was headphones with a mirror and a microphone so that he could watch himself talk all the time.”

14. The band thought their infamous mess of a concept album, Music From The Elder ­was a masterpiece – until they started playing it for people. “We were so off course that we really thought we were creating genius,” says Stanley. “The record company heard it, and it was like a scene from The Producers. We might as well have been singing Springtime for Hitler, you know? So we were delusional. And we spent the better part of a decade saying ‘We’re sorry’ to the fans. And they don’t forgive you that easily.”

15. Stanley thinks it was a mistake to try to introduce new characters in the band – in a short-lived Eighties incarnation of KISS, guitarist Vinnie Vincent was the Ankh Warrior, and the late drummer Eric Carr was the Fox. “People didn’t buy it,” he says. “And that was another reason that the fan base started to dissipate. It lost its believability. It became a menagerie – we could have had Snail Man. And we saw a decline that started gradually, but quickly we fell off the edge of the cliff. To go from doing multiple nights in an arena to, next tour, not being able to sell out a theater, is stark.”

16. Stanley loved taking off the makeup in 1983. “I wanted that recognition,” he says. “It was a big disappointment in the Seventies when I realized that going without makeup meant we couldn’t go to, like, awards shows. It was like I was living this dual life, and just sitting on my sofa at home.”

17. During one of the band’s reunion tours, Ace Frehley punched the band’s then-road manager, Tommy Thayer, who would go on to take Frehley’s place as Kiss’ guitarist (and wear his Spaceman makeup). “In his book he says he decked me or knocked me out or something, which is far from the truth, really,” says Thayer, who had chastised Frehley for breaking band rules by having his girlfriend in the band’s dressing room after a gig. “Ace said ‘fuck you,’ and under my breath I said something like ‘you’re an asshole,’ and I turned around and started walking away. He came up and just, like, hit me in the back of the head, just took a cheap shot, and I kind of lost my balance a little bit. And from then on, things really took a turn for the worse.”

18. With some help from Rob Zombie’s guitarist, John 5, Peter Criss has resumed work on a solo album he put aside in 2008 after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. “It’s heavier than anything I’ve ever touched,” he says. “My music always owed more to R&B because I grew up on Motown. But this is different. I really went for what they’ve been wantin’ from me forever, with a heavier approach, big guitars. And they’ll still hate it, and then they’ll go, “Why don’t you go back and do the pop?” [Laughs] Trust me, I’ve got the craziest fans on the planet earth!”

source: rollingstone.com

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72 Responses

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  • Bryan on

    Peters new record sounds like it gonna be really special. Zombies guitar player kicks major ass!!! This should be interesting. Peter to me has always been more suited for hard rock. He has a killer voice. Great screams. I hope it’s way harder than Sonic Bust and Monster. It would be great to have Aces and Peters out in 2014. I know Aces will be in June. Wish Peter could get his out real soon. Im curious tho. Did Peter start over with this record? Aces old bud Richie Scarlett like 2 yrs. ago played on some tracks in the studio for Peter and said its a real string hard rock album. But if Peters got Zombies guy laying down tracks now that tells me he’s starting over mabe.


    • wagdaddy on

      Have you ever listened to a Peter Criss album….ever?…Gees its THE most godawful thing ever recorded. Go look up his last solo album-go to Amazon read the reviews-go to iTunes and preview it….Peter was/is/will always be a no-talent bum who got lucky and has ridden the coat tails of a legendary band he was a part of for a few years until he became a liability. He can’t sing, has always been an horrible drummer and can’t write a sentence-much less music. He didn’t write Beth-Stan Penridge did…Peter took it, changed a couple of words and took credit for something he never did. He is an asshole, a jerk and deserves EVERYTHING G & P dish on him.


    • davey on

      …this is funny…when people come at someone with ” hey, im here to inform you that although some of you think this guy is really good…well he’s really not in anyway at all whatsoever”. its such a funny tack to take…it makes the reader go for a second “hey is this person right?;they sound very convinced of what they are saying,they must be right” but then you sit back and go “nah” …because what you’re saying here is completely and utterly ludicrous…go watch Shock Me ’77 on the youtube for example,and tell me with a straight face that Peter Criss can’t rock the house and the whole band down when he is on…you can’t…when he was/is on he’s one of the greatest EVER…if the drummer isn’t good the band isn’t good. period. so when they went multi platinum for the first time with Alive and Alive II,you had a live kickass drummer.no weak links.these are the facts.people like to get really funny on the internet, playing fast and loose with the truth…cause they are mad at the person themselves maybe or have some other unknown axe to grind…


    • Lee on

      you obviously no nothing about music if you think Peter can’t sing or play. I’d put him right up there with Neil Peart if you know who that is and I have to say along with millions of fans that many of Kiss’s songs sound better with Peter singing them. So, you might want to get that hearing problem taken care of or put your Justin Bieber CD back in.


  • Jeff Koger on

    Paul can say what he wants, the reason other characters were created for Eric Carr and Vinnie Vincent is because Kiss didn’t own the rights to Ace and Peter’s makeup AT THAT TIME. Once they bought the rights, and the reunion tour/farewell tours had ended, they decide to put Tommy and Eric Singer in the “characters”. And by the way Gene and Paul, the “character” was Space Ace, NOT Spaceman.


    • spike on

      I wish Paul would stop blaming Eric & Vinnies makeup for the decline.


    • John on

      What else could it be?
      Creatures of the night fucking rocked


    • Warbo on

      I agree, It wasn’t the make up Pauly it was the music that caused the decline. The fact that Eric’s make-up was on Creatures was the reason I bought it. I thought it was the coolest thing. The fact you didn’t have Vinnie in make -up on that cover surely doesn’t help Paul’s explanation ! The fans couldn’t’ / didn’t have a chance to act on any new members in make up.


    • Regan Green on

      Paul is delusional. They were losing fans because they changed their sound with Dynasty and Unmasked. Their popularity was washing up because of it and the true rockers out there were seeing young kids filling the seats.. It was becoming a Saturday morning cartoon. The Elder didn’t help either (even though I personally think there is some good stuff there, just different). By the time Creatures came out, their fan base had literally moved on because of the direction Paul and Gene were taking Kiss on their three previous releases. The were no longer the dark and dangerous band.


  • Robert on

    I am tired of Paul and Gene!
    Just Go away like your music in 2001
    I can’t stand the drama,

    Long Live Ace, Peter, Vinnie & Bruce!


  • Rob on

    So your saying the music is not what sells , it the make up? Lame. I thought Vinnie and Eric’s make up was great! Oh we’ll talk enough shit and you start believing yourself I guess…


  • Van on

    They could have given Eric Carr and Vinnie Vincent’s personas a chance to catch on. What’s done is done and that is both Eric C and Vinnie had their own personas and styles that distinguishes them apart from Ace and Peter. They also saved KISS musically with Vinnie doing it twice with Revenge.


    • Regan Green on

      Yep.


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