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
72 Responses
I wonder sometimes what would happen if they sold T-shirts of Eric Carr and Vinnie Vincent with makeup on like the solo albums. The great artwork of David E. Wilkinson can be the starting point for such an idea.
The fact is that those shirts would sell like hot cakes and for Paul Stanley not to a least give some kudos to the fans that love the characters is ridiculous.
I’m sure that back in 1980/81 before MTV changed the world of music, people were just tired of a Kiss band that played pop and disco for the most part, but Creatures of the Night changed everything and all it took was time.
If Kiss would have stuck with the makeup for one more album, say Lick It Up, it’s possible Vinnie Vincent’s Ankh Warrior and Eric Carr’s fox makeup would have become a huge attraction/merchandise money maker.
If after a while they would have wanted to take a break or just plain show themselves, that’s fine, but in the end, they put it all back on and now we are without new characters or old ones that were awesome…
Couldn’t disagree more. While Creatures is one of their best albums and concerts, KISS in make up was deader than dead. It was already dying when Unmasked came out with the original four still on the album cover years earlier. Lick it Up was a business move that gave them some notoriety back for awhile. I loved the COTN era of KISS. But more fans walked away than stuck around during that time.
Kiss was not dying due to the makeup.
Kiss was dying because they turned the music towards kids as they did with the merchandise.
Even the whole Unmasked album cover, the concept album (Music from The Elder), the shorter hair, the pics on 16 Magazine, etc.
I agree the makeup was getting old, but with the new characters, it was like starting from scratch.
They could have waited a bit because that Creatures album was awesome!
And they still had the makeup on.
I saw that concert live and it was great although they were playing for 400 people at best…
All I’m saying is that who knows what would have happened with the Ankh Warrior and Fox characters had they kept it going for a bit longer and what may have been the immediate future with Mark St. John/Bruce Kulick in makeup.
I know for a fact that there is a lot of money going towards the black market that sell Ankh Warrior and Fox stuff online…
The question is why and how come Gene Simmons enterprises is not getting a chunk?
We can disagree on potential fortunes. But we’ll agree on COTN. Especially the tour. Of the 40 plus times I’ve seen the band, the Creatures tour was the best show musically I ever saw from them. I saw them twice that year and they were fierce. I was a huge Ace guy growing up and was bummed when he left. Vinnie played with attitude and didn’t try to be Ace. He was his own guy and they blew me away twice on that tour. Too bad hardly anyone else saw them during that era.
You’re right DR. KISS was old hat by 1980. Nobody cared what they did at that time. I was 15/16 years old then. They had nothing whatsoever to offer me. I know one person that went to the Creatures tour. They had to use a curtain in our local hockey rink to divide it in half, so people wouldn’t see how empty the place was. Put it this way, they used the curtain for Van Halen in 1978 there! Nobody talked about the KISS concert the next day in school. Nobody cared!
I was discovering Black Sabbath, Rush, Ozzy, Triumph, UFO and other hard rock bands. Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Scorpions – all those bands were gaining momentum. Then we still had Led Zeppelin, the Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd and a bunch of the old bands releasing their last halfway decent works. Hardcore KISS fans are completely delusional and younger fans have no idea re: how unpopular KISS was in 1980 – 83.
Thats BS. Kiss lost popularity because they were the bieber of the era, people got sick of them and the kids moved on. But Erics and Vinnies makeup was accepted BIG time. Especially Erics. I really take offense to Paul saying that about Eric. Shows how disconnected Paul truly is.
Amen to that.
3. Yep, that has merit. Ace had been putting up with material on albums that grated against his preferences from Dynasty through Elder, and had finally had enough.
8. So, you did coke to not let down the fans??? Sorry, that’s just rationalization and BS.
14. I don’t believe Ace and Eric ever considered Elder a masterpiece. Ace reportedly threw a copy against the wall after hearing it, considering it junk. I’m one of those weirdoes that actually like that album, though.
15. I really don’t think the makeup was a problem – that’s like blaming a football team’s losses on the uniform. Plus, Eric’s persona was cool. They went discoish/popish, released a wildly unpopular concept album and ultimately wound up chasing an audience that was leaning toward punk and the NWOBHM. The real problem was making too many musical missteps and bad business decisions in a row – losing two founding members within a few years hurt badly also.
18. John 5 is a beast. I honestly don’t know if Peter has the chops to keep with him, but if he does, this could be something very worthwhile. Much needed also, because All for One was just flat out bad.
Peters album “All for one” was, in Peters own words while recording it, an album that he made for himself – and not for the fans. So it’s Peter Criss doing what he really felt like doing.
Just had to get that info into the mix 🙂
Look what gene has to say about someone who died no heart no soul.gene could have died from aids from all the hoes he’s slept with ,but in his narrow brain it’s ok what a joke this clown is.you think he cares about his fans ?
Lately Paul and Gene have been bagging on Mark St. John’s playing. I do agree that the man sounded like a soulless, angry bee. But if you knew that at the time, why in the world did you allow him to play on the record? The reason why Creatures didn’t do well as a tour and album was because Ace was not involved. Not to mention The Elder was like wtf is this at the time. That record was promised to be a return to the hard rock sound. They alienated many fans during ’81 and ’82.
Ace was involved in Unmasked and didn’t help that album. Hell at that point they only place they could tour was out of the US.
Ace was on the cover of Creatures and was in the first video. Not buying the concept that Ace was the reason for the failure of Creatures.
But it had been announced Ace had left the band and wasn’t doing the tour, even before it came out. That most definitely hurt sales of the record.
I guess Mark St John sounded and played like a whole lot of typical hair metal players at the time, so maybe, as Kiss was trying to fit into this pop-metals 80s scene and make money and maybe stay on top, they chose him because he sounded like that, and of course it is typical of our two liars that again they now bash someone for sth that they themselves decided on when they thought it would give them an advantage. This also goes by the name of hypocracy. they will just never give someone who helped the band in any way their due respect if that would mean to have the the spotlightput away from them for a single second. Despite all the money they have, they still seem so vulnerable that nobody will ever acknowledge them for their musical skills … so they must try to look great in different ways. We should rather pity them.
DR, glad we got over that rough patch. But Ace leaving Kiss cast a huge shadow over Creatures, and when I bought it, last time I got Kiss’s new record at 10am, the minute the store opened, the day of its release, I thought Ace played on it. Then I played it for this guy at school, a great guitar player, and he goes, “that’s not Ace, Ace would never play that.” LOL, I go “no, he’s on the cover.” Talk about naive. That was my first Kiss show, I had tickets to Dynasty in Portland, OR but the Fire Marshall shut it down so I had to wait. I think the press covering Kiss played a big role in dividing the original, they always had to say who they thought was the most musically talented, and for some reason they always said Ace was, or even Peter. There was a Creem article in ’77 where the guy said Peter was the only one who had any musical talent. So Gene and Paul probably weren’t too happy, and Ace and Peter actually bought into their own hype. So, my point is that when Creatures came out, Ace was still very popular with the fans, his songs were the only songs on Dynasty and Unmasked that the fans liked. That disco song was popular in spite of Kiss’s fans, not because. That’s how I remember it. Paul and Gene never got their due respect for being great songwriters and musicians like they should have in Kiss’s heyday. It didn’t make ANY sense to me growing up.