My post the other day Worst popular band in history of rock is mad no one likes them was so surprisingly popular, I did the honorable bloggy thing and decided to go right back to the well. My friend and colleague at the Boston Phoenix Daniel Brockman, aka the Chuck Klosterman of Boston if Klosterman didn't like sports, is a big KISS fan. He might've convinced me with this argument for KISS' place in the official rock canon.
I’ve been to the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame once. It’s a weird experience that I somewhat recommend if you ever find yourself in Cleveland with nothing to do, if only to see that Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger both wore amazingly tiny little pants onstage, like Mickey-Mouse-pants tiny.
It’s also a strange place because of the curatorial decisions that go into deciding what is worthy of a portion of a gallery in the Hall of Fame. For instance, it made sense that there is an entire floor dedicated to John Lennon ephemera, but it seemed perverse for an entire room to be given over to a shrine to drowned 90s wunderkind Jeff Buckley. His supporters would of course retort that the man had amassed an impressive collection of tunes that would have certainly led to super-enormo-star status had he not been taken from us at such a young age. But the truth of the matter is that his shrine in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists there because the powers that be decided that they needed more of a Jeff Buckley audience there...
… and less of, say, a Kiss audience, at least judging from their continued snub by those who decide who gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The rules, for those who care about these sorts of things, dictate that an artist cannot be inducted until a quarter century after their formation, which in Kiss’s case was 1999, meaning that the 2012 Inductees list (including such legendary and important figures in the lexicon of rock and roll as Laura Nyro, Donovan, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers) is the 14th time that the grease-painted glam rockers have been officially passed over. Now, you would think that someone like Gene Simmons, bassist and vocalist with the band and worth an estimated $300 million, wouldn’t care about something like the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. But that is forgetting that he never passes up an opportunity to mouth off about a topic in a lifelong campaign to brand himself a professional asshole-- which explains why, when asked recently about this year’s Kiss-snubbing, he snarkily put down the entire institution while offering, perhaps facetiously, to just buy the H.O.F. (he used a similar defense tactic when he appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross in 2002 and claimed that he could buy NPR). Money should suffice in place of the Hall of Fame accolades that the band doesn’t get, right? After all, Kiss clearly zigged toward a career of pandering and marketing when so many other rockers put a premium on respectability.
For me, this has always been one of Kiss’s more endearing assets-- the way that they operate on their own terms and essentially re-shaped the world of rock in a way that suited them, rather than kowtow to the current conventions of popular music at the time. It was a common urban legend at the time of the band’s height of popularity that their name stood for Knights In Satan’s Service, but I think in the ensuing decades, common knowledge has determined that if it stands for anything, Kiss is an abbreviation for Keep It Simple, Stupid, and in many ways it’s a catchphrase that more bands should follow if they want to succeed. Kiss soared to become one of the most popular rock bands of all time in large part because they focused on what they deemed to be the most important aspect of being a rock band: putting on a mind-melting show with enough catchy tunes that people have something to hum on their way home.
If you put the band in the context of the mid-70s rock world, their accomplishments seem more obvious. At the time, rock was becoming bogged down with a cult of virtuosity: a common concert-going experience involved being barraged by nearly three hours of meandering song craft from a far-away seat. If you were lucky enough to see a popular rock band close-up, you were probably viewing some scraggly unshaven dudes in t-shirts and jeans facing towards each other noodling away endlessly. From Led Zeppelin to Aerosmith, this was the norm: there weren’t projectors or props, and unless you were seeing Alice Cooper, the odds are that the only theatrics involved the various band members attempting to convince their beloved back home that they were being faithful out on the road. Kiss assessed this sad state of affairs and, like any group of entrepreneurial Jewish boys, knew that they could do better. If Jimmy Page did an extended guitar solo played with a violin bow, Ace Frehley was going to do his solo with his guitar bursting into flame onstage. If Bonham was going to do a thirty-minute “Moby Dick” drum solo, Peter Criss was going to have his drum riser fly over the audience and do flips during “100,000 Years”. If Yes’s Chris Squire was going to do a ten-minute bass solo during “The Fish”, Gene Simmons was going to hover over the audience and spew blood during “God of Thunder”. What they did was a natural progression in the sense that it moved the concept of the concert warhorse into its next phase, where pyro and hydraulics brought the show out to the audience.
If this seems cheesy, it was also completely necessary. Remember, rock music as a popular medium was, until a decade before Kiss, a small time enterprise. Rock bands with their electronically amplified instruments basically took the place of the thirty-or-more piece orchestra, allowing three-to-five dudes to take up the sonic space of a whole room full of acoustic players. But that didn’t necessarily make them more exciting to watch in a live setting-- which was fine in the early days of rock, which primarily took place in small clubs, where bands like Pink Floyd and The Who mowed people down with the sheer excitement of their presentation. But once the whole thing became a big international business, too many people wanted to see rock’s biggest stars to expect them to roll into tiny club after tiny club. The move to stadiums was an awkward and uncomfortable one for rock: for one, the world’s auditoriums and enormodomes weren’t equipped soundwise to deal with it; additionally, the youth movement chaos of it all was a countercultural force that was almost too much for the straight music business to contain. But by the time of Kiss’s ascent, the stage was set, as increased ticket prices took care of the necessary upgrades-- the business just needed someone willing to fit into the codpiece, so to speak, to step out on a stage and convince a really large audience that they were getting their money’s worth.
The first time I saw Kiss was in 1996, on the “reunion” tour where all four original members donned makeup again after more than a decade of having revealed their hideous pockmarked faces to the general public. The night before I saw Kiss at the Worcester Centrum, I saw Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, MA. Thurston took to the stage, said not a word to the audience, and proceeded to serenade a packed house with a single note of feedback extended and drawn out for almost an hour. The next night, after I had been pummeled by nearly two hours of pyro and explosions and video monitor madness and all sorts of stagecraft, Kiss mouthpiece/guitarist Paul Stanley intoned in his trademark lisp “Did you all get yaw money’s worth?!?!” After the indie scam of the night before, I found myself on the verge of screaming “Yes!” It’s the bargain that the band has been peddling for decades, and it’s in a lot of ways the secret to how they’ve lasted through era after era where their cocky cock rock has been the furthest thing from hip imaginable: no matter what is big right now, no matter what the current trends in music are, there will always be a contingent of the music-listening audience that will be in the mood for being blown away by theatrical hard rock if executed properly, which Kiss usually does.
Especially in their early days, where they mixed gothic somberness with the righteous riffhooks of becoming-obsolete godheads like Argent and Humble Pie, resulting in music that was memorable and heavy without being overbearing or impenetrable. It was anathema to critics but it spoke directly to a co-ed rock audience looking for sheer excitement. In a sense, it’s hard to properly consider Kiss in this day and age: they were so successful that a lot of their tactics and sonic signatures became assimilated into the generic template for a rock band in the decades to come. It’s also difficult to fully comprehend the weird mix between complete Dionysian revelry that was the band’s forte and mainstream acceptance that had children and straight-laced adults accepting the band as a harmless rock and roll minstrel act. Witness this piece of footage, where the band, in 1975, was given the keys to Cadillac, Michigan on the occasion of playing the town’s high school homecoming football game. This documentary displays the band essentially taking over the whole town, most incredulously as the entire town council including the mayor donned Kiss makeup. Watching this video will either make you cheer for the power of rock or weep at the destruction of Western civilization.
Which, ultimately, are the two goals of any rock band worth their salt.
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11 comments:
I was at that Thurston Moore show and wanted to fight him afterwards for being so boring and taking my $20, which at that time, of course, was a ton of money to me. I remember being so confused since Physchic Hearts was a somewhat recent release as to what the fuck he was doing. I also think I drank a 40 of King Cobra that night.
Good stuff. Now can Brockman do a follow-up on Gene Simmons pussylickin' skills?
Drinking a 40 of King Cobra was pretty common if I recall correctly.
as a dude who never really explored KISS, this is a pretty compelling argument. on the other hand, the rock n roll hall of fame. hrmmm. that KISS goes to cadillac thing was pretty awesome though.
hey, bro. what was with all that facebook comments crap? were you trying to put my shit on the list, bro?
Eh? The thing up there? Trying to get a facebook commenting thing installed here. It's a little weird looking at the moment.
ok but be smart about it. i dont want to accidentally tell the world that i drank a bunch of cheap booze and wrote some hack literature about a floridian whore. YA GET ME?!
DON'T CLICK THE BOX THAT SAYS "POST TO FACEBOOK" AND YOU'RE GOOD BRO
When the powers that be at the RRHOF put together a "Best Marketers/Self-Promoters in the History of Rock" exhibit with no deference towards actual musical merit, KISS will be the first inductee. Until then, I agree with their focus on substance rather than style.
Their = the Hall of Fame's. That may have been unclear.
Brockman FTW. Those clips are from '75! No one was doing that then. They turned 70s rock upside down.
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