Kiss and Make-Up (42 page)
Authors: Gene Simmons
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Composers & Musicians, #Music, #Musicians, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Rock Stars
With all this drama, with all the personal struggle and complicated feelings, the farewell tour ended up being the number-one tour in the world, based on calendar years. We started in March, but we were consistently selling out huge venues. It’s comforting to know that you can end on top even after almost three decades.
I feel a sense of accomplishment from our merchandising deals. I feel a sense of accomplishment seeing fans around the world putting on makeup that imitates what we invented almost thirty years ago. But in the end, the most satisfying part is still getting up on a stage and playing KISS songs that fans have come to love, from “Strutter” to “Deuce” to “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
Soon KISS will hang up its boots and its studded codpieces. We’ll take off our makeup. And when we walk off the stage for the final time, it will be bittersweet.
To be honest, there are some things I won’t miss. The reunion tour brought us back to square one, both in rediscovering the simple pleasure of playing in a band and also in putting up with the headaches of band members who didn’t see us as a unit.
I firmly believe that people have the right to behave as they wish. I have never thought I was anyone’s guardian or protector. But for decades I saw substance abuse problems intensify every insecurity,
spark unreasonable anger, and fog Ace’s and Peter’s ability to make intelligent decisions. As the farewell tour winds down, it’s clear to me that KISS will never realize its full potential, because while the band was originally conceived as a four-wheel-drive vehicle, we often had to drive on flat tires. On the other hand, we’ve also gone where no band has gone before. We’ve survived the punk movement, the new romantic movement, the thrash movement. We’ve survived every movement you can think of. We walked weird, we talked weird. We certainly looked weird. And what genre we came from is anybody’s guess. We owe our allegiance to the spirit of early rock and roll. The point was uplift. We wanted to capture the spirit and energy of bands we had never seen onstage.
We wanted to go where no band had gone before.
We wanted our fans to be proud of us and leave our concerts with big grins on their faces.
We wanted to stand guilty as charged by the poor, deluded critics who thought they were insulting us by charging that we made complete spectacles of ourselves. You’re damn right we did.
We wanted, finally and most important, to let our fans, the KISS Army, know that they were the only reason we were doing this, that when they came to see us live and heard our call to arms—“You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best. The Hottest Band in the World, KISS”—they would know in their hearts we wouldn’t let them down.
KISS will continue. Maybe not in the way you expect, but it will live on. There will be a KISS cartoon. There will be KISS theme parks. There are already, as you read this, KISS Kaskets. (They say you can’t take it with you. I say you can.)
My mother taught me to dream big. “Reach for the sky,” she would say. And to her I owe everything.
And to America, sweet America, thank you for making a poor little immigrant boy’s dreams come true.
The rock star and his lady.
(photo credit 16.2)
KISS
(Casablanca, 1974)
Hotter Than Hell
(Casablanca, 1974)
Dressed to Kill
(Casablanca, 1975)
Alive!
(Casablanca, 1975)
Destroyer
(Casablanca, 1976)
The Originals
(Casablanca, 1976)
Rock and Roll Over
(Casablanca, 1976)
Love Gun
(Casablanca, 1977)
Alive II
(Casablanca, 1977)
The Originals II
(Japan only, Casablanca, 1978)
Double Platinum
(Casablanca, 1978)
Gene Simmons
(Casablanca, 1978)
Ace Frehley
(Casablanca, 1978)
Peter Criss
(Casablanca, 1978)
Paul Stanley
(Casablanca, 1978)
Dynasty
(Casablanca, 1979)
Unmasked
(Casablanca, 1980)
Music from “The Elder”
(Casablanca, 1981)
Killers
(released abroad, Casablanca, 1982)
Creatures of the Night
(Casablanca, 1982)
Lick It Up
(Mercury, 1983)
Animalize
(Mercury, 1984)
Asylum
(Mercury, 1985)
Crazy Nights
(Mercury, 1987)
Chikara
(Japan only, Polystar, 1988)
Smashes, Thrashes and Hits
(Mercury, 1988)
Hot in the Shade
(Mercury, 1989)
Revenge
(Mercury, 1992)
Alive III
(Mercury, 1993)
KISS My Ass
(Mercury, 1994)
MTV Unplugged
(Mercury, 1996)
You Wanted the Best … You’ve Got the Best!
(Mercury, 1996)
Greatest KISS
(Mercury, 1997)
Greatest Hits
(UK only, Mercury, 1997)
Carnival of Souls: The Final Sessions
(Mercury, 1997)
Psycho Circus
(Mercury, 1998)
Detroit Rock City
soundtrack (Mercury, 1999)
KISS boxed set (Mercury, 2001)
Alive IV
(yet to be released)
Front endpaper:
Neil Zlozower, copyright ©1998
TEXT PHOTOGRAPHS
1.1
: Laurel Martin-Jacobs
2.1
: Bob Gruen
6.1
: Raeanne Rubenstein
6.2
: Waring Abbott
7.1
: Lydia Criss Catalog
7.2
: Chuck Pulin/KISS catalog
7.3
: Waring Abbott
7.4
: Bob Gruen
7.5
: Reproduced by special permission of
Playboy
magazine.
Copyright ©1976 by Playboy.
8.1
: Barry Levine/KISS catalog
9.1
: Bob Gruen/KISS catalog
9.2
: Fin Costello/KISS catalog
9.3
: Bob Gruen
9.4
: Bob Gruen
10.1
: James Fortune
11.1
: Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.
13.1
: Reproduced by special permission of Columbia Pictures. Copyright ©1984 by Columbia Pictures.
13.2
: Reproduced by special permission of Columbia Pictures. Copyright ©1984 by Columbia Pictures.
13.3
: Reproduced by special permission of
Playboy
magazine. Copyright ©1996 by Playboy.
14.1
: Copyright ©1988 by The Kiss Company.
14.2
: Copyright ©1986 by Paul Entertainment.
16.1
: Bob Duda/KISS catalog
16.2
: Waring Abbott
INSERT PHOTOGRAPHS
INSERT 1
INSERT 2
Courtesy of
People
magazine. Copyright ©1978 Time Inc.
bottom: Barry Levine Studios/KISS catalog
Reproduced by special permission of
Playboy
magazine.
Copyright ©1999.
Reproduced by special permission of
Playboy
magazine.
Copyright ©1998.
All other photographs and illustrations are courtesy of the author.
I am singing here with my high school band the Long Island Sounds. Seth Dogramajian is on the left, and Alan Graff is playing guitar on the right. We played after-school dances at Joseph Pulitzer Middle School.
