KISS, KISS BUT NO BANG, BANG
During the ‘70s Kiss was mostly just a name and an image of four guys in make up masks to me. “Rock and Roll All Nite,” perhaps “Beth,” and “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” (Kiss going disco) were on the radio every now and then but South African rock radio, such as it was, hardly saturated the airwaves with Kiss. Ace Frehley’s solo project “Ne York Groove” had a decent amount of exposure and was a favourite of mine at the time. I saw some of the album covers, and read that Alive was regarded by some as one of the greatest live albums of all time (to that date, anyway) and read the quote, from Hit Parader magazine, that Kiss would be the best thing since sliced bread if they could only write number one hit songs. There was the fanatical Kiss Army who dressed up and wore make up to represent their favourite band members. The Kiss sage show was almost over the top theatrical, with the musicians teetering around in high heeled boots, lots of pyrotechnics, including Gene Simmons breathing fire and sticking out a huge, prosthetic tongue and high energy rock and roll. The story was that they dressed up from the start, when they were playing high school gyms and small club and simply carried on doing it on bigger and bigger stages. Kiss were superstars in Japan before they broke big in the USA. They did unmask themselves for a bit, in the ‘80s, perhaps to regain attention on a fading band, but resumed the masks shortly afterwards. The drummer left the band and was replaced by another character.
For all this, and mostly because of what I saw as ridiculous costumes and because I didn’t really know the music and wasn’t that keen on finding out, I eschewed Kiss, even as I began investigating the ‘70s hard rock of Cheap Trick, Aerosmith and Blue Oyster Cult.
Somehow, in the mid-‘80s I found a copy of the debut album, Kiss (1974) in a bargain bin somewhere. When I listened to the record, I was pleasantly surprised and yet also a tad deflated because I’d expected so much more from this legendary band, but, I guess, it was the debut and better would come. The music was pretty much tough edged rock and roll, not particularly hard rock and not metal, with a little melody, big choruses and typical male centred hard rock lyrics about mythical bad girl stereotypes of the time. Several songs off this debut are Kiss classics and the album is very listenable indeed and holds up well today, along with the aforementioned bands from the period, in that kinda dumb hard rock genre.
The first impression of Hotter Than Hell (1974) is that it’s less tough than the debut, with a much more sophisticated, smoothed out sound, and a resultant loss of edge, a much more deliberate pace, without an increase in heaviness, and a general air of an over cautious approach, probably to make the record radio friendly . Only “Let Me Go, Rock and Roll” breaks a sweat.
I reckon, if I’d actually been a Kiss fan at the time, a casual one, and had bought Hotter Than Hell because I liked the debut album, I would’ve thought I’d wasted money buying the follow up and would’ve lost interest.
I think Kiss must’ve had the same thought and Dressed to Kill (1975) is out of the blocks fast and loud, albeit with the same kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink teenage boy’s idea of a great rock lyric, where women are nothing but bad, as in hot, or just bad as in scheming, deceitful and troublesome. After the fast start, though, the style and pace of the music reverts to verging on sludge and there is very little of material interest on the album until the closing track “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
Kiss and their management realised that the production values on their studio albums didn’t reflect the band’s live sound and believed that this defect, for a band that thrived on a loud, spectacular live performance, did them no favours and the next release was Alive (1975), intended to give the fans a taste of the high energy onstage performances of fan favourite tunes, and to establish once and for all that the studio albums to date were not truly what the band was about. The lives cuts do not sound that much better than the studio versions and the joke was that most of the music was recorded in the studio afterwards, which means that you don’t actually hear what the band sounds like live at all. Presumably, the spectacle of the stage show was really what impressed the fans and not so much the music.
Destroyer (1976) kicks off with the anthem and ode to a hard rock burg, “Detroit Rock City” and with the following songs it’s apparent that their ambitions to produce even more radio friendly hard rock have gone up a notch. The rough edges have been fully smoothed out. “Great Expectations” is a ridiculous, anthemic sleazy ballad dedicated to the band’s female followers; “Shout It Out Loud” is more sing-along party noise; and “Beth” is the sensitive, piano driven, power ballad dedicated to the good woman at home.
CODA
My optimistic target was to listen to more Kiss albums than these few, at least until the end of the ‘70s output but it was getting to be harder work than I’d anticipated mostly because the band just doesn’t rock hard enough and the songs aren’t particularly good or engaging. The slower riff heavy tunes don’t stomp, they just plod, and the faster tunes are just so frivolously lightweight, and most of the lyrical ideas sound like parodies, except that they’re probably not.
Kiss have had more releases after the end of the ‘70s than they ever had in that decade, but I don’t think there’s compelling reason to listen to all of them, unless one wants to a serious, in-depth retrospective analysis, or are a die-hard fan. The ‘70s catalogue, when the band was young, ambitious, full of vim and vigour, probably represents their best in terms of ideas even if, over time, they became technically better musicians.
Kiss has had a long and successful career, yet another member of the classic rock careerist cadres of musicians who’ve managed to maintain a career in hard rock and have proved that rock is not a young person’s game after all. If you’re the Rolling Stones, you can keep on rocking until your late seventies and there is still so much interest in, and money to made for, ‘70s rockers that they can keep going for as long as they like, or can.
