Monday, December 10, 2012
Hogie's Heroes: KISS
Okay, let's get this over with...
For at least my generation, saying that as an adolescent boy you dug KISS is a non revelation on the scale of saying that one day you discovered you liked boobies. They were the boy band for boys, replacing non threatening sexuality with comic book theatrics. The question wasn't "Who's the dreamiest?" but rather "Who could beat The Silver Surfer in a fight?" I don't currently own any KISS records, but when I was 10 years old "Destroyer" worked as my gateway drug to contemporary pop and rock. In the late 70's they were enormous. Even girls listened to them! (This explains why GWAR never achieved similar success. Who could imagine them releasing "Beth"?)
So there's not really much for me to say that hasn't been said. I have Six Degrees of Separation from them in that my wife's cousin was the late Brooke Ostrander, who was a member of Wicked Lester, the band that would eventually morph into KISS. (He managed to live a happy life despite this Pete Best status.) Rather than link to a song you've probably already heard, here's Gene Simmons on the Mike Douglas show back in 1974. It's kind of fun seeing a young Simmons as a skinny geek in Halloween togs looking more like one of his future fans than a grumpy old millionaire.
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If when asked you told other kids you didn't like KISS, they'd say "Oh, what DO you like? Bay City Rollers?" (I kind of did)
ReplyDeleteMy triumph came when KISS showed up in HOWARD THE DUCK, which made me the coolest kid in school for about five minutes (because I had the comic and no one else read comics). And the Marvel Super Special printed in Kiss's blood made me king. For awhile, anyway. Then everyone went back to beating me up.
Probably the one two sucker punch of KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM and HOWARD THE DUCK: THE MOVIE overturned that apple cart.
DeleteGene Simmons was easily the most unpleasant interview subject I ever encountered as a stringer -- I was saddled with trying to get him to talk about his bass playing and songwriting process as a sidebar to my partner's feature interview, but literally all Simmons wanted to talk about for the first 10 minutes was how washed up Ace was. It was very, very ... very important that our audience understood that, said Gene. This was just before their big reunion. Then he spent the last ten minutes talking about how all the Beatles' best guitar riffs were echoing McCartney's basslines -- ALL OF THEM -- agreeing that Ron Wood's playing with the Jeff Beck group was more of an influence on his playing than Jack Bruce's was and admitting that the sound of the ALIVE audience was sweetened in post-production, a scoop at that time. My writing partner used nothing I got on tape [he had plenty of "Ace will never play with KISS or anyone else again. It's over, etc." from his own interview] and I retired from stringer work with my record intact. I kind of respected the utter indifference he held for music journalists, and almost admire him for it now.
ReplyDeleteI think he's that way with most journalists. His interview with Terry Gross from Fresh Air was pretty cringe inducing.
DeleteWeird -- does Blogger no longer respect hard returns in comments?
ReplyDeleteThe above was not one huge paragraph when I wrote it.
Try again. Mine did hard returns.
ReplyDeleteI always use HTML paragraph breaks in my posts, but blogger can be sketchy depending on which computer I use.
ReplyDelete