Some Pluckers Do Have 'Em

In an Islington hostelry on a Tuesday evening in early March, it all goes a bit Overlook Hotel. There we are, taking the lift to the fourth floor with Colm from MCD Promotions and Glenda Gilson from TV3’s Exposé, when the door slides open to reveal none other than – holy crapola – The Starchild himself, all seven foot-something of Kiss frontman Paul Stanley in full battle dress, warpaint and stackheels. It is, needless to say, a bit of a polaroid moment.

The occasion is his band’s fanclub-and-invites-only shindig at the 800-capacity O2 Academy just down the street, which will serve as a promo-op for Sonic Boom, Kiss’s first studio album in ten years, and also their upcoming arena tour of Europe, due this way in May with full bells, whistles, smoke and mirrors – and probably Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation and Roy Lichtenstein-style shazams and kabooms into the bargain.
Tonight’s show is a scaled down and intimate affair, although nobody seems to have told the band, who are attending to pre-gig press duties in complete schlocky-horror regalia. TV crews, press officers and folk from the band’s new label Roadrunner mill the halls. It’s a bit like like a presidential press conference as imagined by Rob Zombie. Ms Gilson is ushered into the interview suite, where Stanley and Tommy Thayer (aka The Spaceman, the hotshot fret-shredder who replaced original member Ace Frehley a few years back), give rapid quote and pose for photos like the old showbiz pros they are.
A couple of hours later the foursome take to the tiny Academy stage, illuminated tonight by a KISS neon backdrop so powerful it requires its own generator, and slug their way through an 12-song set that includes new tunes such as ‘Modern Day Delilah’ alongside old nuggets like the awesome ‘Black Diamond’ and the not-quite-so-awesome ‘Calling Doctor Love’ and ‘I Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll All Nite And Party Every Day’. (Alas, there’s no sign of their Moroder-esque disco cash-in ‘I Was Made For Loving You’, although it is a staple on the tour set-list.)
Your reporter is not and never has been a member of the Kiss Army, but the sheer incongruity of the situation is enough to suspend critical faculties for a good 60 minutes. It’s a solid show, although by the band’s own reckoning a tough one to play on account of the heat and cramped confines, compounded by 40 lb of costume gear and trowels of make up, plus a streamer machine that malfunctions and blows carbon monoxide in the members’ faces, rendering an encore of ‘Detroit Rock City’ a little less balls-out than they might have liked.
Anyways, judging this quartet on purely musical terms is kind of missing the point. It’s all about the spectacle. In any alternative Planet of the Apes scenario, Charlton Heston might just find a Kiss pinball machine on the beach beside that broken down old Statue of Liberty, so comprehensively did they infect American culture throughout the late ‘70s. “The world’s culture,” bassist and vocalist Gene Simmons corrects us the next day, but the fact is Kiss never translated in Ireland on the same level as Aerosmith or even Lynyrd Skynyrd.
In truth, the best thing you can say about the average Kiss tune is that it’s mercifully short. They don’t do long guitar solos. They do do big choruses. Frequently I’m reminded of no one so much as Slade. It’s a comparison Simmons volunteers unprompted the next day when we ask if he ever saw the New York Dolls in their prime.
“We used to go see them live, but there was no connection,” he says. “They were little boys physically, and we couldn’t do the androgynous thing. Paul does it better than most, but I’m six-two and 230 pounds, I can’t dress up in little tutu things. Our template was more superheroes... Slade is closer to what Kiss is.”
Maybe as a result, Kiss were one of a handful of ‘70s stadium acts who survived the post-punk fatwah and got a free pass from bands like Nirvana and The Replacements.
“Well, whether you like us or not, I think you have to tip your hat to a band that does it their own way,” Simmons purrs. “I mean ultimately that’s very punk, if punk is your vibe. A band that says, ‘This is who we are’, like an animal pissing on the ground says, ‘This is my territory.’ You can even hate the band, that’s fair enough, but you have to say, ‘Yeah, that’s Kiss, and those are the other bands’. We belong to no movement. Punk produced its own thing. The Seattle movement produced its own thing. New Romantics and New Wave, bands became identified by sound, but I don’t know what the hell we are. We’re certainly not heavy metal. Kiss was around before heavy metal. I just call it rock.”
Tall, reptilian and dressed entirely in black, Simmons (born Chaim Witz, of Israeli-Hungarian extraction) comports himself with more gravitas – and common courtesy – than one might rightly expect of a 60-year-old rock star who spits fire and fake blood for a living and calls himself things like The Demon and The God of Thunder. If anything, he’s quite philosophical and paternalistic in manner. His various business interests, including TV shows like Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels and Rock School, have made him a very wealthy individual.
Accordingly, he seems less like your typical ‘70s rock survivor than a sleazy-but-charming-with-it filthy rich oil sheik who takes it upon himself to dispense advice on the ladies to young reporters. If it had all gone south after The Elder, one imagines Simmons might have made a tidy living on the self-empowerment/aspirational speech circuit as a more laid back version of Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia. Gene, need we remind you, possesses a tongue the length of an anaconda and has by all accounts love-torpedoed more babes than Beatty. Former paramours include Cher and Diana Ross. He has two children with former Playboy playmate and adult movie actress Shannon Tweed. So what the hell is he doing on the road at an age when most blokes of his vintage and means are sunning themselves on a private beach in Miami?
“Well, I haven’t needed to do it for 30 years,” he points out. “Within five years we were playing stadiums and arenas and the licensing and merchandising took off. I remember showing my mother my first ten million dollar cheque, and she says, ‘Well, that’s nice, but now what are you gonna do?’ And that was like an awakening: no matter what you’ve done, what are you gonna do now? In other words, assume today is the only day God is gonna give you, you only have 24 hours of life – what do you want to do with it?”
Presumably –
“No – let’s play the game: you’ve got 24 hours to live from now, what are you gonna do?”
Write. That’s what I do.
“Yeah, you’ll fuck, you’ll eat, you’ll live, but you won’t do it without work. So I treat every day as if it’s the only day I’ll ever have. The money’s good, I like money, I like it a lot, I make no pretense of it, although I don’t get caught up in the accoutrement, the jewelry and the gold and the bling. That’s fine if you like it, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. To me it’s the game, it’s the satisfaction of doing something, for fuck’s sake. But sitting around on a beach waiting to die...”
Presumably, like most musicians, he’s addicted to the adrenalin buzz of performance?
“It’s unlike anything. It’s probably closest to being one of the Olympian gods and coming to earth and walking around. I mean, Popes don’t get groupies do they?”
Well, technically...
“And you could be Prime Minister and still some people like you, but some people don’t. You could be James Bond and have a license to thrill, but not everybody knows who you are. Being a rock star is unlike any other life. Everybody wants to be one: actors, sports guys, they all wanna get that rock star thing, because where normally you would have to take out a girl and show her you’ve got a nice sense of humour and talk nicely to her and this and that, respectfully I could wake up in bed with a girl whose name I never bothered to learn. There’s no other job that does that. That same girl who would torture you with, ‘Where’s my present?’ or, ‘Did you look at another girl?’ or, ‘What sign are you?’, would never subject me, or anybody else that does my thing, to that torture, not on a first date with a rock star. She’ll blow him in public.”
Which is all whoop-de-do while it lasts, not so hot when the party’s over, especially if you’re some poor dipso Sunset Strip burnout who got diddled out of his royalties sometime in 1987 and now looks like a blighted potato with big hair.
“I’ve never been drunk in my life,” Simmons says. “It’s called the music business. Business has always been up there. There’s a marketing firm that gauges these things: Kiss are one of the most recognised brands on planet earth. Everybody knows Kiss. The songs are okay and the records do well, the concerts do very well, but nobody touches us in licensing and merchandising, nobody. We outgrossed the Beatles and Elvis together, 3,000 licensed products. The second Kiss coffee house is opening in Melbourne. The first one is in Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. We’ve gone where no band has gone before. You can get Kiss M&Ms with our faces on them. Kiss scooters. Kiss condoms, Kiss caskets. We’ll get you coming and we’ll get you going!”
And, of course, Mr Simmons is completely unapologetic about that.
“Unapologetic? Proud! You can’t have a U2 action figure can you? Nobody would buy it. It’s one of my favourite bands, but that doesn’t mean it lends itself to that iconic imagery. U2 has a name and a music that’s classic, the imagery is not. There is no imagery. And the Rolling Stones likewise, the only thing they have is a logo with that tongue – which should have been Kiss’s logo of course.”
So how much of all this empire-building could he have foreseen before the release of Alive! in 1975? Was it Machiavellian planning or pure instinct?
“Well, instinct is partly dreams, isn’t it? ‘Cos before something happens it’s a thought. You dream it and you want it, and before you ever started you dreamed big, didn’t you? Did you ever dream you could fly?”
I probably did. I definitely went dinosaur hunting.
“Me too. I dreamed I could fly, dinosaur hunting, we did all those things, because dreams have no limits, and if you can take that kind of passion and that kind of will, that dream quality, and stick it in real life, you will reach for the stars and go beyond it.”
Simmons once submitted a college paper entitled ‘The Social Significance of the Panel Graphic Art Form’. Is he still interested in comic books?
“Sure, I have Simmons Comics Group, we publish Gene Simmons’ House of Horrors, Zipper and Dominatrix, all trademarked.”
What did he make of Watchmen?
“Great film. And book. Well, series of books. When I was a kid I lived, breathed and ate that stuff. I got a letter from (Marvel Comics president and chairman) Stan Lee saying, ‘You’re gonna do great’. All that inspiration, I try to do the same thing when I see young people coming up, because I’ll never forget that postcard from Stan Lee. It gave me a sense of, ‘Oh my God, anything’s possible’.
“And now what’s happened is the kids that were reading Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was an American magazine, comic books, all that stuff, they became the leaders of the world. Steven Spielberg and Gene Simmons and a few others came up as comic book reading kids. My stuff is a direct link to horror movies, science fiction and comic books. The stuff that was made fun of... Avatar is now the biggest grossing movie of all time. James Cameron’s a friend, we’ve known each other a long time, since around the time of Terminator, but he read comic books all his life. Different to Scorsese and all the other guys, which is why those movies, although they’re respected, aren’t seen by as many people. Those movies have a different sensibility and it takes a while for that sensibility to chime. But likewise, if you take Kiss and stick us in the 1800s, it doesn’t work.”
We beg to differ. Kiss are pure grand guignol by way of PT Barnum’s give-the-people-what-they-want ethos.
“To do otherwise I think is an insult to your bosses. Your bosses bought the tickets. For some of them it’s half their weekly wages, and they deserve a show, instead of getting up there with a rug and an acoustic guitar and thinking you’re doing them a favour. When you go to see a band you already know the music, but now you’re bringing your eyes, so how dare you short-change what I see with my eyes? It’s supposed to be audio-visual, otherwise put blinkers on. I’m going to go through the traffic jams and stuff and give you a hundred dollars, so the philosophy of Kiss is always give ‘em bang for the buck.
“Give ‘em more and give ‘em more after that.”