Gallagher Kiss In The 1970s

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-632-5
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

They pulled on their platform boots and slapped on the makeup when everybody else was discarding theirs. Their albums were subject to poor production and scathing reviews. Other bands refused to have them as their opening act. Their record company was up against the wall. By all reasoning, Kiss should have become one of the 'lost' bands of the 1970s, like the Harlots of 42nd Street or The Hollywood Stars. Yet in 1975 the band unexpectedly came Alive! and by the following year, they were the biggest rock and roll band - and brand - in America.
This is a journey through Kiss's most eventful decade. It is the story of the four men behind the masks, and the music they made, the legendary live albums, and of one of the greatest rock follies in music history - the four simultaneously released solo albums. Along the way, it tells of the costumes and the concerts, the merchandise and the Marvel comic books, the television appearances and the disastrous 1978 movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. And having straddled the 1970s like an unstoppable colossus, it ends with Kiss under siege, beset by changing public taste and their own combustible personalities.
Peter Gallagher is a regular contributor to the British music magazine Shindig!, and the author of two previous books for Sonicbond, Marc Bolan, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and T. Rex: On Track, and Warren Zevon On Track. His fiction has been published in Writing Magazine and The London Reader, and he is currently working on a novel set in the Weimar Republic, which he hopes will see publication sometime before the cows come home. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gallagher, Peter

Leseproben

Chapter 8

1973

3 January. Or maybe it is late December. Like so much of Kiss’s history, it all depends on who is telling the tale. Over thirty people responded to the ad, most of whom were no-hopers. The best so far was Bob Kulick, but while he had the guitar chops, he didn’t have ‘the look’. It was while they were auditioning him that a rather distinctive individual walked into their rehearsal loft. He ‘stumbled and tripped. He was a real klutz’, remembered Bobby McAdams, a friend of said individual, in Nothin’ to Lose, the oral biography of Kiss’s early years. He was ‘kind of goofy and pigeon-toed’, and ‘moved in a rubbery way’, recalled Stanley in his autobiography. And what everyone remembers is that he had two different coloured sneakers on, one red and one orange. And that he got everyone’s hackles up when he let rip on his guitar while the band were still chatting to Kulick.

The odds were against this ill-mannered, poorly coordinated weirdo that couldn’t even match his shoes, but when he launched into his solo during a run-through of ‘Deuce’, he annihilated the competition. But still, there was uncertainty. According to Criss, Stanley and Simmons’ main reservation was the fact that Frehley was Chinese, while Criss tried to placate them, assuring them he was Mongolian. Frehley, meanwhile, claimed he was from another planet. He was none of these things, of course, but being of German descent with just a smidgen of Cherokee thrown in was apparently enough to make him one unusual looking fella. After a second audition, Paul Frehley was in. There was only one slight hiccup; there couldn’t be two Pauls in the band. “No problem,’ the newly appointed lead guitarist responded. ‘Call me by my nickname. It’s Ace’. The band was now complete.

The first order of business was to christen the band, and Stanley, on hearing that Criss’s previous outfit had been called Lips, suggested Kiss, which got everyone’s thumbs up. Next to be considered was the look. At first, they opted for the androgynous style sported by the New York Dolls, but whereas the Dolls could pull it off, Kiss looked, according to Stanley, ‘like a bunch of firemen in drag’. They soon settled on black leather with silver highlights as their uniform, but as they couldn’t afford the clothes they saw in the window of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, they bought similar fabrics and designed their own. Stanley sewed a pair of black satin pants for both himself and Simmons; Frehley’s early outfits were stitched together by his mother; Criss’s mum smeared a pair of Hush Puppies in glue and then covered them in glitter; and Lydia Criscoula and her sister pitched in, creating t-shirts with a homemade, sparkly Kiss logo. Even that was homespun, drafted by Ace and refined by Paul. Accessories came from pet shops and S&M stores. The future multi-million-dollar brand essentially began as a cottage industry.

The Beatles were an inspiration insofar as Kiss wanted to emulate their model of no lead singer and no standalone frontman, but it was only after attending an Alice Cooper concert that the notion of creating four distinct characters, each with a unique facial design, took hold. Simmons indulged his love of monster movies and comic books and created a look that, according to his autobiography, crossed Godzilla with the Marvel comics character Black Bolt (or a Phantom of the Opera / Batman hybrid, according to his account in Nothin’ to Lose); Stanley placed a single black star over his right eye, a symbol of his ambition; Criss adopted a feline look because he considered cats to be tough and independent, which was how he saw himself; and Frehley, who was already telling anybody that would listen that he was from the planet Jendell, became the band’s resident alien.

However, it would be some months before these embryonic designs resembled their iconic versions. For example, in an early photo showing the band with Sid Benjamin, owner of The Daisy club in Amityville that they would play a dozen times in 1973, the black patterns around Simmons’ eyes are little more than amorphous inkblots, Frehley has forgotten the whiteface, and the cartoonish look of shocked surprise on Criss’s cat face suggests he may just have fallen victim to a five-fingered rectal invasion. Stanley, meanwhile, has neither his trademark black star nor white face, settling for mascara that looks like it was applied whilst wearing boxing gloves.

Kiss made their live debut on Tuesday, 30 January 1973, at the Coventry Hotel in Queens, playing two sets to an audience which Stanley remembers being ‘less than ten.’ Simmons, however, narrows it down to ‘Lydia Criss, a girl named Jan who I was seeing, and Jan’s friend’, so Stanley’s recollection, while not incorrect, might just be the earliest and oddest example of the mighty Kiss hyperbole machine in action. Either way, it was an inauspicious start for the future Hottest Band in the Land, and they were booked for the Wednesday and Thursday as well.

On 9 March, they made their first appearance at the Daisy, with Sid Benjamin initially sceptical about this new act he had booked. The scepticism turned to outrage when he saw that his customers weren’t drinking but standing slack-jawed looking at the stage. To compound matters, Simmons would go into the audience, take the drink from their hands, put it on the table, and encourage them to clap. Meanwhile, the club’s fearsome bouncer thought they were ‘a transvestite band’ and threatened to kill them. Both bouncer and Benjamin were soon won over, the former by the band’s no-frills rock and roll and the latter by the fact that, as word got out, the number of people attending the Kiss shows soon exceeded his club’s 144 capacity. By the time they played the last of their dozen shows at the Daisy, on 25 August, Kiss had outgrown the club.

On Friday, 10 August, a fortnight before their final Daisy gig, the band played a show at the Hotel Diplomat that was of considerably greater consequence. The Diplomat was still an operational hotel, but its glory days were long past. Bobby McAdams, a friend of Frehley’s, described it as ‘a dump’, and Binky Philips of The Planets, who had previously played the Diplomat with Kiss, said it was ‘basically a flophouse – very run-down and sleazy, a notch above skid row’. But the New York Dolls had played there, and that put it on the map for all the other bands that comprised the New York ‘street scene’ that Kiss were both a part of and apart from.

Kiss hired the hotel’s second-floor Crystal Room, a dilapidated ballroom, and, recognising that they could never fill it on their own, also paid two other bands from that ‘street scene’, Street Punk and Luger, both of whom had larger followings than Kiss, to share the bill. They then took out press ads and littered the city with flyers which suggested Kiss were the headliners. However, as part of their ‘contract’ with the other bands, they took the middle slot, going on stage at nine-thirty, not-so-coincidentally the time they had put on the homemade press kit they had mailed out to industry executives. Finally, they then packed the front rows with friends and family wearing Kiss t-shirts that Peter and Paul had made the previous night.

The number of movers and shakers that attended the Diplomat that night is unknown, but one was enough when that individual happened to be Bill Aucoin. A television producer/director who had previously worked on the original Supermarket Sweep gameshow, Aucoin was currently involved in a show called Flip Slide, which took the viewer into the recording studio with acts such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Raspberries, Roberta Flack, Judy Collins, and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Aucoin cornered Simmons after Kiss’s set and announced that he would like to manage the band, promising to get them a recording contract within thirty days. It was an audacious proposition, but it turned out Bill knew a guy.

Re-enter Neil Bogart, late of Buddah Records. The Ohio Express had reached the end of the line, the 1910 Fruitgum Company had closed shop, and the bubblegum fad had burst, as bubbles are wont to do. Bogart had just launched his own label, Casablanca, and was looking for his first signing. Bill Aucoin, who had shone the Flip Side spotlight on some of Bogart’s previous acts, passed a Kiss demo tape onto him a week after he had seen the band at the Diplomat, and Bogart, in turn, handed it over to Kenny Kerner, who that year had produced the chart-topping single by Stories, ‘Brother Louie’. Kerner liked what he heard and told Bogart as much. A few days later, Bogart, Kerner, Casablanca vice-president Larry Harris, Aucoin, Aucoin’s business partner Joyce Biawitz and a few others attended a Kiss showcase at the Henry Letang School of Dance in Manhattan.

In his book And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, Harris describes this incongruous venue as a space ‘typically used for the kind of dance rehearsals and recitals attended by the moms and pops of the performers’.

Kiss took the stage – ‘four seven-foot monsters in eight-inch platforms’ according to Harris – and ran through a set list of less than half a dozen songs, including future favourites ‘Strutter’ and ‘Deuce’. The show had none of the special effects later made famous by the band, and, again, by Harris’s account, ‘the makeup was cheap. The whiteface was more like powder than...