Sounds Interview

� 1980 Sounds
KISS IN THE WIND
(An interview shortly after Eric Carr joined)

The limo runs us downtown to a sleazy building. Inside it is plush and white. Kiss bustle around in kimonos and higher-echelon helpers nurse beer bellies and read physical fitness magazines.
I'm eventually bunged in a room with the group, or three of them at least. New member Eric looks innocent enough to be a drummer for the Osmonds. Paul Stanley, even minus his white face and black star over one eye, still comes off like a super hero. Gene Simmons is a wry, wisecracking comedian.

This legion of superheroes has a new member.

"It was really important to us that we got somebody who was unknown," intones Paul Stanley. "We didn't want somebody who last week was in Rod Stewarts's band or in Rainbow. If you're a member of Kiss, you were born to be a member of Kiss ... Before you even get to play with us you had to be interviewed, because if we auditioned everybody who wanted to try out we'd still be auditioning people today."

So where did they locate the lucky Eric?

"He," deadpans Simmons, "was a bum in the street, he was drinking and we felt sorry for him. But he was wearing high heels, so we knew there was hope."

I'd heard that another applicant had been selected for the drum seat but had blown it by circulating photos of his unmadeup face to all his friends. True! True. In these circumstances, would Eric be prepared to reveal much about his background?

"I've been in local bands round the New York area. Nothing that anybody would know I've been playing for a long time and not getting anywhere."

Will his success change him? Has being in the 24-hour-a day Kiss circus affected his life as yet?

"I have sores all over me! I wake up screaming at night! It's changed my life in a lot of ways already. I've had to break off ties with friends of mine to devote my time to it. I get fed every day. I'm really looking forward to it, this is what I've been wanting to do my whole life."

Be in Kiss?

"I always wanted to be famous," he says hungrily, "and I always wanted to be in a band like Kiss when I was growing up ... I always thought that Kiss had something special over any other band. They had created something that, not since the Beatles ... they're not just a group ..."

At this point Gene Simmons leans over, smiling. "We pay him well."

Ace Frehley arrives, wine glass in hand and slumps onto the couch. "Hi! Ace hass arrived, layeeess 'n' gen'lmin!", he slurs. He looks like a very debauched samurai at the end of an opium orgy. Without his greasepaint he's even more alarming than onstage, if thoroughly recognizable as the Ace you kids have come to know and love.

This prompts a thought. Did it ever occur to them, that since their real faces are unknown to the world, they could perhaps have avoided telling the punters that Peter Criss had left? One man in a monkey suit is the same as the next ... Heeeyyy! Maybe ... how do I even know I'm talking to the real Kiss right now? Could be they have people to do interviews for them ...

"It doesn't really work like that, y'know? You put Kiss makeup on somebody else and they don't look like us," says Paul Stanley reverentially. "What we are comes from inside of us ..."

"Whatever else anybody may say about the band, the band is very sincere about what we're doing," swears Gene Simmons. "We really consider this ...", he pauses for effect "... art."
Kiss may be mega, but they appear a bit serious. Has the recession affected them?

"The interesting thing is that the recession seems to be a worldwide phenomenon, but right now we're happening bigger in the rest of the world than we ever have before," says Simmons without much apparent enthusiasm.
"It's growing by leaps and bounds ... We're going to Australia for the first time doing 40,000 seaters ...

Everybody's gonna come through. All the bands that shouldn't be around won't be around and it'll be fine." If only I could share his faith in the fairness of life.

"They say we're a punk band, then a glitter band, then heavy metal, then disco, then pop," offers Stanley, quite accurately, when I mention the early days of Kiss when they were equated with sleaze outfits like The Harlots Of 42nd Street. Kiss have never been a band to ignore a successful trend.

But: "The next album that we've already started work on is a pure, pure heavy metal album. It's guitars, bass and drums... They said to us, 'You can't wear platform boots, they went out six years ago'. Doesn't matter," says Paul.
"What we do is timeless. We haven't cut our hair, we really haven't changed other than in what we wanted to. We're really not victims of fashion".

Gene Simmons smiles faintly: "I like that: Victims of Fashion. Sounds like the next Elton John album."

Of course, if everything is so rosy in the corporate garden, one is forced to ask why Peter Criss decided to leave.
"Peter didn't leave! Peter is, in a sense, still in the family ... He married the girl in the Coppertone ads, there are 50-foot posters of her all over America. He doesn't want to tour anymore, we have to respect that," replies Simmons.
Paul Stanley assures me that everyone is still palsy-walsy and that Criss departed because of the old musical differences schtick. No-one mentions drug abuse or deadly pancake allergies. "Iss like a brother going off t'college," nods Frehley sagely.

Kiss were about to undertake their European tour, with all the brouhaha you'd anticipate. Plans are afoot to have them interviewed for Swedish TV, in full regalia, by the ex-Prime Minister of that country in his plush apartment. I mention this to them but it hardly provokes so much as a raised whisker. Instead, Gene Simmons asks about England.

"We haven't been there in five years. What do you think the fan reaction will be like?"

I dunno. There're elements of whining about cancelled visits and so forth.

"You know, it's amazing," says Stanley, "The only official tour that we've cancelled is the most recent one. There were always rumors about us going over but we didn't initiate them, so it was amazing that some fans got a little pissed at us canceling the last tour when in reality it's the only time it's ever happened."

They were worried, says Ace, about Criss. Meanwhile, the ex-drummer plans to be truly unmasked on the cover of his upcoming solo LP. Why, I suppose we want to know, has it taken the teen titans so long to return to the UK?

"I didn't wanna go back," says Simmons in an irritated voice. "This is upfront. I didn't wanna play in another small hall. Our show is too big and we have to cut down a lot of the show. I didn't wanna go over and do half the show."

Stanley is more forthright: "It wasn't the size of the halls that bothered us as much as some of the accommodations. We got the short end of the stick. We weren't treated quite the way we were used to being treated, which is not to say treated like royalty, I just thought, y'know, in some respects we got screwed a little."
Frehley is even more honest: "We got spoiled in America. Treated with kid gloves ..."

Now, they believe, Europe is ready for Kiss. That, readers, is entirely up to you. Simmons has the final word on this topic:
"I don't want to be intimate. That word doesn't appeal to me at all. I'd rather be epic proportions. There's nothing exciting to me about being in front of thirty people, sitting on a stool strumming away."

Stanley admits that, perhaps in keeping with the current mood of austerity, Kiss played a special one-off gig in New York last week in a mere 3,800 seater. Sold out, was it? "I should hope so," he retorts, with just the tiniest trace of campy venom in his voice.

We get into a somewhat unproductive discussion about spectacle, and the press and the value of analysis in rock writing.
Ace says that Kiss could get up and match any band in blue jeans, but they want to give the faithful more excitement. Simmons swears that intelligence "doesn't depend on the size of your vocabulary. Or the size of your dick." Paul asserts that Kiss will last as long as they, and the fans, want them to: "Those are the people who believe in us and we believe in them."

"They made us what we are today," states Frehley. "Without them we'd be nothing."