Steve Appleford | Rolling Stone
Nearly four decades on, Kiss remain an ongoing and unlikely rock & roll success story, standing high on platform heels and painted in kabuki black-and-white, unloading fireballs and grinding hard-rock hooks around the world. Led by founding members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, Kiss has been back touring arenas and stadiums since the mid-Nineties, but the onetime platinum-selling quartet finally returned to the studio as a fully functioning recording unit with 2009’s Sonic Boom.
The band has a new album, Monster, released today by Universal, and produced by singer-guitarist Stanley. He’s taken the leadership role in the studio, and he wouldn’t have it any other way, guiding Simmons, guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer to a sound that’s loud and swaggering. It’s given Kiss some new material to chew on for their ongoing road show, which just ended a successful tour across North America with Mötley Crüe.
“We’re best off prowling the stage,” Stanley tells Rolling Stone, during an interview about the new album, the current state of Kiss and the music that first inspired him. The makeup hasn’t changed much since the Seventies, and neither has the attitude: “It’s the embodiment of everything I am and have nurtured and created. I look in the mirror and go, ‘Hey, there’s Paul Stanley – he’s so fuckin’ cool!'”
You took the producer’s role beginning with the last record, Sonic Boom. What did that mean for Kiss?
Democracy in the studio is overrated. What you wind up getting is compromise on everybody’s part, which means that nobody has their way, and that means nobody wins, including the fans. I thought it was really important, and in my mind it was a deal-breaker – if I wasn’t going to produce the albums, we weren’t going to do albums at this point. Somebody had to set parameters and boundaries and voice expectations. To make sure Continue reading