DETROIT - The most outrageous tongue in show business, blood-red and seven inches long, is in the rafters above Tiger Stadium, wagging lasciviously at the crowd below.
"Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah ... I was raised by the demons!" growls the tongue's owner, bassist Gene Simmons of rock band KISS, as dry-ice fog curls around his devil-bat costume and mile-high platform boots.
It's Friday night in "Dee-troit rock city" and Simmons has been sky-hooked up to sing his showstopper, "God Of Thunder."
He spits up gobs of fake blood between moans, and the more than 38,000 cheering fans below him - known collectively as the KISS Army - love it.
All the while, he and bandmates Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss pound out a beat that thumps as loud and steady as a dinosaur's heart.
The song ends with Simmons returning to the stage while cat-faced drummer Criss takes the spotlight for some classic rattle-and-thrum. Finally, a blast of fireworks punctuates the noise, a visual exclamation mark.
All this for just one song out of 22 carefully orchestrated songs, mid-way through the first show of a planned two-year worldwide reunion tour of the most theatrical of 1970s rock bands.
Welcome back, friends, to the show that was supposed to have ended. In 1983, KISS announced it was wiping off the greasepaint and rolling up Simmons' X-rated tongue, to concentrate on music rather than madness.
By then the band was 10 years old, a fed-up Frehley and Criss had left for solo careers, and the advent of punk rock had demonized the excesses of stadium rock, excesses that had been defined by the grunt-and-glam of KISS.
But pop music is a strange and ironic beast, and summer 1996 finds KISS in the position of rebelling against the excesses of punk.
While the annual Lollapalooza Festival founders on poor ticket sales and criticism that punk has sold out to corporate rock interests, KISS is selling out stadiums on the strength of a few pounds of makeup, a ton of pyrotechnics and the nostalgic promise of the originals blowing things up real good.
The Tiger Stadium show, in the city that first embraced KISS in the '70s, sold out in a thundering 47 minutes when tickets went on sale a few weeks back, at prices that range from $27.50 to $85.
Many other dates on the tour are also sold out. The Toronto date, Aug. 6 at SkyDome, has sold well with more than 20,000 of 30,000 tickets already gone.
"Why?" is the big question. KISS never went away; it just wiped off the makeup, changed members (co-founders Simmons and Stanley being the two constants) and continued to put out an endless series of derivative albums.
KISS is to music what Twinkies are to food: Without redeeming value or fibre, they provide momentarily thrills and you feel guilty afterwards. The lyrics to songs like "Deuce" and "Calling Dr. Love," heard early in the show, are so simple they could probably be taught to parakeets. Yet a full-makeup reunion of Simmons, Stanley, Frehley and Criss has long been demanded by the KISS Army, mostly people under age 35.
"We want to bring spectacle back," Simmons says in the current issue of Musician magazine, decrying the whining "delivery boys" of '90s rock.
"It was interesting to see everybody want to commit suicide. I now declare it over - let's rock."
The tour is expected to gross $100 million (U.S.), another small incentive.
The KISS Army is delighted to follow Simmons' marching orders.
The crowd filing into Tiger Stadium before Friday's show range in age from early teens to late 40s, and in personalities from tie-dyed hippies to nose-ringed punkers and pale-faced goths.
Many wear KISS facepaint, and some have gone all out for costumes.
Tim Armbruster, 23, is done up in full Gene Simmons demon garb of black leather and Spandex, standing 6-foot-6 in his platform boots.
With his girlfriend, Dawn Manning, 25, whom he met at a Halloween party and who is wearing a black bra and mini-skirt, Armbruster cuts quite a figure.
He pulls a pointy plastic tongue out of his pocket, sticks it in his mouth and leers at Manning, who gives him a "cut that out!" look.
Less visually dramatic, but way more serious about KISS, is John Provost, 29, a studio drummer who has driven 12 hours from hometown Nashville with his girlfriend, medical technologist Cheryl Cosby, 46.
Provost has seen KISS 15 times, but never the original members all together. He is so excited by the prospect, he paid a scalper $1,140 for a pair of $85 third-row tickets, and he's also planning to attend every KISS show during the month of July, including stops in Dallas, New Orleans, Chicago and Boston.
He's carrying a large framed gold LP, originally given to KISS in 1978 for its Alive II album, and which Provost purchased from a collector for $3,000.
He's desperately hoping to have it signed by lead guitarist Frehley, the last of the original members yet to autograph his treasured artifact.
The show has also brought out other rock stars. Members of Smashing Pumpkins, in Detroit this weekend for two of their own shows, are taking time out to indulge their own KISS obsession. (Scratch an alt-rocker and you'll find a KISS fan - members of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails and show opener Alice In Chains, to name just a few, are all KISSheads.)
So is Toronto-bred rocker Sebastian Bach of Skid Row, who drove with his family from his home in New Jersey to be here.
Simmons and Stanley rule KISS roost and no whim goes unheeded
"God, I'm so excited, man," Bach says. "I saw them at Maple Leaf Gardens in '79, and I never thought I'd see them together again.
"The state of music for the last three years has been so depressing, all about heroin and suicide and everything, and this is just full-on entertainment. I feel like I'm 10 years old again."
Flashback to Thursday night, and the pre-show dress rehearsal.
Performing an abbreviated show to technicians and tour support people in a nearly empty Tiger Stadium, KISS is mad enough to spit blood - for real.
"Where was the pyro?" Stanley demands, talking to an unseen technician out in the cavernous dark. "Isn't that why we're doing this?"
The band has just sound-checked "Love Gun," which is supposed to be accompanied by a burst of onstage flame.
Stanley doesn't get an answer about the missing pyrotechnics, and he blows.
"Rehearsals are over, guys!" he snaps. "This is the big time. Can the guy push the (pyro) button?"
Simmons is also in a foul mood.
"Why are we wearing makeup?" he sarcastically asks the lighting technician, who has failed to give Simmons the desired wattage of spotlights.
Simmons and Stanley rule the KISS roost, and no whim or whine goes unheeded. The troubled rehearsal leads them to blow off a scheduled interview with The Star, and to fire their makeup artist on the spot.
The deadly duo are such sticklers for detail, word backstage is they also ordered modifications made to the 40-foot-high inflatable images of the band members, which pop up with great flourish early in the show.
"They sent them back to San Diego to have bigger crotches put on," one tour worker confides. "They didn't want to be called d--kless."
When the lights, cameras and action start at Friday's show, none of the nastiness of the dress rehearsal surfaces.
Stanley is Mr. Showbiz personified, getting the pyro he wants on "Love Gun," and constantly asking the audience, "How are we doing so far?"
Every KISS hit a fan could want is played at supersonic volume - including "Cold Gin," "Firehouse" and "Rock 'n' Roll All Nite."
The show drags at times, but it's often lifted by Frehley, who looks like the Tin Man in the Wizard Of Oz but who plays like Hendrix. During "Shock Me," his guitar bursts into fake flames, just as the KISS Army expects.
The Army also expects Stanley to smash his guitar at the end of the show, and Stanley obliges. Drummer Criss fulfills his destiny by doing a stadium karaoke version of the power ballad, "Beth," standing alone on stage and looking oddly like an outcast from Cats.
After three encore songs, including the local anthem "Detroit Rock City," fireworks erupt over Tiger Stadium, continuing long after the band leaves the stage. It seems as if the concert will continue without KISS, appropriate for a band where the spectacle is everything.