06/12/96 - 10:41 PM ET
LOS ANGELES - Pucker up, Kiss Army brats. Your favorite flame-spitting, blood-spewing, tongue-wagging rock band is back in greasepaint and skyscraper boots for one more glittery encore.
Can Kisstory repeat itself?
With a vengeance.
The four original members of Kiss, who last performed together Nov. 29, 1979, launch a long-anticipated reunion tour June 28 in Detroit's Tiger Stadium. Fans grabbed 38,000 tickets to summer's only stadium pop concert in a record 45 minutes. Three dates at Madison Square Garden sold out in one hour. Shows in Chicago and Cleveland sold out in 6 minutes.
Rock's guiltiest pleasure is expected to draw curious teens and longtime Kiss loyalists, including boomers who constituted the band's older following and Gen-Xers who experienced the original Kiss as adolescents. Some went on to pop stardom: Stone Temple Pilots, White Zombie, Rancid, Lenny Kravitz, the Gin Blossoms, Hootie & the Blowfish and Lisa Loeb.
Trent Reznor wore tinfoil on his shoes to emulate idol Gene Simmons. Garth Brooks collected Kiss 8-tracks. Courtney Love was caught shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt. Pearl Jam's Mike McCready carried a Kiss lunchbox. Kiss inspired Soundgarden's Kim Thayil to play guitar.
The band that sold 75 million albums and spawned a generation of rockers now believes that only one obstacle lies between recapturing bygone glory and succumbing to a career-capping kiss of death.
"We're up against our past," says guitarist Paul Stanley, 44. "It casts a bigger shadow with every year that goes by. We have a lot to live up to, but we have no doubt that we can shatter any expectations. We can go beyond anything that anyone remembers. If we couldn't deliver the goods musically or physically, we wouldn't do this."
The band's daily regimen includes lengthy rehearsals plus kick-boxing, weight-lifting and aerobic sessions with trainers.
"We're going to kick everyone's collective butt," claims bassist Simmons, 46. "The physical strains are real. We're not Crosby, Stills & Nash or the Eagles, who can sit on stools and strum acoustic guitars. We're Kiss, and we have to physically prove it on stage."
The first test is Saturday's closing slot at KROQ's all-star "Weenie Roast" concert in L.A. The foursome has already donned makeup and costumes in teasing appearances at the Grammys (causing Eddie Vedder to leap from his seat) and the MTV Movie Awards, airing tonight. Also greasing the wheels are two albums, the current MTV Unplugged and You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best!!, a vintage live set due June 25.
Mere appetizers, says Stanley, promising a main course of ballistic music, outrageous theatrics and eye-popping stunts.
"We'll have smoking guitars and smashing guitars," he says. "The drums will rise 40 feet. Gene will fly and breathe fire. All the classic stuff, only bigger. A Kiss show on steroids."
They plan to exploit '90s technology to magnify and multiply their trademark '70s antics.
"There's one machine that flies me to the light truss at 6 feet a second," Simmons marvels.
Are these guys, uh, insured?
"We better be," he says.
The 2-hour production, modeled after 1977's Alive II tour, will focus on faithful renditions of songs from the band's first six albums.
"Nothing disappoints a fan more than waiting all evening for a favorite song, and the band's so bored it's become an unrecognizable reggae tune," Stanley says. "We're giving our songs the respect they deserve. It's been like school. We rehearse a song and refer to the CD to be sure we're playing it authentically."
And with feeling.
"The most transparent thing to the public would be four guys on stage just going through the motions," Stanley says. "The magic of Kiss wasn't the bombs or 8-inch heels or lasers or pyrotechnics. The magic of Kiss was chemistry. Without it, we're window dressing with no window."
Nobody is more excited about the reunion than the planet's most fanatical Kiss devotees, the band itself. Unquestionably, money was an incentive to re-form after years of refusing offers: Stanley and Simmons reportedly were guaranteed $20 million each, with another $2 million each going to guitarist Ace Frehley, 45, and drummer Peter Criss, 48.
But the Kiss deal was sealed by pure boyish glee, rekindled at last year's $100-a-ticket fan conventions and the recent Unplugged session.
"Unplugged was the eye-opener for me," says Frehley, who left the band in 1982. "I had no idea what to expect after all these years, but there was an instant natural vibe. I felt like I had never left."
Criss, who departed in 1980, says, "Kiss was the best part of my life when I was younger, and I'm really getting off on it now. I don't even know what we ever fought about when we were kids."
"It's such a rush to re-create the Kiss phenomenon," Stanley says. "When we're in our war paint and uniforms, there's no bigger charge than to look at ourselves and go, 'Wow, it's Kiss!' "
They say Kiss was an unstoppable fantasy driven by instinct.
"It was stream-of-consciousness primal therapy," says Criss, comparing their early vision to Richard Dreyfuss fashioning Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "We were determined to get to the top."
Without a roadmap, role models or capital, the quartet built stardom with willpower. They plastered homemade posters in Brooklyn subways at 3 a.m. and pretended a crew had done it. Criss lusted for a chrome drum kit but made do with adhesive strips of Mylar. He asked his mom to sew his hot pants.
"Our costumes and characters evolved around alter egos," says Frehley. "I was into astronomy and science fiction. Gene was into monster films. We improvised."
"One night, we just started putting makeup on," Simmons says. "Nobody was cracking up. We let our inhibitions down and subconsciously did what we had to do. Our vibe was: 'Let's go where no band has gone before.' When we couldn't find studded leather guitar straps, we used belts from the S&M shops in the Village."
Stanley dismantled his favorite jeans to make a pattern for Lurex stage pants that he stitched on his mother's sewing machine.
"We became the band we dreamed of long before we could afford it," he says. "We saw big bands with walls of amplifiers, so we bought empty speaker cases and stacked them up so we'd look important. We'd tell the lighting guy, 'Don't shine the spotlight into the speakers.'
"There were 35 people at our first show on Long Island, and probably 30 wanted to kill us. I figured the only way we'd survive is to make them think we were famous. So I had this rap about playing all over Florida. I said, 'Hey, it's great to be back in New York!'
"We desperately needed money, but we had a rule that we'd only play in New York once every month or two so people would think we were playing somewhere else."
Initially, Kiss alone was the driving force behind Kiss. But its fabled army mushroomed in the mid-70s.
"Our belief in ourselves was contagious," Stanley says. "You either hated us or wanted to be part of us forever. When you finish a tour of duty, you take off the uniform. But fans in the Kiss Army made the ultimate commitment. They tattooed our image and logo on their bodies. Those lifers will not be let down."
Simmons is eager to survey his troops on this tour.
"I know for a fact you will see grown men cry," he says.
Stanley interjects: "Yeah, and four of them are right here!"
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY