When it comes to Kiss memorabilia, John 5 is like the proverbial kid in the candy store.

Hell, even at 54 he is a kid, especially compared to Kiss patriarchs Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, and even to his current bandmates in Mötley Crüe.

John 5’s Kiss fandom — stoked while growing up in the near suburbs of Detroit Rock City, in fact — has led him to accumulate a supersized collection of more than 2,500 items from 1973 to ’83, which he’s dubbed the Knights in Satan’s Service Museum of Kiss Memorabilia. He’ll be putting it on public display for the first time ever this month at a space in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, guiding fans through the experience himself.

But there’s a coveted latter-day item that won’t be part of the exhibition that is nevertheless near and dear to John’s heart — what is, by all accounts, the last photo of Simmons in full makeup and costume, taken backstage at New York’s Madison Square Garden following the group’s farewell concert on December 2, 2023.

It was a moment John — who’s co-written and played on songs for Stanley and original Kiss guitar player Ace Frehley — wasn’t sure he’d have, either. The timing of the show came near the end of Crüe’s World Tour, just as John 5, Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil were arriving stateside.

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The whole idea behind Kiss in the very beginning was simple: They wanted to be a unit and have complete creative freedom within that unity. While many people will argue that the makeup and pyrotechnics were just good markings, there was a lot more to the band than that.

When Paul Stanley was initially asked why he and the band were so keen on wearing make-up and inhabiting these characters, he said it was because he had grown frustrated with bands’ image, and how it didn’t look like musical outfits were separate entities. “Those ‘60s British groups all looked like real bands. No member of The Beatles could have fit into the Stones. No member of The Who could have been in the Dave Clark Five,” said Stanley, “You had unified images of those bands, and at the same time, there was an emphasis on the individual members.”

Gene Simmons added that their make-up didn’t just mean they looked like a unit, but they also had complete creative freedom. “We also took pride in having the same freedom The Beatles had,” confirmed Simmons, “Their philosophy was, ‘No matter what kind of music we do, it’s still The Beatles’. That’s what was amazing about them… The Beatles were not trapped in that way. They could do music hall, psychedelia – anything – and they did. Yet somehow it always sounded like The Beatles.”

You can certainly hear this creative freedom in their music, as while some of their records, such as Sonic Boom and Animalize, the band leaned heavily into their rock roots; however, they decided to apply disco sounds on their record Dynasty. Despite the changes in sound, the records are fundamentally Kiss, and nobody has ever questioned whether the sound is too left field for the band.

The image of the band brought with it a strange sense of unity. Even when members fell out with one another, it looked as though everything was fine within the band. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons might be arguing, sure, but their characters in the lineup are alive and well, still rocking out to some of the greatest rock music ever made.

The band could only ever work as a unit, which is why Ace Frehley’s solo career didn’t take off in the way that he would have liked. Frehley contributed a great deal to Kiss’s music, as he was a fantastic guitar player; however, it apparently wasn’t enough for the rest of the band, and so he left to pursue his own projects.

This created a very frosty relationship between Frehley and Simmons, as while Frehley said he left because of creative differences, Simmons said that the guitarist was fired because he couldn’t control his substance abuse. Simmons went as far to call Frehley a “cancer,” and the two still have a troubled relationship to this day.

Frehley tried his best to have a successful career outside of the band following his fallout with Simmons, and while he succeeded to some degree, he never achieved the same heights he managed with the band. Despite still wearing his Kiss makeup when performing as a solo artist, there was no getting over the fact that people were more interested in his character as a member of Kiss than they were him as an individual.

That being said, there is no escaping the fact that he wrote some great songs as a solo artist. One of his most famous is ‘New York Groove’, which has succeeded in making its way onto the soundtracks of Hollywood movies and is considered a classic by all those who hear it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Frehley was capable of writing great songs, he had been doing for Kiss for years, and even though his connection to the band was severed, his connection to his art wasn’t.

Frehley has never put anything other than 100% into his work, which is best reflected in his track ‘Starship’. The song highlights Frehley’s unwavering approach to music, as he will never rush a song. If it doesn’t sound right, it won’t be released, which is why it took him so long to get this track out. He began writing it in the mid-2000s but didn’t end up releasing the track until 2014, as he couldn’t quite figure out how the song should sound. Eventually, the track evolved into something finished, but it took him a while to get the sound perfect.

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