Kiss has always been a strange anomaly in the world of rock and roll. Not all of their songs are fine works of poetry, and a lot of them require the audience to shut their brain off a little bit, but the empire they created cannot be overstated every time they went onstage. Then again, Paul Stanley could remember a few times when artists felt too good to work with them.
Because when looking at the band’s stage setup, it’s easy to forgive someone if they thought it was more of a circus act than a rock and roll show. The biggest names in music usually let the music do the talking whenever they went onstage, but even if Jimmy Page had a taste for theatrics in Led Zeppelin, what Stanley and Gene Simmons were doing felt like it was ripped straight out of a comic book whenever they got up to their stage antics like spitting blood and breathing fire.
At the same time, that might have also been why the band was considered toxic for any headlining act. The whole point of any Kiss show was to give the audience the time of their lives, but when the bombs had gone off and all the cannons had been let loose, there was hardly any reason for anyone to stay for people like Blue Öyster Cult when they came out afterwards.
But there’s also the argument that the best artists in the world don’t need theatrics to make their music sound good. Granted, Kiss have always said that they were far from the greatest musicians in the world, and it was going to take a lot of convincing for someone to think the lyrics to ‘Christine Sixteen’ are anything too deep, but in Steven Tyler’s eyes, there wasn’t anything Kiss could do that Aerosmith didn’t improve upon.
Sure, Kiss had more showmanship whenever they went up onstage, but Tyler was a wild animal whenever he put on a performance. Outside of dancing his way across every single platform, Tyler was a force of nature that could always deliver whenever he sang, and while his brief spats with Kiss were documented in the 1970s, it didn’t exactly smooth over when they attempted to tour together in the modern age.