KISS Trivia — 145 Entries
145 sourced facts about KISS.
Trivia
Kiss albums issued in Japan have long carried Japanese titles of their own, and a striking number of them invoke hell. The 1975 live album Alive! became Jigoku no Kyoju, the following year's Destroyer became Jigoku no Gundan, and Lick It Up, the 1983 album on which the make-up came off, became Jigoku no Kaiso. The convention belongs to the Japanese editions and does not necessarily track the meaning of the original titles.
Destroyer was the first Kiss album to sell a million copies in its year of release, and it remains their best-selling studio record — a claim made by the label itself on Universal Music Japan's product page. The Japanese edition of the 45th anniversary release was pressed as an SHM-CD, a Japan-only specification, and early buyers received a B2-sized reproduction of the poster that had advertised Kiss's first Japanese concerts in 1977.
Kiss took about three hours to get out of Haneda Airport on their first visit to Japan in 1977. Tatsuo Takahashi of Udo Artists, the promoter, recalls that the Pan Am aircraft that brought them carried the Kiss logo beside the Pan Am logo on its fuselage; it was not a private jet but a half-charter, with ordinary passengers aboard. The four had flown bare-faced and put their make-up on before disembarking, at which point immigration officers pointed out that they could not be matched to their passport photographs. So they went back on board, took the make-up off, cleared immigration, and reapplied it on the aircraft before coming out. By then the several hundred fans waiting in the arrivals hall had given up and were heading home.
Kiss stayed at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo on their first Japanese visit in 1977. According to Tatsuo Takahashi of the promoter Udo Artists, the hotel had hosted heads of state but never a rock band, and set conditions: an entire floor booked out with the party confined to it, and uniformed guards on every entrance around the clock. The touring party numbered about thirty-five or thirty-six, and the promoter had to rent the spare rooms on that floor as well. The Lincoln Continentals carrying them in from the airport were mobbed so thoroughly that the windscreen was covered by people and the drivers could not see ahead.
Kiss barely left the hotel during their first Japanese visit in 1977. Tatsuo Takahashi of Udo Artists puts it down to the fact that they concentrated everything they had on the show. There was one afternoon of dressing up in military uniforms in a hotel room and photographing each other bare-faced, and one shopping trip to Ginza with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley — on which Stanley turned up in a Kiss logo T-shirt and Simmons was annoyed with him, since both men were tall enough to be conspicuous without advertising who they were. Otherwise Frehley drank in his room, Criss practised his drums and Stanley wrote songs. Takahashi says drugs did not come into it at all.
Kiss toured Japan twelve times between their first visit in 1977 and the 2019 dates, and every one of those tours was promoted by Udo Artists. The first Japanese visit by an unmasked Kiss was in 1988, and Shoji Shigetomi of the same company, who handled the tours from then on, has said his initial impression was that this was not the Kiss he knew: the show still used pyrotechnics in the same quantities, yet without the make-up they felt like different people.
Staging a Kiss show in Japan runs into a constraint that exists nowhere else in quite the same form: the fire code. Shoji Shigetomi of Udo Artists explains that there are limits on how high a column of flame may reach from the ceiling, on how much powder may be used in a single effect, and on the total amount permitted across an entire concert — so every visit involves trading one effect against another. A fire officer attends every Kiss show to watch the moment Gene Simmons breathes fire. There has never been an accident since the first visit and the relationship is one of trust, Shigetomi says, and the officer comes anyway.
The lyrics for Hotter Than Hell were printed in both English and Japanese, a gesture said to have been made in appreciation of the band's Japanese following. When the album appeared in October 1974, Kiss had not yet set foot in Japan; their first visit came two and a half years later, in 1977.
On 28 January 2015 a single credited to Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS was released under the title "Yume no Ukiyo ni Saitemina". The words were written by Paul Stanley with the Japanese lyricist Yuho Iwasato, the music by Stanley and Greg Collins, who has produced a good deal of Kiss's work, and the arrangement by the band and Collins; Momoiro Clover Z sing it while Kiss play the instruments and the backing vocals. The single came in two editions, and the Kiss edition carried "SAMURAI SON", a mirror image of the same song with Kiss taking the melody and Momoiro Clover Z on backing vocals.
The Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS single also carried a cover of "Rock and Roll All Nite" sung by Momoiro Clover Z. It was arranged by NARASAKI and Yuyoyuppe, a pairing that had not worked together on a Momoiro Clover Z track since a song on the group's 2013 album 5TH DIMENSION.
On 3 March 2015 Kiss closed the Japanese leg of their fortieth-anniversary tour at the Tokyo Dome in front of 35,000 people. Paul Stanley addressed the crowd in Japanese during the show and sang Kyu Sakamoto's "Ue o Muite Arukou" alone, in Japanese. After "Black Diamond" ended the main set, the screens began alternating the Kiss and Momoiro Clover Z logos, each drawing a roar from its own half of the audience, and the encore brought the two acts together for "Yume no Ukiyo ni Saitemina". Everyone finished the night on "Rock and Roll All Nite".
On 11 December 2019, YOSHIKI of X JAPAN appeared as a surprise guest at Kiss's Tokyo Dome show. Paul Stanley introduced him as making the night a special one, the dome erupted, and Kiss played "Beth" with YOSHIKI at the piano and Eric Singer singing. He then moved to a drum kit and joined them for "Rock and Roll All Nite". The connection between them goes back to the 1994 tribute album KISS MY ASS, for which YOSHIKI produced an orchestral version of "Black Diamond".
The Japanese leg of December 2019 ran to five shows, opening on 8 December at Sekisui Heim Super Arena in Sendai. Speaking to BARKS shortly before it began, guitarist Tommy Thayer said that if you asked him which country he most enjoys visiting on tour, he would say Japan without hesitating — as an American boy who grew up a Kiss fan, photographs of the band taken in Japan had struck him as something mysterious. This was the first tour to include Morioka; Sendai had been added for the first time on the previous visit in 2015.
On 30 November 2022 Kiss played a single night at the Tokyo Dome. The End Of The Road tour had already said its goodbyes to Japan in December 2019, but the pandemic forced the schedule to be rebuilt, requests came in from all over asking them to return, and this show was the result. The set was close to the one played at the Tokyo Dome on 11 December 2019, with one addition: "Makin' Love" from Rock and Roll Over. Paul Stanley introduced it as something they had not played in a long time, and it appears to have been the first time it was chosen on the entire tour.
Kiss are famously protective of their brand, but in 2012 they went into partnership with a Japanese character. The Hello Kitty co-branded line put the cat in Kiss make-up across T-shirts, mugs, vinyl figures and badges, and at the launch event in Las Vegas Mike Tyson tried one of the items out.
Kiss's decision not to stop after the Farewell tour may have had something to do with a dinner in Tokyo, according to Shoji Shigetomi of Udo Artists. At a dinner the promoter hosted during the 2001 Japanese dates, the company's founder Seijiro Udo said it would be a waste to stop now, with the band in good shape and the halls full. Gene Simmons and the others agreed that he had a point, and Shigetomi says he felt the atmosphere in the room change. He adds that he cannot say what actually happened.
There is an Ace Frehley guitar solo on "Sweet Pain" that never made the album. It surfaced on the 2012 remix Destroyer <Resurrected> and was carried over as a bonus track on the Blu-ray Audio disc of the 45th anniversary edition in 2021 — the same disc on which Steven Wilson's remix presented the original album in Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround for the first time.
Each of the four had a different idea for what the band should be called. Ace Frehley favoured Albatross, Peter Criss preferred The Crimson Harpoon, and Gene Simmons pushed for an unprintable four-letter word. The name that stuck came from Paul Stanley, who arrived at Kiss after thinking about Lips, the name of a band Criss had been in before.
The Kiss logo began as a felt-tip sketch by Ace Frehley. Paul Stanley then tightened it up with a technical pen and pushed it towards the look of a car badge. Frehley's own explanation is that Stanley had the steadier hand; Stanley's version is that the initial idea was good but not yet a finished design. The two accounts broadly agree.
The idea that the name stands for "Knights In Satan's Service" has followed the band for decades. There is nothing to it: Paul Stanley came up with the word and the other three liked it. In a 1977 Marvel Comics profile, Peter Criss explained the appeal in plain terms, pointing out that a kiss is the first thing you give anyone, that it can also mean the kiss of death, and that it is a strong word and easy to remember.
Before Kiss, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had a band called Wicked Lester. Their first move in starting the new group was to fire everyone else in it. The vacancies were then filled through classified advertisements placed in Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, which is how drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley both arrived.
Peter Criss got into Kiss through an advertisement he had placed himself in the 31 August 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, offering his services as an experienced rock drummer looking for an original band. When Gene Simmons phoned, he pressed Criss on how he dressed and how long his hair was. Criss turned up for the meeting in gold satin trousers and turquoise boots brought back from a honeymoon in England and Spain, and has said he was thrown when he realised that the plainly dressed pair waiting outside the studio were the men who had grilled him about clothes.
Ace Frehley's audition began badly. His mother drove him over with his 50-watt Marshall in the family Cadillac, he was in such a rush that he put on one orange and one red sneaker, and he steadied his nerves with two sixteen-ounce cans of beer before going upstairs. Nobody in the room was impressed by the sight of him. Then he started playing over "Deuce", and Simmons and Stanley looked at each other. Of roughly sixty guitarists auditioned, he was the only one who produced the sound they were after.
The four arrived at the idea of make-up on the night they went to see Alice Cooper. Gene Simmons and Peter Criss looked at each other as they left, and back at the loft the question became: what if there were four Alice Coopers? The Kiss characters grew out of that. Simmons has added a second push — he and Stanley bought two four-foot mirrors for fifteen dollars, and when they leaned them against the wall the slight bend gave them a funhouse reflection that suggested exactly the sort of face they wanted.
The star around Paul Stanley's eye was not there at the start. His original design was simply paint circled around the eye, and for a while he wore an actual mask instead. Ace Frehley has said that it was he who suggested dropping the circle in favour of a star. Stanley's own account is that the rest of his make-up stayed much the same while the element over his eye kept changing.
Kiss played their first show on 30 January 1973 at Coventry, a club in Queens, New York. Barely anyone came: by Lydia Criss's account the audience was her, Gene's girlfriend of the time and a friend, the road crew and the people who worked there. Three nights, Tuesday to Thursday, paid thirty dollars, and all of it went to the crew. Years later the band learned that the tall man in glasses watching from the back had been Joey Ramone.
The demo that launched Kiss was cut in a single day, on 13 March 1973, in Studio B at Electric Lady Studios in New York. One day was the condition engineer Eddie Kramer set, and he insisted on doing it the old way, on four-track. The five songs taped that day — "Deuce", "Cold Gin", "Strutter", "Watchin' You" and "Black Diamond" — went on to form the core of the first album. Kramer's stated aim was to catch the band at their rawest and resist embellishing it.
Kiss were the first act signed to Casablanca Records, and it happened because producer Kenny Kerner used to take home boxes of demo tapes from label boss Neil Bogart's office. Kerner played the Kiss tape Eddie Kramer had recorded on a Friday, was floored by it, and on Monday brought it back with the band's black-and-white photograph and told Bogart to sign them. Bogart replied that he could not sign them where he was, but that he was starting a new label — and Kiss became its first signing.
Late in 1973, Warner Brothers — Casablanca's distributor — asked whether Kiss would take the make-up off. Manager Bill Aucoin put the question to the band in the dressing room; by his account they looked baffled and asked what he thought, and when he said they should keep it, they agreed at once. Aucoin's answer to Warners was that the make-up was staying. Gene Simmons has since summed up the band's position as all or nothing: the make-up and the band, or neither.
Gene Simmons's fire-breathing made its stage debut on New Year's Eve 1973 at New York's Academy of Music — and that was the night his hair went up. Nobody had yet worked out that spraying your hair with hairspray amounts to soaking it in something flammable. The same show introduced another new trick, flash paper lobbed out over the crowd, and Simmons's aim was poor enough that it went off in a man's face. By Paul Stanley's account the man came backstage anyway, blistered, to tell them they were great.
Casablanca Records launched itself on 18 February 1974 with a $45,000 party at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Kiss set off so many smoke bombs there that some guests fled before the band had played a note. Label boss Neil Bogart had been uneasy about the make-up to begin with, but once he accepted it he set about making the spectacle larger still, pushing for an elevating drum riser and for fire-breathing as part of the act.
The first Kiss album was made fast: six days of recording and seven of mixing, with Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise producing. The routine was three basic tracks a day — drums, bass and two rhythm guitars — with Frehley overdubbing his solos afterwards and the last three days given over to vocals. What Kerner and Wise were after was the rawness of the band's live show, put straight onto tape.
The cover of the first album was shot by Joel Brodsky, the photographer behind The Doors' Strange Days and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. Four painted faces surrounded by darkness was the result, and Peter Criss's explanation of what they were reaching for is simple enough: they wanted it to look like Meet The Beatles.
"Strutter", the opening track of the first album, started life as a different song called "Stanley The Parrot". The title was not a dig at Paul Stanley: Gene Simmons had written it before the two men met, and it was one of the numbers he played for Stanley when they first got together in 1970. What caught Stanley's ear was a chord structure he thought would suit a Kiss song in the mould of the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar", and he rewrote the words around the glamour of the New York street.
"Cold Gin" was written by Ace Frehley, who put the words and music together in his head on a New York subway. He did not sing it, though. Gene Simmons's account is that he pressed Frehley to take the vocal, that Frehley refused and asked him to do it instead, and so a song about drinking ended up being sung by a man who has never touched alcohol. Simmons has also said that the song arrived unfinished — a great opening riff that went nowhere after the chorus — and that the middle riff section was his addition.
Paul Stanley wrote "Firehouse" while he was still at high school. By his own account he could not afford the British albums he wanted at the time, and the song came out of The Move's "Fire Brigade" — he took it and rewrote it. It was one of the five songs on the Eddie Kramer demo, and in concert it became the slot where Gene Simmons breathed fire.
"100,000 Years" started with a book Gene Simmons was reading, one arguing that the earth had been visited by aliens a hundred thousand years ago. He was working through Einstein's theory of relativity at the same time, and by his account all this space-and-time material was swirling around in his head. When he showed it to Paul Stanley the response was: what is a hundred thousand years? Simmons pushed to try it anyway, Stanley contributed material, and Simmons added the riff.
With the debut album selling poorly, Casablanca's Neil Bogart had Kiss record "Kissin' Time", an old Bobby Rydell hit from the fifties. It was added to the album in May 1974 and pushed hard, with regional kissing contests staged across the United States. It flopped anyway.
The first single Kiss ever released was "Nothin' To Lose". It did not chart, but it stayed in the live set right through the seventies. It also carries the first appearance by a musician from outside the band on a Kiss track: Bruce Foster played the piano on it. Foster was a member of Shark Frenzy, the first band Richie Sambora played in.
Hotter Than Hell was recorded in August 1974 at Village Recorders in Los Angeles, because producers Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise had moved their operation to the West Coast. The band spent the sessions homesick for New York and simultaneously indulging in everything California offered, and it was here that Gene Simmons says he first realised he had nothing socially in common with Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. Whatever the sunshine did for them, the record came out darker and heavier than the debut.
Shortly before the cover shoot for Hotter Than Hell, Ace Frehley crashed a car in Los Angeles. By his own telling he had been drinking, drove around the Hollywood Hills faster and faster, lost control and hit a telephone pole. The injuries were minor, but his doctor told him he could put make-up on only half his face, which is how he turned up to Norman Seeff's session. His image on the finished sleeve was completed by superimposition.
Two songs from Hotter Than Hell were later picked up by other bands. "Parasite", the heaviest thing on the record — written by Ace Frehley and sung by Gene Simmons — was covered by Anthrax, and "Goin' Blind", an uneasy ballad Simmons had written back in 1970, was covered by the Melvins. The title track itself was built on Free's "All Right Now".
Paul Stanley has volunteered where the riff in "Got To Choose" came from. A band called Boomerang, which included former members of Vanilla Fudge, used to play Wilson Pickett's "Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won't Do)", and Stanley is fairly sure that is the riff he used. He has also said it is one of his own favourite Kiss songs.
The third album, Dressed to Kill, was produced by Casablanca boss Neil Bogart himself, and the reason was political rather than musical. Rival labels had begun circling Kiss, a power struggle had opened up between Bogart and manager Bill Aucoin, and being in the studio with the band day after day kept them close to him. Bogart kept the production plain, and Ace Frehley's verdict on the result was that there is a lot of energy in the record.
Kiss were running short of songs when they made Dressed to Kill, having put out two albums in a year and toured constantly in between. To make up the numbers, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons went back to Wicked Lester and reworked "She" and "Love Her All I Can". Stanley's account of the pace is that the two of them wrote fast — start in the morning, and by the time the other two arrived at the studio there was a song.
The Dressed to Kill sleeve — four men in suits and full make-up standing on a street corner — was shot by Bob Gruen at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue. The suits were borrowed from manager Bill Aucoin, and the shoes on Gene Simmons's feet belonged to Gruen's wife.
"Rock and Roll All Nite" exists because the record company ordered it. At the end of 1974 the debut had sold 75,000 copies and Hotter Than Hell had stalled at number 100 in the US, and Casablanca's Neil Bogart told Paul Stanley in precise terms what the band needed: something the fans could rally behind, a song that said what Kiss stood for. The model he pointed to was Sly & the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher".
Paul Stanley wrote "Rock and Roll All Nite" in his room at the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard — the hotel guests had nicknamed the Riot House. He took out an acoustic guitar and, by his account, the chords, the melody and the line about wanting to rock and roll all night and party every day arrived almost without thought. What finished the song was an unfinished piece of Gene Simmons's called "Drive Me Wild", built on a car as an analogy for a woman: Simmons's verse was simply attached to Stanley's chorus.
"Rock and Roll All Nite" did not work as a studio single. Released in April 1975, it reached only number 68 in the US, and the album it came from did not move far either. What changed things was Alive!: the live version, taped at Cobo Hall in Detroit on 16 May 1975, was pulled as a single later that year, climbed to number 12 and gave Kiss their first substantial hit.
"C'mon and Love Me" is also the first Kiss song on which Paul Stanley played lead guitar; the solo at the top is him. Stanley has described the song as autobiographical rather than calculated — a straight purge of the life he was living at the time. He raised it while making a related point: as you get better at songwriting you can lose the free-association purity that produced the early material.
Alive! was a gamble made from a corner. By Gene Simmons's account Casablanca had no hits at the time and Kiss had not so much as a gold record, and they decided to make a live album anyway — a double one. Four shows were taped: Cobo Hall in Detroit on 16 May 1975, Cleveland on 21 June, Davenport, Iowa on 20 July and Wildwood, New Jersey on 23 July, with later work done at Electric Lady. Eddie Kramer produced.
Fin Costello, who shot the Alive! cover during rehearsals, also took the photograph on the back — two Detroit teenagers, Lee Neaves and Bruce Redoute, holding up a homemade Kiss banner with the empty expanse of Cobo Hall behind them. Redoute later described finding themselves on the sleeve when the album came out as astonishing, a dream come true.
The announcement that has opened Kiss shows for decades — you wanted the best and you got it, the hottest band in the land — was originally the voice of roadie J.R. Smalling. Pressed onto the start of Alive!, it became a permanent part of the band's furniture.
The title Destroyer came from outside the band entirely. Gene Simmons's account is that Howard Marks, then Kiss's business manager, reported back from a meeting that had failed to settle on a name: his son had overheard the discussion and suggested Destroyer. The four looked at each other and took it on the spot. Simmons's own preference had been Dynasty, a title the band would eventually use in 1979.
Pre-production was a new experience for Kiss when they made Destroyer; until then they had written songs, gone into a studio and recorded them. Bob Ezrin turned up to rehearsals with a whistle round his neck, called the band campers and was not above pointing a finger and shouting. Paul Stanley has called it musical boot camp — humiliating for a band who were selling out arenas, but they listened, he says, because Ezrin was right.
Click tracks did not exist in 1976, so Bob Ezrin brought in a cigar box. He put a microphone inside it and tapped it with a drumstick to hold the tempo. Peter Criss has described the album as brutally hard work — he went to the same primal therapy institute John Lennon had attended, having lost his grip on things — while also saying that Ezrin knew exactly how far each of them could be pushed.
The story in "Detroit Rock City" came from something that actually happened. Paul Stanley remembered that on an earlier tour someone had been hit by a car and killed outside the venue, and what struck him was the strangeness of dying on the way to a celebration of being alive. Bob Ezrin saw the theme in that and pushed him to finish the lyric. What emerged was the story of a kid who hears the news of his own death on the radio.
The voice reading the news bulletin about a fatal crash at the start of Destroyer is not Gene Simmons, whatever the internet says. It is producer Bob Ezrin. Engineer Corky Stasiak has explained the method: the voice was played through a small radio and re-recorded off it, so that on headphones the listener gets the eerie sense that the accident is happening to them.
The twin-guitar solo at the centre of "Detroit Rock City" was written by Bob Ezrin. He worked it out in his head as the music for the driving sequence, without picking up an instrument, and describes it as an old flamenco theme adapted to hard rock — his take on gladiator music. He then sang the passage note for note, harmony included, and had Ace Frehley learn it. Paul Stanley has since acknowledged that the drum pattern and the bassline were Ezrin's too.
The bassline under the verses of "Detroit Rock City" comes from outside hard rock altogether. Gene Simmons has called the part very untypical of him and thoroughly R&B, close in feel to Curtis Mayfield's "Freddie's Dead" — while adding that it is similar rather than the same thing note for note.
The third verse of "Detroit Rock City" has Paul Stanley singing about moving fast on 95. Interstate 95 runs through New York City; it does not go anywhere near Detroit, which is served by I-75. To paper over it, Kiss published the lyric as "movin' fast, doin' 95" — a speed rather than a highway.
"God of Thunder", the song most identified with Gene Simmons, was written by Paul Stanley — and written as his own theme song. He cut the demo, and when the band rehearsed it with Bob Ezrin the producer slowed it down, which Stanley liked. Then Ezrin said Simmons was going to sing it, and Stanley says he was floored. The band's rule was that the producer had the final say, so it stood; years later Stanley concedes it is a perfect Simmons song and that he could never have done with it what Simmons did.
The unsettling children's voices behind "God of Thunder" belong to Bob Ezrin's sons. David, then nine, and Josh, then four, came to spend an afternoon at the Record Plant wearing a futuristic walkie-talkie set their father had bought them in Paris — a space helmet for one, a handset for the other. Ezrin miked the helmet and had them make monster noises, intending to pitch the result down afterwards; it was strange enough as it was, so it stayed unaltered. The boys were already veterans, having been recorded for a Lou Reed album three years earlier.
The hook of "Shout It Out Loud" predates Kiss. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had played the Hollies' "I Wanna Shout" in Wicked Lester, and Simmons brought the phrase back in the form of "shout it, shout it, shout it out loud". When Ezrin and Stanley asked him shout what, exactly, his answer was that it did not matter. The song itself came together at Bob Ezrin's New York apartment, three men around a piano, in about half an hour, with the answering vocals aimed squarely at the Motown call-and-response of the Four Tops.
"King Of The Night Time World" on Destroyer is not a Kiss original. It belonged to a Los Angeles band called the Hollywood Stars and was brought to Kiss by the scene fixer Kim Fowley. Co-writer Mark Anthony's account is that he wrote the music, Fowley supplied the lyrical ideas, and Bob Ezrin then rang up asking what had become of the song, passed a tape to Paul Stanley, and Stanley rewrote some of the words and rearranged it. Fowley also has a co-writing credit on "Do You Love Me" from the same album.
The title "Flaming Youth" has nothing to do with the British band of that name that Phil Collins drummed for. Gene Simmons's account is that Kiss opened for a New York band called Flaming Youth at their first show at the New York Academy of Music, and when he mentioned this to Bob Ezrin the producer seized on the phrase and declared they would write a song around it. The song itself was assembled from fragments, its riff taken from another Simmons piece called "Mad Dog".
"Beth" began as a song called "Beck", and it predates Kiss. It was written with Stan Penridge, guitarist in Chelsea, the band Peter Criss played in between 1970 and 1972. In a 2000 interview with KissFAQ, Penridge explained that the lyric is essentially a transcript: another guitarist's wife kept phoning during rehearsals, and Penridge spent three or four days noting down the husband's replies in a small notebook he kept for stray phrases.
The version of "Beth" Bob Ezrin first heard was not a ballad. By his account it was bouncier and more swaggering — a man telling his partner he was not coming home because the band mattered more. Ezrin went back to his apartment on 52nd Street, sat at the piano, and the melody that came out made him realise it was a very sad song: why is he not going home, when he knows he is breaking her heart? Recast as a ballad, it suited Peter Criss's smoky voice exactly. The rest of the band felt it was not representative of Kiss; Ezrin simply knew it was a hit.
"Beth" became a hit because radio stations flipped the record over. When "Detroit Rock City" went out to them in July 1976 as the third single from Destroyer, a great many of them played the ballad on the B-side instead. The label swapped the sides soon afterwards, and "Beth" climbed to number seven in the US to become the biggest commercial hit of the band's career.
There is an uncredited guitarist on Destroyer. Bob Ezrin called in his old associate Dick Wagner, a Detroit session player, to cover the parts Ace Frehley was not around to play: the solo on "Sweet Pain", the closing figures on "Flaming Youth" and the acoustic guitar on "Beth". Wagner said he did all his work on the album in two days, and put the lack of a credit down to the fact that bands like Kiss and Aerosmith wanted it to look as though they played everything themselves.
The Destroyer sleeve was meant to be a Frank Frazetta. Gene Simmons has said he telephoned Frazetta, the artist behind the Conan the Barbarian covers, asking for a painting in that style with no guitars or drums in it — just the four of them standing as superheroes. Frazetta's fee was too high, so the job went to Ken Kelly, a relative of his.
Two paintings of the Destroyer cover exist. Manager Bill Aucoin's account is that the first oil was simply not dynamic enough, so the artist was sent back to do it again; Ken Kelly's second attempt is the image everyone knows. A separate account of the same episode records that the first painting had the four of them in the wrong costumes.
The black Gibson Firebird Paul Stanley holds on the cover of Alive! was destroyed during the Destroyer sessions. Engineer Corky Stasiak's account is that the band were demonstrating the new album for Casablanca executives, a vocal overdub was called for, and he pulled at a headphone cable that was still threaded through the guitar strap. The guitar toppled and the neck snapped at the nut. Stasiak has said Stanley was very gracious about it, and that he still feels terrible.
Another Peter Criss vocal was recorded for Destroyer and left off. "Ain't None Of Your Business" was a hard rock number, and Bob Ezrin's explanation for dropping it is that it was not as sophisticated as the rest and did not belong on the record. The song had been written by Michael Des Barres during his time with the band Monarch, and it stayed unreleased until the 45th anniversary box set appeared in late November 2021.
The closing montage on Destroyer is there to fill time. What the band and Bob Ezrin had built ran to under thirty-five minutes, and the collage was added to make up the length; with the years it has come to sound like a natural part of the record. Ezrin, incidentally, did not care for the album's title, thinking Destroyer sounded negative — Paul Stanley's view was that it was too good not to use, and his view prevailed.
What Bob Ezrin set out to change on Destroyer was the audience itself. By his account Kiss at that point reached fifteen-year-old boys and nobody else, which was a ceiling. He put it to them through The Wild One: Lee Marvin's character is bad all the way through, while there is something vulnerable and human about Marlon Brando's, which is why the girl falls for him. Right now, he told them, you are Lee Marvin. The pivot in that argument was "Beth", remade as a ballad.
For the early dates of the 1976 Destroyer tour, Kiss put a genuine film prop on stage: the lightning machine from the laboratory set of Universal's 1931 Frankenstein. Designed by Ken Strickfaden, it was a giant Tesla coil that threw off coloured electrical beams, and the band called it the God Of Thunder Machine. It was cumbersome and unreliable, and was dropped before long.
The polish of Destroyer did not go down well with the band's own audience — Gene Simmons's summary is that the fans hated it. So Rock and Roll Over, eight months later, set out to strip the fancy work away and get back to what Paul Stanley called the primitive quality of Alive!. It was recorded in a disused theatre, the Star Theatre in Nanuet, New York, with Eddie Kramer, who had produced Alive!, and the room's own ambience suited the crunchier songs.
"Hard Luck Woman" was not written for Kiss. Paul Stanley had Rod Stewart in mind when he wrote it; the band recorded it themselves in the end, with Peter Criss singing it in something very close to Stewart's manner, and it became another hit for them.
The title "Calling Dr. Love" came off a television set showing the Three Stooges. Gene Simmons's account is that he had been refining an unloved song called "Bad Bad Lovin'" when a scene jumped out at him: the Stooges sneaking into a hospital in surgical gear and running from room to room paging Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard over the public address system. He rewrote the chorus around a Dr Love with a peculiar way of injecting his patients.
The backing vocal on "Calling Dr. Love" is Katey Sagal, later known as Peg Bundy in Married with Children and Gemma in Sons of Anarchy. At the time she was an aspiring singer waiting tables, and the connection began when Gene Simmons walked into the restaurant where she worked. Her own band, The Group With No Name, was signed to Casablanca Records in 1976 after Simmons pulled some strings.
"Love Gun" was written on a flight to Japan. By Paul Stanley's account the whole thing was composed in his head, and he had to play it after landing just to confirm it worked. He has called it the song he most enjoys performing and one of the five that best define Kiss. Asked what it is about, he had a ready answer: a love gun is the gun you are born with, and it never comes off.
The bass on the title track of Love Gun is played by Paul Stanley, not Gene Simmons, and the keyboards are played by the album's producer, Eddie Kramer.
The title "Christine Sixteen" started as a jibe. Gene Simmons was ribbing Paul Stanley for writing nothing but songs about girls and love, and invented a title on the spot as an example of the type — Christine Sixteen. Then he realised the title he had made up to mock his bandmate was rather good, and went away and wrote the song.
The demo of "Christine Sixteen" had Eddie and Alex Van Halen playing on it. Gene Simmons brought the brothers in during 1977 to work up demo material for Love Gun, and the solo that ended up on the album is Ace Frehley reproducing, note for note, what Eddie had played. Simmons had financed and produced Van Halen's first demo tape the year before.
"Shock Me" came out of Ace Frehley nearly being electrocuted. On 12 December 1976, at a show in Lakeland, Florida, he touched the metal railing of an improperly grounded set, current went through him and he fell to the floor unconscious. He came round and finished the show with no feeling in his hands. Someone suggested he write a song about it, and he did.
"Shock Me" is the first Kiss album track with Ace Frehley on lead vocals, and he sang it lying flat on his back. Asked about it by Dimebag Darrell in Guitar World in 1992 — was it to help him reach the high notes? — Frehley said no: he was nervous and did not want anybody watching him sing, so he had producer Eddie Kramer dim the lights and lay down out of sight.
Love Gun is the first Kiss album on which all four members sing lead, and it is also the last on which the full original line-up plays on every track. On Alive II, Ace Frehley is missing from most of the newly recorded studio material, and by 1979's Dynasty, Peter Criss appears on a single song.
Alive II, released in 1977, had three live sides and a fourth of newly recorded studio material. Ace Frehley barely played on that studio side: apart from his own "Rocket Ride", his place was taken by Bob Kulick, a friend of the band who had auditioned for the guitarist's job back in 1973. The substitution was not made public at the time.
In May 1978 Kiss began filming the television movie Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park, pitched to them by Hanna-Barbera as Star Wars meets A Hard Day's Night. The shoot went badly. By Gene Simmons's account Peter Criss and Ace Frehley sometimes failed to appear on set, and Criss's speech was judged so indistinct that an actor was brought in to dub all of his dialogue — which infuriated him. Paul Stanley's memory is that everyone kept telling them how great it would be while they were making it, and then they saw it.
The four simultaneous Kiss solo albums of 1978 were a device for keeping the band together. Gene Simmons's account is that Ace Frehley and Peter Criss were threatening to leave, and manager Bill Aucoin improvised on the spot: why not each make a solo record? They would be solo albums and Kiss albums at the same time. Neil Bogart, who liked a big idea, then decided to put all four out on one day with the Kiss logo in the top left corner.
The four solo albums went on sale together on 18 September 1978, each with cover art painted by Eraldo Carugati and behind a promotional campaign worth $2.5 million, and all four were declared to be shipping platinum. Each record carried a dedication to the other three members, and none of the four played on anybody's album but his own.
A joke about the four solo albums hardened into received wisdom: they shipped platinum and came back double platinum. Returns did happen — one account records an administrative error that sent too many copies to shops, with thousands coming back unsold. Gene Simmons, however, told Classic Rock that every one of the four sold at least a million. Two assessments of the same episode stand side by side.
Gene Simmons's solo album stood apart from the other three for the company he kept on it: Joe Perry, Bob Seger, Donna Summer and Cher, who was his girlfriend at the time. His ambitions ran further still — John Lennon and Paul McCartney were on his wish list and did not appear. He recorded "When You Wish Upon A Star" from Disney's Pinocchio and cried while singing it. Simmons himself has since called the record disjointed.
Of the four solo albums, the one that sold best was Ace Frehley's. It was carried by a cover of "New York Groove", written by Russ Ballard and already a hit in Britain for Hello, which reached the US Top 20, and it was produced by Eddie Kramer. The success went to Frehley's head by his own admission: it opened his eyes, made him a little cocky, and planted the idea that he would eventually go his own way.
Most of the drumming on 1979's Dynasty is not Peter Criss. He had been badly injured in a car crash the previous year, and with that and his drug use he was in no condition — or no mood — to play. He wrote and appeared on one track, "Dirty Livin'"; the rest was played by the South African session drummer Anton Fig, who did the same job again on Unmasked the following year.
"I Was Made for Lovin' You" was written to prove how easy it was to write a disco song. According to the book KISS: Behind the Mask, Paul Stanley set out to do exactly that with the songwriter Desmond Child and producer Vini Poncia. It sold over a million copies and became a concert fixture. The direction of Dynasty as a whole owed something to the band's nights at Studio 54 in Manhattan.
"I Was Made for Lovin' You" also broke down a resistance to rock bands working with professional songwriters. In a Songfacts interview, Desmond Child explained that bands of the period would co-write among themselves, and might let a producer in, but bringing in an outside writer was thought to look like an admission that they could not write their own material. It was Child's first hit as a writer, and it opened the door: the next band he worked with was Bon Jovi, and on their first day together they wrote "You Give Love A Bad Name".
Paul Stanley has told Songfacts where the melody of "I Was Made for Lovin' You" came from: he lifted the hook from The Four Tops' "Standing In The Shadows Of Love", and says you can hear it if you put the two side by side. Peter Criss is not the drummer on it either. He appears on the album cover and in the video, but the part was played by the session player Anton Fig.
Only one member of Kiss actually plays on "Shandi" from Unmasked: Paul Stanley, who sang it and played all the guitars. The drums are Anton Fig, the bass is Tom Harper, a Kiss roadie, and the keyboards are the professional songwriter Holly Knight. Stanley wrote it with producer Vini Poncia, who also sang backing vocals. It reached number 47 in the US but did far better in the southern hemisphere, peaking at number 5 in Australia and number 6 in New Zealand.
The last time Peter Criss appeared as a member of Kiss was in the video for "Shandi". He does not play on the recording, but all four members are in the film. He left the band in 1980 to begin a solo career.
When Eric Carr replaced Peter Criss in May 1980, management had a character ready for him: The Hawk. The effect was not what anyone intended. Carr later said he looked like Chicken Man — like a big chicken — and in the end he came up with a persona of his own, The Fox.
The story behind Music from "The Elder" was a piece of fiction Gene Simmons wrote during a stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. His own summary of it: the Elder are a life-form without bodies, benevolent but committed to the balance of opposites, and when darkness grows too strong a hero is born to restore the balance. When the band started writing at Ace Frehley's home studio in Connecticut, Bob Ezrin set the narrative out on a blackboard.
Lou Reed has a co-writing credit on Music from "The Elder". He was brought in on Bob Ezrin's recommendation and worked on two songs, "Mr. Blackwell" and "A World Without Heroes".
Music from "The Elder" was recorded at Bob Ezrin's studio on a farmstead outside Toronto. Gene Simmons remembers it as the dead of winter with nothing outside but ducks and horse manure. One person was largely absent from the sessions: Ace Frehley hated the concept, and in the end recorded a single song for the album, "Dark Light".
Music from "The Elder" was conceived as the soundtrack to a film that was never made; Gene Simmons has said a deal was close, with actors attached, before it disappeared into development. Worse, the running order was altered shortly before release, which made an already tangled story impossible to follow. It became the first Kiss album to fail to go gold in the United States. Simmons's own verdict is blunt: it was the one time the band chased critical approval, and they lost their minds doing it.
To fill the gap left by Ace Frehley, Kiss auditioned somewhere around eighty guitarists. One of them was Richie Sambora, later of Bon Jovi, who recalled that they liked how he played but kept naming songs and asking whether he knew this one or that one — and he did not know any of them. Another contender was Eddie Van Halen, unhappy in his own band at the time and keen to join; Gene Simmons and Alex Van Halen talked him out of it.
What steadied Kiss around Killers and Creatures of the Night was outside songwriters. Adam Mitchell, a Canadian, was brought in by producer Michael James Jackson, and by his account the brief was blunt: enough of the concept album, let's write some good Kiss rock and roll songs. Of the four new songs on Killers, "Down On Your Knees" was co-written with a then-young Canadian writer named Bryan Adams.
Ace Frehley is on the cover of Creatures of the Night but not on the record. He had already made clear he was finished with the band by the time the sessions began, and the guitar work was divided among several players: Vinnie Vincent, Bob Kulick, Robben Ford and Steve Farris, who later joined Mr. Mister. The riff in the middle of the title track was played by the song's co-writer, Adam Mitchell.
Vinnie Vincent joined Kiss officially at the end of 1982, but as a salaried, non-voting member. He was given a character, The Wizard, and a stage name: his own suggestion, Mick Fury, was rejected in favour of Vinnie Vincent. In the official biography Behind The Mask he described the difficulty of taking the place of someone the fans genuinely loved, and said he had no wish to replace anybody. His stage debut with the band was in Bismarck, North Dakota, in December 1982.
In June 1983 Kiss played the largest show of their career, at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Gene Simmons has put the crowd at somewhere between 190,000 and 210,000 and described it as looking like a nation. Back home the picture was the opposite: the American tour of the same period was playing to half-empty halls. Something had to change, and what changed was the make-up.
Kiss showed their faces to the world in September 1983, on MTV, at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night. One by one, four faces hidden for a decade appeared under studio lights. Paul Stanley has said the day was anticlimactic for him: the mystique had belonged to the original four, and with that line-up gone the unmasking was a good press angle and not much more.
Kiss had already been photographed without make-up nine years before the 1983 unveiling. The man who managed it was Charlie Auringer, art director at the rock magazine Creem, who told the band their management had approved the shoot. Management had not. Creem nonetheless agreed not to publish the pictures, leaving the carefully built mystique intact.
Taking the make-up off was Paul Stanley's idea, and he first raised it during Creatures of the Night. Gene Simmons said no. The band worked on the principle that if one member did not want to do something, they did not do it, so it was dropped. For Simmons the Demon was a persona he let out on stage, and giving it up was not simple. The question came back during the recording of Lick It Up, and he held out until almost the last moment: standing for photographs, he thought they looked like every other band, then saw a shot of himself with his tongue out and decided that some link to the old Kiss would survive. He closed his eyes and agreed to try it.
The video Kiss made for "Lick It Up" immediately after unmasking was the first of theirs that MTV picked up. The song was written by Paul Stanley and Vinnie Vincent, and the film is set in what looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. At its MTV premiere in September 1983 it opened on a shot of the four men's legs, stretching out the reveal a little longer.
The "Lick It Up" single came out on 18 September 1983, the same day as the album. It was a landmark day for Kiss, the first on which they appeared in public without make-up or costumes; on the sleeve they look like four ordinary men, at least by rock band standards. They did promotional appearances that day too, and the attention pushed the album's sales.
Animalize is the only Kiss album featuring Mark St. John. Chosen as Vinnie Vincent's replacement, he lasted eight months. A form of arthritis swelled the knuckles of his left hand, his knee and his Achilles tendon badly enough that he needed a cane at one point, and two songs on the album are not him. His last show with Kiss was on 29 November 1984 in Binghamton, New York. He died in 2007, aged 51.
Animalize was effectively finished by Paul Stanley alone. Gene Simmons was giving his time to film and television work, so Stanley took over production. Getting parts out of guitarist Mark St. John was its own problem: Stanley would send him home to construct a solo, and the next day he would play a completely different one, so Stanley ended up singing solos to him or simply playing them himself. Simmons has since acknowledged that he had taken his eye off the band in this period.
Bruce Kulick came into Kiss by an unusual route. The younger brother of Bob Kulick, who had played uncredited sessions for the band, he had known Paul Stanley since the late seventies through his brother. When Mark St. John's health failed during Animalize, Kulick was called in as an extra pair of hands and played on two tracks. During that work Stanley told him not to cut his hair, and Kulick took the hint. His first show with Kiss was in Brighton on 30 September 1984; he was so nervous he barely moved, and was nicknamed Spruce Goose on the spot. The call confirming him as a member came that December, and he stayed for ten years.
"Crazy Crazy Nights", the lead single from Crazy Nights, was written by Paul Stanley with the professional songwriter Adam Mitchell. In the 2011 book The Eric Carr Story, Mitchell said he had been happy with their demo: the backing vocals, a crowd singing along, came out enormous, and that crowd was the whole point of the song. In his view Ron Nevison's mix left the crowd out of it, and he did not care for the result — nor, he believes, did Stanley, though Stanley did not say so at the time.
Kiss's real breakthrough in Britain did not happen in the seventies but in the eighties. In 1987 "Crazy Crazy Nights", the song that opens the Crazy Nights album, reached number 4 on the UK singles chart — eleven years after "Rock and Roll All Nite" and "Beth" had made them a household name in America.
Hot in the Shade, released in 1989, is the only album in the band's career with outside co-writers on every track. Paul Stanley wrote "Forever" with Michael Bolton and "Hide Your Heart" with Desmond Child and Holly Knight. Bolton is best known for ballads, but he had a rock pedigree, having worked earlier under his real name, Michael Bolotin.
"Forever" reached number 8 in the US, the band's highest-charting single after "Beth". It arrived when Guns N' Roses were on the charts with "Patience" and Extreme with "More Than Words", a moment when a hard rock act could put out a heartfelt love song and be played everywhere. The video, directed by Mark Rezyka, is a plain performance piece in a room and gives a good look at Kiss in their unmasked years.
The bass on "Forever", the biggest hit from Hot in the Shade, is not Gene Simmons but the band's guitarist, Bruce Kulick. The album was co-produced by Stanley and Simmons and built by overdubbing onto demos, a method Kulick disliked: with the two of them producing, he says, you get compromise — I like that song of yours but not that one. Stanley's own summary is that they were a ship without a captain.
Eric Carr was found to have a tumour in his heart in 1990 and died on 24 November 1991, the same day as Freddie Mercury. In looking for a replacement, Stanley and Simmons considered Aynsley Dunbar, the veteran who had played with everyone from David Bowie to Journey, but decided he was too high-profile. The job went to Eric Singer, who had played in Stanley's late-eighties solo band and had already stood in for Carr on the version of "God Gave Rock And Roll To You" recorded for the 1991 film Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.
Revenge, released in 1992, was built to push Kiss back towards basics, with Bob Ezrin producing for the third time. The surprise was in the credits: Vinnie Vincent, who had left the band acrimoniously in 1983 and spent years trading insults with his former employers, co-wrote three of its songs, among them the lead single "Unholy". The closing drum solo, "Carr Jam 1981", was a tribute to Eric Carr, who had died the previous year, and the album as a whole was dedicated to him.
Carnival of Souls: The Final Sessions began life as a grunge record. In 1994 Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons met Toby Wright, who had produced Alice in Chains; by Wright's account they wanted to follow the trend of the moment and, like any artist, to sell records. The album was nearly finished when Simmons took a call offering a large sum for the original line-up to put the make-up back on. Wright says everyone in the room knew, the moment the words came out, that they were done. The record was shelved and finally appeared in 1997.
The four original members of Kiss shared a stage again on 9 August 1995, at MTV Unplugged, where Ace Frehley and Peter Criss joined the line-up of Stanley, Simmons, Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer. It was the only occasion on which Frehley and Criss played alongside Kulick and Singer, and the only time the four founders ever performed together without make-up. What happened that night set the full reunion in motion.
The return of the original Kiss was announced to the world by an unlikely figure. On 28 February 1996, presenting at the 38th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Tupac Shakur quieted the room, said the ceremony needed something different, something surprising, and brought the four of them out. It was the first time Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss had stood on a stage together in full costume in seventeen years. They said very little, and did not need to.
The reunion press conference was held on an aircraft carrier. On 16 April 1996, Kiss invited journalists aboard the USS Intrepid, docked off Manhattan, to announce the first shows the original four would play in costume since 1979. The opening night was set for the 50,000-capacity Tiger Stadium in Detroit. In his autobiography, Gene Simmons wrote that they were not sure they would sell it out: tickets went on sale on a Friday night, manager Doc McGhee rang at six the next morning with good news and bad news, and the bad news was that there were no tickets left to sell. The stadium had gone in under an hour.
Psycho Circus was sold as the reunion album of the original four, but there is only one track on which all four actually play together: "Into The Void", sung by Ace Frehley. Engineer Mike Plotnikoff has said the decision to use outside musicians came from producer Bruce Fairbairn. Peter Criss's drum parts were played by session man Kevin Valentine, much of the guitar was played by Tommy Thayer — who would eventually replace Frehley — and Bruce Kulick contributed to a couple of songs. Frehley's own account is simply that he was not invited to the sessions.
The Psycho Circus tour, which began in 1998, was the first rock concert staged in 3-D. Audiences were handed glasses and told to put them on at particular points in the show to see the effects on the video screens. Several tons of pyrotechnics went up every night.
Tommy Thayer first put on the Spaceman costume long before he officially joined. During a show in California on the Farewell tour, Ace Frehley failed to turn up on time, and Thayer — then the band's tour manager — was made up and dressed and ready to go on in his place. Paul Stanley's account is that Frehley walked into the dressing room about twenty minutes before showtime, looked at Thayer standing there fully made up with his guitar on, and said only: oh, hey Tommy, how you doing?
Kiss were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, fifteen years after they first became eligible — and they did not play at the ceremony, because the Hall would not recognise Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer, the members of the band at the time. In a Songfacts interview, Gene Simmons explained his objection by inverting it: suppose he had a hall of fame of his own and honoured you there, and told you to bring your whole family, but only the first girlfriend you ever went out with — no wife, no children. How would you feel about that?
In 1975 the high school football team in Cadillac, Michigan was going nowhere. Their coach, Jim Neff, started playing Kiss albums on the team bus and in the locker rooms, and the Vikings finished the season with seven straight wins and a conference title. Neff wrote to the band's management to tell them, and the story took an unlikely turn: Kiss came to Cadillac, played a show on campus and took part in the town's homecoming parade. A street was later named Kiss Boulevard, and the band were given the key to the city.
In 1977 Marvel Comics published a Kiss comic book whose red ink was said to contain some of the band's blood. The merchandising did not stop there: in 2001 production began on the Kiss Kasket, a coffin bearing photographs and autographs of the original members. Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, murdered in December 2004, was buried in one — Kiss were his favourite band and Ace Frehley his favourite guitarist, and "Cold Gin", the song he loved best, was played at his funeral.
Kiss played the final show of the End Of The Road tour at Madison Square Garden in New York on 2 December 2023, and left the stage during the encore. What appeared in their place was Kiss as digital avatars, performing "God Gave Rock And Roll To You". The avatars were created by Industrial Light & Magic and financed and produced by Pophouse Entertainment, the Swedish company behind ABBA Voyage in London. Paul Stanley told the crowd that the end of the road is the beginning of another road, and that the band was not going anywhere.
The part of the Future Villain Band in the 1978 film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was offered to Kiss first. They turned it down, worried about what playing the villains might do to their image. The role went to Aerosmith instead.
Paul Stanley was born with no hearing in his right ear. Speaking to CNN in 2011 he described the condition as a Level 3 microtia, a congenital malformation of the cartilage of the outer ear that occurs in roughly one in every 8,000 to 10,000 births. There is no ear canal and no direct path into the inner ear, so apart from bone conduction he is effectively deaf on that side. He has used an implanted hearing aid.
Who actually wrote "Beth" is a question with two answers standing side by side. Peter Criss, credited as a co-writer, says the melody came to him on a train into New York and that he and Stan Penridge finished it, with Bob Ezrin changing the title from "Beck" to "Beth". Paul Stanley told Rolling Stone in 2014 that Penridge wrote very nearly all of it and that Criss contributed very little. The song is the biggest hit of the band's career, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.
Vinnie Vincent's time in Kiss ended with the Lick It Up tour. At a show at the LA Forum he deliberately stretched out his guitar solo, leaving Paul Stanley waiting at the side of the stage for his cue, and the two men reportedly came close to a fight in the dressing room afterwards. Speaking in 1985, shortly after his departure, Vincent said he had not been living up to his potential and that Lick It Up showed perhaps a quarter of what he was capable of. Stanley has since confirmed plainly that he was fired.
Peter Criss left Kiss for the second time in the middle of a tour. At the end of a show in North Charleston, South Carolina, he wrecked his kit, sending a large tom rolling towards an unsuspecting Paul Stanley. He quit the tour and the band that night, and Eric Singer — the man he had replaced in the line-up and who had replaced him before — finished the dates. Criss returned for another tour in 2002 and departed for the third and final time in 2004.
Sonic Boom, released in 2009, was the first Kiss studio album in eleven years. It marked Tommy Thayer's studio debut with the band, and he sang lead on one track; Eric Singer did the same on another. Paul Stanley's line on the title was that it suited a record that was earth-shaking and deafening.
Eric Carr was, by Bruce Kulick's account, the most fan-friendly member of Kiss. He answered every piece of fan mail he received and sometimes telephoned the people who wrote to him. Kulick recalls him signing autographs outside a hotel in freezing weather because the fans waiting for him were not allowed into the lobby.
The Cynthia Plaster Caster of "Plaster Caster" was a real person. It began with a University of Illinois assignment to cast something solid in plaster that would hold its shape, and she and her friends arrived at a method involving musicians. In 2014 she told Songfacts that she had not been thrilled when the song was first pointed out to her, because it looked designed to suggest that Gene Simmons had been cast, which he never was. By the time the Lemonheads covered it, though, she had come round to the tune, and said she was all right with it.