KISS
by Graeme Virtue © Sunday Herald
How does one gauge the true greatness of a rock group? Is it the length of their career, or the length of their bassist's tongue? By either measure, Kiss are sitting pretty. As a band, they've been rocking for 36 years; as a brand, they've been raking it in for almost as long. But for all their longevity, Kiss remain a queer proposition: iconic but cartoonish, successful but hardly influential.
Sniffy rock classicists will tell you that when the band first stomped on to the scene in 1974, they were just a New York Dolls knockoff with an eye on the bottom line and a hand in Alice Cooper's make-up case, and that precious little has changed since.
Has there ever been anything of import or substance underneath the goofy image? I've been dimly aware of them for all my musical life - dressed for kabuki and obsessed with nookie, Kiss are hard to miss - but have never consciously listened to one of their albums. With the band about to embark on their first arena tour of Europe in 11 years, it seems appropriate to take a belated Kiss krash kourse.
Thanks to online streaming music service Spotify, it's possible to listen to their entire discography chronologically, if one were so inclined. Long-standing acolytes proudly call themselves the Kiss Army. So consider this national service.
Kiss have released almost as many greatest hits packages as actual studio albums, so I decide to ignore the many cash-in compilations and, in the interests of sanity, skip over the four solo albums released by founder members Paul Stanley (Starchild), Gene Simmons (The Demon), Ace Frehley (The Spaceman) and Peter Criss (The Catman) on the same day in 1978. That still leaves 21 platters: 265 tracks that, in total, will last for almost 18 hours. That's a lot of priapic rock to ingest. I decide to spread it out over a few days just to be safe.
From the off, the band seem remarkably fully formed: Strutter, the song that opens their debut album Kiss (1974), functions as a scuzzy statement of intent, a lustful groove exalting a sassy streetwalker. Other tracks like Nothin' To Lose and Kissin' Time are early indicators of what would develop into a career-long aversion to employing a "g" when an apostrophe could be used instead. What's mostly missing from these early records - stacked with gilded bar-boogie riffs - is any sense of the ersatz gothic I've always associated with Kiss. Despite their outlandish appearance, they're singing about cheap girls and cheaper booze instead of hellfire and devil worship.
After three rapid-fire studio albums, Kiss put out Alive! (1975), the record credited with making live albums a genuine commercial proposition. Kissologists still debate over how live Alive! actually is, but the hysterical crowd noise remains a vital part of the overall sound. Even streamed through a laptop, something of the communal tension and excitement of a pros per stadium gig bleeds through. I'm starting to walk with a bit more of a strut, even if it's just to make a cup of green tea.
By the time I hit Alive II (1977), I've swaggered through another three albums-worth of horndog rock, even if a touch of one-joke grotesquery has crept into the songwriting. On Rock And Roll Over (1976), boisterous tracks like Calling Dr Love and Mr Speed make me cringe rather than grin (does anyone really want to be called Mr Speed by the ladies?). Miraculously, the single-entendre title track from Love Gun (1977) manages to be thrilling rather than cloying, thanks to a highly dramatic chorus that sounds even more urgent than The Final Countdown. Eight albums down and my sanity remains intact.
Day two starts, confusingly, with disco. I Was Made For Lovin' You from Dynasty (1979) is still one of Kiss's best-known songs, and has a certain hysterical urgency, if perhaps a bit too much falsetto. There's a tangible sense of overproduction creeping into the music, where half-ideas for songs (such as X-Ray Eyes, "the better to see through your lies") are bolstered and Botoxed in the studio. Despite various personnel changes within the band during this period, there's also a distinct lack of personality. Many of the tracks from Dynasty and its follow-up Unmasked (1980) shimmer and gleam, but slide right over my consciousness.
The self-serious concept album Music From The Elder (1981) stands out stylistically, with hot orchestral flashes and a garbled sword-and-sorcery storyline. It makes me want to watch Conan The Barbarian, which illuminates the problem of committing all your time to Kiss consumption. Watching television or movies is out. Reading is difficult, because if good fiction can be defined as the never-ending attempt to escape cliché, Kiss are often barrelling headlong in the opposite direction. Their 1980s mid-tempo throb doesn't even fade into the background thanks to lyrical bombs that can make you sit bolt upright. Did Gene Simmons really just threaten to "dance all over your face" (a song title that might even give AC/DC pause)? Or suggest that he wanted to "put that log in the fireplace" (from Burn Bitch Burn).
At least Kiss can inject some whip and snap into boring chores like washing up and floor-mopping: crazy, crazy wipes. I end up spending most of the day in the kitchen. The propulsive Lick It Up (1983) is talismanic to fans as the album where Kiss ditched the make-up, but will forever be associated in my mind with the preparation of some excellent honeyed carrot soup. I only get as far as Animalize (1984) before a breakdown in the Spotify service brings me to a premature halt. I'm slightly worried to only be a decade into their career, although that amounts to 15 albums. I feel slightly stupider, but also pleasantly frisky.
"This is my music, it makes me proud, these are my people, this is my crowd," is the rousing start to day three. Depending on your point of view, Crazy, Crazy Nights - the single and 1987 album - represents the permed peak or vulgar trough of Kiss's career. What began as cheerfully disreputable rock had morphed into chintzy pop metal. Listening to Hot In The Shade (their 1989 album notable only for being unavailable on Spotify, which at least gets me out of the house), it's impossible not to imagine oneself as part of a triumphant sports movie training montage. Traditionally, time moves faster in a montage, but the endless widdly-widdly guitar solos and shouted choruses are beginning to drag. All the late-night tomcatting also seems to have caught up on the band, drastically slowing their musical output (in the past 20 years, they've only released three studio albums).
Knowing that the end of the Kissathon is looming actually improves the experience of Psycho Circus (1998), although it's a stodgy mix of Marilyn Manson-apeing psycho-sleaze and gloopy ballads. Which brings me, finally, to Sonic Boom, their 2009 comeback album and apparently a conscious attempt to return to the 1970s glory days. (This is reflected by Gene Simmons boasting about his "tower of power" during Hot And Cold.)
By this stage, I am experiencing ambivalence. But the second half of Sonic Boom features a stealthy greatest hits set, re-recorded by the current touring line-up. Ending the experiment by listening to such faithful versions of past triumphs elevates much of what's gone before, and helps percolate my perception of Kiss as monolithic, ardent and possibly everlasting. It's a cold heart indeed that doesn't feel a jolt of primal pleasure from hearing Detroit Rock City. But three whole days of Kiss isn't advisable. By the end of it, I feel animalistic, overstimulated and exhausted - like a werewolf who lives on the moon.