Kiss

by Robert Duncan

It seems a shame that no one has bothered to review this good, early biography of the band. It was published in 1978, right at the height of the band's popularity. Kiss had only existed for about four years at the time, and much of Robert Duncan's work is devoted to the years the band labored in obscurity, attempting to make a name for themselves. There are individual biorgraphys for each of the original band members, and the albums through Love Gun are all reviewed. Duncan seems to have spent lots of time with the band, and his knowledge of events during these key years is pretty extensive. My only quibble with his work comes in the reviews section. For several notable songs, he completely misidentifies the source of the song's vocal. For instance, he credits Paul Stanley with the vocals for the album versions of both "Cold Gin" and "Strange Ways," when they were actually done by Gene Simmons and Peter Criss, respectively. Since the band members repeated their individual vocal performances in concert, this mix up is inexplicable. Never-the-less, this remains a strong work and it is an excellent source of information about the early years of this classic band.

Genres: Music

Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

At 22, Robert Duncan was managing editor of the renowned Creem magazine, working in Detroit alongside Lester Bangs. He has contributed to Rolling Stone, Circus, Life and many other publications. His previous books include The Noise: Notes from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, and Kiss, a tongue-in-cheek biography. He is founder of the advertising and design firm Duncan Channon and its Tip Records subsidiary. He lives with his wife, artist and rock photographer Roni Hoffman, near San Francisco. LOUDMOUTH is his first novel. Pre-order from Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, others. List at duncanwrites.com/buy

Reviews

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the end of this book, there is a brief mention Kiss had just spilled a few drops of their blood into their very own Marvel comic. The comic, as written by Steve Gerber, goes for his uncharacteristic (for the time) reliance on dialogue to tell the story rather than having tiny drawings swamped in yellow blocks of text.

Thankfully, this book picks up the slack and provides the logorrheic overflow of a classic Mighty Marvel ish. Face front, true believers! You wanted the best...you got handwriting analysis!

Coming at the end of the Love Gun era, this slender book captures the brief time when Kiss were transforming from rock superstars to Saturday morning cartoon characters. The target audience for this book seems to be those kids who were allowed to go with their parents to the rock 'n' roll spookshow (because that cat guy did that pretty little song and they weren't really as scary as that demonic Black Sabbath) and needed something to order at the Book Fair. How those children reacted to the Boschian vignette in which the dead rockers of yore are seen floating past in the torrent of a forty-story Gene Simmons's blood barf torrent is lost to history. Probably, they got the impression the writer thought Kiss were way more dangerous than they did. By 1978 you could be Hell Bent For Leather.

Kiss were stars and glitter rock anachronisms at the exact same time. The only year a book this laudatory about Kiss could have been published is 1978. According to the book (sometime after even The Beatles are left to become blood-swollen corpses in the Ganges of Gene's plasma puke), "if those vestigial rock 'n' roll musicians don't actually expire in Gene's nightly chicken-blood torrent, effectively they die- their existence a useless appendage onto humankind".

Powerful words for a band that once wrote a song with the lyrics "She's a dancer, a romancer. I'm a Capricorn and she's a Cancer."

Speaking of writing, the prose contained in this book is to Lester Bangs like a gas station 8-track was to a greatest hits compilation. It's the same tune, but it's performed wobbily and with less skill...but, rather like Kiss themselves, it's full of a wonderful polyester charm. Where else are you going to get a three-page fugue about Gene's tongue? Where else will Kiss be considered some kind of Rock 'n' Ragnarok, stomping the world flat beneath their seven-inch leather heels? When Duncan gets to the page devoted solely to comparing the opening drumbeat of "Rock 'n' Roll All Nite" to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had the urge to say "Easy, Catman! He is serious!"

The 172 pages (plus 16 Kisstastic pages of photos) of Kiss exist in a span of time when the mythology of Kiss was immense and the urge to deconstruct that mythology was equally intense. Before they lost the makeup, lost the hair, and gained Michael Bolton as a co-writer, Kiss were still mysterious to the average teenager. By '78, they weren't dangerous, hot rock 'n' roll (no matter how much Duncan tries to sell you on the concept). They were on their way to being superheroes, a kind of proto-rock'n'roll X-Men: too dark to be Supermen but too cuddly to be villains. Like superheroes, they had secret identities. Some of them were kept better than others; for instance, this book insists Gene Simmons was born "Gene Klein".

As with any good Marvel comic, we get a few scenes of the men behind the costumes between the "action". There's even an origin story, of sorts. Most of this is psychogeographical musings (Queens is really important to the identity of Kiss) and armchair psychology (Gene Simmons has a case of only child syndrome). The best parts of this are the aforementioned handwriting analyses, which are so perfectly 70's they could be shelved comfortably next to Linda Goodman's Love Signs.

I would comment on the hot pink "PUNK POWER!" blurb on the back of my copy, but it's so delightfully inappropriate it somehow fits.

"So," you ask, "why the five stars?" Because it's perfect. If you're going to base your life on a rock book, I'd pick this one over No One Here Gets Out Alive any day.

[Robert Mckay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't claim to be the world's export on KISS. Shoot, I'm not the world's expert on anything. I've certainly not done any research on the band. But I did love their music before I ever saw what the band looked like (it was the Destroyer album, which is still my favorite), and I have read a couple or three books about the band - including this one, back when it was in its original edition. I used to have that book, but "three moves are the same as a fire," and I've moved considerably more than three times since then.

In my opinion, this is the best thing anyone's ever written on the band. It is, of course, terribly out of date (it first appeared in 1978, right after the Love Gun album came out). KISS has betrayed the fans twice, once in 1979, and again whenever it was that the Farewell Tour ended without there being any farewell (Gene Simmons said it would be the end of KISS as a touring band, and I suppose if you're extremely generous you might possibly perhaps be able to think about pondering the idea of saying that he didn't lie, since KISS finally did stop touring in December of 2023, only 22 years after he said it). A history of KISS after Love Gun, with the exception of Alive II, is the history of a band with the same name, and for part of the time the same makeup and costume shtick, but with totally different music. The band floundered for a while, and then turned into just another hair band. Creatures of the Night, in 1982, had some good stuff on it, though not much, and "I Love It Loud" almost sounds like it came near being one of Gene's stomp-and-roar songs, but it just isn't quite what made KISS great. And from then until Carnival of Souls in 1997 the band didn't make a single good album. Even CoS wasn't really a KISS album - it was very good dark, heavy, alternative style rock, and if the band had kept that lineup and changed its name and continued with that sort of music I'd've cheered. But then came the Reunion and Psycho Circus, which was mostly schlock, but had great songs first and last - though the last cut, "Journey of 1,000 Years," sounds very much like the band is saying goodbye to the fans who, in spite of the band's huge departure from greatness had continued (mostly - some of us decided, in 1979, that if the band didn't want us we didn't want the band either, and paid little attention thereafter) to support KISS. I've not listened to anything after that album, and won't.

But that's all to say that Robert Duncan put his book out at almost exactly the right time. If he'd waited a year or two, and been able to cover Alive II, that would've been better, but not by much, and if he had to publish the book before that live album, after Love Gun was as good a place as any. That was, after all, the last real KISS studio album. Duncan covered the early years, when the band had a vision of how to become great, and acted accordingly, and not only established themselves as the most garish and bombastic band out there, but also made music which is, all these years later, still worth listening to. It isn't often that a band puts out an album with only one song on it that I don't like, but KISS did it twice - first with Destroyer and then with Rock and Roll Over. "Beth" and "Hard Luck Woman" are just boring (I know, I know - everyone loves "Beth," but it bored me the first time I heard it and it still does), but they're the only songs on those albums I don't care for. The boys done good - and Duncan covered the years when they were doing it good.

Today KISS is just Gene Simmons' and Paul Stanley's personal cash cow. They're a dictatorship of two, hiring and firing musicians as they please, and not particularly caring, anymore, about the fans and the music that propelled them from a loft in Manhattan to Madison Square Garden in just three years. If they thought it would make them another couple of million, they'd record Barry Manilow music and release it (I happen to like a couple of Barry Manilow songs, so this observation is nothing against him). If they thought it would increase their bank accounts, Paul and Gene would record the veriest tripe, and solemnly present it to the world as a KISS masterpiece.

This book missed all that - the descent of Paul and Gene into cynical corporate hacks, the throwing away of the great music, the years as a generic hair band, the lying about the Farewell Tour, the uneasy fact that KISS has hung around nearly as long as the Rolling Stones, but without the Stones' commitment to being the Stones and not whatever band the current fad would have them pretend to be. And so this book is well worth reading if you're a KISS fan - and perhaps especially if you became a fan somewhere in the time after Alive II. It may be that to really grasp what those first few albums, that first sound, those initial years were like, you hadda been there. Maybe reading this book won't give you the intensity that we all had - we who loved KISS in the 70s - listening to their albums and noting their costumes and wondering what they really looked like. Maybe after all these years, someone who came along later just can't get the gut feel of it, just as I've found that those who weren't alive in 1969 don't think of Woodstock the way we do who were around then - even if we didn't get there, and I certainly didn't. But maybe, just maybe, someone who reads this book will get some comprehension of why to this day, I'm still angry at KISS for the Dynasty album. And if it does that, all the pontificating I've done in this review will be worth it.

[SouthWestZippy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book.