Last week, Kiss kicked off the One Last Kiss: End of the Road World Tour, which may actually be their final tour, or may be another fakeout like the Kiss Farewell Tour of 2000-2001. In any event, it seems like a good time to take a look at their discography. As someone who loves cartoonish hard rock bands of the '70s from Aerosmith to Van Halen, Kiss always seemed like a bridge too far, their fandom almost more like pro wrestling than music, rock's literal circus clowns. But their enormous popularity meant that they were a lot of kids' first favorite band, almost as much a gateway for '70s kids as The Beatles were a decade earlier, and so they ended up being a formative influence on many great bands of the '80s and '90s, including many that didn't follow in their pop metal footsteps. So I've always been a little curious to see how much the lingering love for Kiss's music is nostalgia and to what degree their records actually hold up.

Kiss deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Love Theme From Kiss
2. Cold Gin
3. Black Diamond
4. Parasite
5. Got To Choose
6. She
7. Deuce (live)
8. Hotter Than Hell (live)
9. Firehouse (live)
10. God Of Thunder
11. Do You Love Me
12. King Of The Night Time World
13. Baby Driver
14. Shock Me
15. Plaster Caster
16. Ladies Room (live)
17. Tomorrow And Tonight (live)
18. 2000 Man
19. She's So European
20. Dark Light
21. War Machine

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Kiss (1974)
Tracks 4 and 5 from Hotter Than Hell (1974)
Track 6 from Dressed To Kill (1975)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from Alive! (1975)
Tracks 10, 11 and 12 from Destroyer (1976)
Track 13 from Rock And Roll Over (1976)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Love Gun (1977)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Alive II (1977)
Track 18 from Dynasty (1979)
Track 19 from Unmasked (1980)
Track 20 from Music From "The Elder" (1981)
Track 21 from Creatures Of The Night (1982)

One thing that really struck me listening to this stuff was that I probably was too stuck up to have enjoyed it when I was a teenager, but I've spent the last 10-20 years drifting more towards the immediate pleasures of the shamelessly sugary end of pop/rock and feel well primed for it now. A lot of Kiss songs are more power pop than hard rock, which is amusing to think about since 'power pop' has been the rallying cry of commercially unsuccessful bands since Kiss's platinum heyday -- like it's possible that really all it takes to make this stuff popular is to package and commercialize it as shamelessly as possible. Of course, nobody in Kiss is an especially good singer, which is probably where they fall short as power pop. And Gene Simmons is particularly awful most of the time, which kind of surprised me, since he's kind of become a pop culture fixture outside the band by having this deep relaxed speaking voice and always being ready to talk and talk and talk. Of course, upon saying this, I realized that I actually included more Gene lead vocals than Paul Stanley vocals, but I was really just going on the strength of the songs.

I decided to cover the band's first decade or so -- without all 4 members' 1978 solo albums cluttering things up -- up through their last album before they took the makeup off (in a classic poorly planned Kiss move, they kept the masks on for Unmasked and then actually unmasked themselves just 3 years later). Part of the fun of that, of course, was that I got to listen to their infamous proggy concept album Music From "The Elder" that I've seen on many lists of the worst albums of all time. That album definitely has some embarrassing moments but isn't entirely devoid of some good hard rock tunes, foremost among them "Dark Light," from Ace Frehley's late blooming hot streak as a singer/songwriter that was kicked off by "Shock Me" (although he wrote great songs for the other members to sing like "Cold Gin" well before that). I'm not sure why one of the few covers on Kiss's '70s studio albums is Frehley singing a deep cut from one of the Rolling Stones' least loved '60s albums, but "2000 Man" has always sounded dopey to me and feels kind of more fitting as a Kiss song than as a Stones song.

One thing I do admire about Kiss is that they are among a small number of bands where all 4 members wrote and sang hit singles, alongside The Beatles and Sloan (and also everyone wrote hits in Queen, even if Freddie sang them all). But that makes Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons' treatment of Ace Frehley and Peter Criss over the years, including excluding them from the current farewell tour, all the more glaring. I feel like there's almost a pattern that some of the most hated and divisive bands in rock are ones where 2 members kind of consolidated their power and lorded over everyone else in the band -- Don and Glenn in The Eagles, James and Lars in Metallica, and so on (you could maybe also make an argument for Donald and Walter in Steely Dan, but I think they just fostered a a more old-fashioned composer/session player relationship with their bands from early on).

"Tomorrow And Tonight" was supposedly the band's overt attempt to rewrite "Rock And Roll All Nite," but it was never even released as a single, and I think it's actually pretty good. But for the most part I tried to make a playlist that appealed more to people who like "Detroit Rock City" or "Love Gun," to make a case for Kiss as a band that had some cool swinging rhythms and screaming guitar leads. They weren't the best of the best, and sometimes I had to turn off Kiss and listen to Thin Lizzy or another superior band as a palette cleanser, but I still came out of this appreciating Kiss much more than I did before. There's so much weird, funny, stupid shit here, from "Ladies Room" (with Paul's hysterical intro banter on the live version) to Gene's ode to Cynthia Plaster Caster, the woman famous for making plaster casts of rock stars' penises.

The Replacements' cover of "Black Diamond," a weird little outlier on their masterpiece Let It Be, is emblematic to me of how far Kiss's unlikely influence seeped into future generations of punks and indie rockers. And listening to these albums, I wondered what else they inspired. Was one of my favorite The 1975 songs, "She's So American," a nod to Kiss's 'She's So European"? Was Baby Driver named after "Baby Driver"? I was amused to finally hear "War Machine" after a couple of decades of only knowing it from Beavis and Butthead briefly singing in an episode of their show. And I was even more amused to learn that the song was co-written by a young Bryan Adams, a few months before he rose to fame with the release of Cuts Like A Knife.

Live albums were commercial breakthroughs for many of the big rock acts of the '70s, so as with Cheap Trick, Bob Seger, The Allman Brothers Band, I've included live tracks as the arguably the canonical versions of some of their best loved songs. Kiss was unique in that live albums were a high watermark for them twice -- Alive! was their first album to go gold, and Alive II was their first album to sell 2 million, and the versions of "Rock And Roll All Nite" and "Shout It Out Loud" from those albums are probably their two most famous tracks. And I tried to include their biggest concert staples that weren't singles, including "Black Diamond," "Cold Gin," "Deuce," "Firehouse," "God Of Thunder," "War Machine," "Shock Me," "Do You Love Me," and "Kings Of The Night Time World."

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 05, 2019 at 11:10 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.