KISS have arrived in Australia for their final tour. We’d had a dig through the Time Off archive and found some gems. KISS were no strangers to the Time Off cover over the years and were often asked about their final tour. The final dates are at the end of this fine feature from Michael Dwyer – who talks here in April 2001 to Gene Simmons.
It was the night of February 9, 1997. My makeup had done its dash by the time Paul Stanley climactically smashed his guitar on the blood-spattered stage of Perth’s Burswood Dome. A good quarter of my Ace Frehley paint job was flaking down my shirt. No matter. When the finale firebombs had fizzed out, I only had to drive my mate Bob home—he was Paul Stanley, curly wig, genuine chest hair and all—and hit the showers.
Sadly, my old car wasn’t up for that challenge. But the road service guy was a pro. He looked at me, looked at Bob, raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly, stuck his torch under the hood and said, “So what’s the problem?”
Gene Simmons chuckles softly at the story: another one for the archives. Tales of the bizarre have been this bass-wielding sleazebag’s lifeblood since he first stuck his unfeasibly long tongue out of his grease-painted face nearly thirty years ago.
“I’ll tell you a moment,” he volunteers in response. “We played Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for the ’98 tour. It was the first 3D tour in history. Everybody blowing out their minds behind those 3D glasses. Now this was Halloween night so on the way back from the show, as you can imagine, traffic was completely stopped. We were on Sunset Boulevard three blocks from the hotel and the streets were filled with people from Star Wars and Star Trek, Frankenstein’s monster—and some Kiss people as well.“So we’re in the van in full make-up, full outfits and we looked at each other and said, well, why don’t we walk? They won’t know it’s us.”
The odd catcall aside, Simmons reports, the four towering rock superheroes tottered home on 20cm heels, unharmed. It’s a neat illustration of what an integrated fixture Kiss have become on the cultural landscape. Luke Skywalker, Spiderman, Dracula, and Elmer Fudd: Kiss is in rarefied company and it seems unlikely the band’s final bow next month will change that. But like the Fantastic Four, Kiss will live on.
“The idea that you stop making records doesn’t mean the end of the band ’cause the band has always been more than just showing off the new song we just wrote,” Simmons says. “We’re also superheroes and all this other stuff. In our comic books, we don’t even have guitars.
“There’s a Kiss theme park being worked on, along with a cartoon show, a casino… there are already 2500 licenses out there. Kiss the entity will continue; what’s happening now is a metamorphosis. The caterpillar is dying, but the butterfly will be born.”
Naturally, the New York rockers are not going out quietly. Their 129-date farewell tour of America was yet another licence to print money, so now Simmons, Stanley, Frehley and prodigal drummer Eric Singer (original cat person Peter Criss is a late scratching) are bringing their five-year reunion to Australia before hanging up the skyrocket axes forever.
“And then, maybe with dignity intact, we’ll get off the stage,” Simmons, the man born Chaim Witz in Israel fifty years ago, says. “You know, while we’ve still got teeth in our heads. We would rather leave the stage than have people wondering when we’re leaving the stage. I never want to have a fan come up to me all misty-eyed for the golden years. You’ve got to quit when it is the golden years. You’ve got to go out on top.”
In Kiss world, this can only mean one thing: firepower.
“Bigger, better,” Simmons says smugly. “This tour might be called Size Does Count. It’s going to be more bang for your buck. We’ll throw everything including the kitchen sink into it. Paul will fly off the stage to the back of the hall and sing “Love Gun” way above your heads. Look to the skies. Not all the action is going to be on the stage.”
Perish the thought. With tickets ranging from $70 to $180 and a range of merchandise to put Pokemon to shame, the lion’s share of the action will be going down at the cash register, right?
“Obviously this costs a lot more,” Simmons coos, unfazed. “Look, let’s face it. If I was John Farnham or Tom Petty or any one of those guys, you stand on stage and strum your guitar. Thank you very much, here’s a song off my next album. And you don’t break a sweat. That’s fine, but it’s not what we do. We’re closer to the Olympics, you know?”
And just like Sydney 2000, it can get kind of emotional up on that podium.
“I don’t want to be cornball about it, but this is way beyond anything I thought would happen,” Simmons says of Kiss’s twenty-eight-year climb into the hearts and wallets of the world. “On stage, every now and again it hits me like a tidal wave and—nobody sees it, but I can talk about it now—the lump in the throat and the tear in the eye has happened more than once. It just overcomes you: Oh my God! Look what they’ve done for me!
“The whole family’s there this time. Dads bring their kids, telling them, this is what I’ve been telling you about! There’s a kind of…I don’t know…a last time for passing the torch kind of thing. It all seems to mean a lot more than four guys on stage playing guitars and spitting fire.
“I’m a believer,” Simmons concludes, with just a touch of evangelism, “and this has carried me a long way. I’m a believer in the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd. I believe that what we do roars and I believe the crowd knows.
“I believe in the American ideal: ‘Of the people, for the people and by the people’. No queens or kings, no backroom politics, no critics, nothing decides for the people except they, themselves. If they like something, so be it.
“French food critics might tell you frogs’ legs are great but that’s not going to change people’s minds. They’re going to eat McDonalds hamburgers cause that’s what they want. You can pooh-pooh it all you want but guess what? They’re going to McDonalds. Maybe at the end of the day Kiss has more to do with hamburgers than with frog’s legs.”
As famous last words, they’ve got to be up there with “I wanna rock and roll all night, and party every day.”
AUSTRALIAN CONCERT DATES 2022
Saturday August 20 ROD LAVER ARENA, MELBOURNE VIC
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Support: Dead City Ruins
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Tuesday August 30 ADELAIDE ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE, SA
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Friday September 2 RAC ARENA, PERTH WA
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***NEW SHOW JUST ANNOUNCED***
April 2001. Original interview: Michael Dwyer.