The story of Kiss

From Wicked Lester to Kiss

The Kiss story begins with two very different boys. Gene Simmons was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, on the twenty fifth of August 1949. His mother had survived the Nazi concentration camps, and was liberated from Mauthausen in May 1945. After his parents divorced, eight year old Chaim moved with her to Queens, New York, speaking almost no English, and took the name Gene Klein. He escaped into monster movies, comic books and science fiction fanzines. Then he saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and rock and roll went straight to the top of the list. Before music paid, he worked as an assistant to an editor at Vogue and spent six months teaching a sixth grade class in Manhattan.[1] [2]

Paul Stanley was born Stanley Bert Eisen in Manhattan on the twentieth of January 1952, the son of Jewish parents whose families had fled Europe. He was born with a condition called microtia. His right ear never formed properly, and he was deaf on that side. Kids at school mocked him for it, and he later said he lived under constant staring. Music was his way out. He grew up on doo wop, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran, and when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones appeared on American television, he decided that performing was within his reach. He studied at the High School of Music and Art, and in 1970 a mutual friend brought him into a band that Gene was building.[1] [2]

That band was first called Rainbow and then Wicked Lester, a folk rock and pop group that landed a deal with Epic Records. It spent most of a year making an album at Electric Lady Studios, but in August 1972 Epic's A and R director Don Ellis said he hated it and refused to release it. Simmons later joked that they sounded like a cross between Three Dog Night and the Doobie Brothers. Gene and Stanley kept their partnership and set out to build the band they had never seen on a stage. Their drummer came from a Rolling Stone classified ad placed by Peter Criscuola, a Brooklyn drummer who had studied under his idol Gene Krupa. When they heard him sing in a small Brooklyn club, they knew he was their man. At a showcase for Epic that November, Peter's drunken brother threw up on Don Ellis's foot.[1] [2] [3]

For a lead guitarist, they put an ad in The Village Voice asking for flash and ability. One of the guitarists who answered was Paul Frehley from the Bronx. His mother drove him to the audition because he could not afford a cab. He walked in wearing one red sneaker and one orange one, and the others laughed, until he plugged in and soloed through their song Deuce. There could not be two Pauls, so he went by his nickname, Ace. By January 1973 the line up was complete. Stanley came up with the name Kiss while the three original members were driving around the city, after Peter mentioned his old band Lips. Ace scrawled the name on a club poster with the two S letters shaped like lightning bolts, and Stanley later tidied that into the logo.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By now Gene and Stanley had new stage names. Stanley became Paul, after Paul McCartney and Paul Rodgers. The first Kiss show took place on the thirtieth of January 1973 at the Popcorn Club in Queens. Fewer than ten people watched, and the band earned fifty dollars for two sets. Afterwards Paul decided that Kiss would play every club as if it were Madison Square Garden. The makeup had started simply, with mirrors and clown paint bought at Woolworths, and the four characters debuted in March 1973 on Long Island. Paul became the Starchild, Gene the Demon, Ace the Spaceman and Peter the Catman. Gene's eyes were borrowed from the comic book hero Black Bolt, and his stalking walk from a movie monster, the Ymir in Twenty Million Miles to Earth.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Casablanca and the hard years

That autumn a former television director named Bill Aucoin offered to manage Kiss. They agreed, on condition that he found them a record deal within two weeks. He delivered. On the first of November 1973, Kiss became the first act signed to Casablanca Records, a new label started by Neil Bogart, a Brooklyn born former pop singer and record executive who had helped launch bubblegum music. On New Year's Eve 1973 they played the Academy of Music in New York, opening for Blue Oyster Cult. During his fire breathing routine, Gene set his hairspray soaked hair on fire, the first of many times. The debut album, simply called Kiss, came out in February 1974, with songs like Strutter, Deuce, Cold Gin and Black Diamond.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The launch party in Los Angeles had palm trees and a Humphrey Bogart lookalike, and a loud show that horrified Casablanca's distributor, Warner Bros. Warner reportedly told Bogart to get the band out of their makeup. With Aucoin's backing, Kiss refused, and Warner soon let Casablanca go. On television Kiss played ABC's In Concert, where Dick Clark personally welcomed them backstage. Then came The Mike Douglas Show in April 1974. Gene introduced himself as evil incarnate. The comedian Totie Fields, also a guest, joked that underneath the paint he was probably just a nice Jewish boy. He told her she should only know. Despite all the effort, the debut sold only about seventy five thousand copies at first.[1] [2] [3]

Life on the road was anything but glamorous. The band toured in a station wagon, and Gene has said they were thrown off tours with acts like Black Sabbath because headliners were afraid to follow them. The second album, Hotter than Hell, was made in Los Angeles that summer. On Paul's first day in town his guitar was stolen, and after a car crash Ace posed for part of the album photos with makeup on only half of his face because of the stitches. Released in October 1974, it stalled at number one hundred on the Billboard chart. Four months later Bogart pulled Kiss off the road and ordered a new record, fast.[1] [2] [3]

Bogart produced Dressed to Kill himself, because the label could not afford anyone else. It was recorded in about ten days and runs barely thirty minutes, the shortest album Kiss ever made. On the cover the band stand on a Manhattan street corner in business suits, but only Peter owned one. The other suits belonged to Bill Aucoin. The record included Rock and Roll All Nite. Stanley wrote the chorus and Simmons the verses, partly recycled from an older song, inspired by Slade's Mama Weer All Crazee Now. Roadies, studio players and Peter's wife Lydia sang and clapped along, and some of the crew zipped their leather jackets up and down in rhythm.[1] [2] [3]

Fans were starting to fight for them, even if radio was not. In 1975 two teenagers in Terre Haute, Indiana, Bill Starkey and Jay Evans, bombarded their local station with calls and letters signed as the Kiss Army, demanding Kiss records. Some letters even contained joking threats to blow up the station. Eventually the station gave in and helped promote a show there in November 1975, which sold out ten thousand seats. Kiss brought Starkey on stage and gave him a plaque, and the Kiss Army became the official fan club. At its peak, the club had nearly one hundred thousand members and reportedly earned five thousand dollars a day.[1]

Alive and Destroyer

By the middle of 1975, both Kiss and Casablanca were close to going under. The label had just lost a fortune on a double album of Tonight Show highlights, and the band had received only a small advance and no royalties. Kiss's great strength was its live show, so Bogart decided to put that on record. He could not pay for the tour, so Bill Aucoin covered it himself, around three hundred thousand dollars, reportedly on his own credit card. Shows were taped that summer in Detroit, Cleveland, Davenport in Iowa and Wildwood in New Jersey. The double album Alive! came out on the tenth of September 1975, its title a nod to Slade Alive![1] [2] [3]

The live tapes needed a lot of help. Producer Eddie Kramer spent weeks at Electric Lady Studios fixing wrong chords and missed vocals, and even the crowd noise was assembled from the best screams of several shows. For years the band denied it, but later they admitted it, saying they had enhanced the record to capture the energy rather than to fool anybody. Whatever the method, it worked. Alive! reached number nine, stayed on the chart for one hundred and ten weeks, and the live Rock and Roll All Nite became their first top twenty single. It was also Casablanca's first top ten album. When Aucoin hinted Kiss might leave, Bogart signed a two million dollar check to keep them.[1] [2] [3]

For the next album they hired Bob Ezrin, the Canadian producer behind Alice Cooper's hits. Ezrin treated the sessions like boot camp. He wore a whistle around his neck, called the band campers, and stopped work to teach them basic music theory. He added an orchestra, a children's choir, sound effects and backwards drums. Destroyer came out on the fifteenth of March 1976 with Detroit Rock City, God of Thunder and Shout It Out Loud. Shout It Out Loud gave the band its first number one anywhere, in Canada. Critics were rough, and after peaking at number eleven the album slid quickly. Ezrin had also quietly brought in Alice Cooper's guitarist Dick Wagner to play parts Ace did not.[1] [2] [3]

What rescued Destroyer was a ballad on the flip side of a single. Beth grew out of a song called Beck, written by Peter Criss and his old bandmate Stan Penridge, which Ezrin slowed down and rearranged with strings and piano. Neil Bogart disliked it, and put it on the B side of Detroit Rock City to bury it. Radio stations flipped the record anyway, led by the powerful CKLW across the river from Detroit, whose music director's daughter loved the song. Beth reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1976, the band's biggest American hit, and Destroyer became their first platinum album. That October they mimed three songs on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.[1] [2] [3]

The biggest band in America

The hits kept coming. Rock and Roll Over arrived in November 1976, recorded in an empty theatre in Nanuet, New York, with Peter's drums partly miked in a bathroom. Hard Luck Woman, a song Paul had meant for Rod Stewart, gave Peter another ballad. Then came Love Gun in June 1977, and the live Alive II that October, and all three went platinum. Love Gun carried Ace's first lead vocal, Shock Me, inspired by the night he was badly shocked by an ungrounded railing on stage in Lakeland, Florida, in December 1976. He sang it lying on the studio floor. That year a Gallup poll named Kiss the most popular band in America, ahead of Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and the Eagles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The shows had become enormous. Gene spat stage blood, made mostly of eggs, yogurt, red food colouring and maple syrup, and breathed fire. Ace's guitar shot smoke and flames, Peter's drum riser lifted into the air, and Paul smashed guitars. In Japan in 1977 they sold out five nights at the Budokan in Tokyo, matching the Beatles' record there. The merchandise was just as huge. There were dolls, lunch boxes, makeup kits, a pinball machine and board games. Marvel published Kiss comic books, and the ink for the first one was mixed with blood donated by the band. Between 1977 and 1979, merchandise sales reached an estimated one hundred million dollars.[1] [2]

In 1978 the band tried something no rock group had done before. All four members released solo albums on the same day, the eighteenth of September. Their contract counted each one as half a Kiss album, and Casablanca spent two and a half million dollars on marketing and shipped five million copies. Gene's album was the most eclectic. His guests included Joe Perry, Bob Seger, Donna Summer, a young Katey Sagal, and his girlfriend Cher, and he even covered When You Wish Upon a Star. Gene's charted highest, at number twenty two, but Ace had the only big hit, his cover of Russ Ballard's New York Groove. Many unsold copies later ended up in bargain bins.[1] [2] [3]

Aucoin's other big idea was a movie that would make them superheroes. The band were promised a mix of A Hard Day's Night and Star Wars. What they got was Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, a Hanna Barbera television film shot at the Magic Mountain amusement park in California and aired on NBC on the twenty eighth of October 1978. The writers first gave Ace almost no lines except the word ack, until he threatened to quit. In one scene where he walked off the set, his stunt double can be seen instead. Ace and Peter were drinking and using cocaine, and afterwards nobody on the Kiss payroll was allowed to mention the film in front of the band.[1] [2] [3]

Disco, departures and The Elder

Dynasty, released in May 1979 and produced by Vini Poncia, leaned towards pop and disco. Its lead single, I Was Made for Lovin' You, written by Paul with Desmond Child and Poncia, reached number eleven in the United States and topped charts in Canada, France, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Some fans called it a sell out, and Gene has said it is his least favourite Kiss song to play. Behind the scenes, Peter barely played. Injured in a car crash and struggling with drugs and alcohol, he was replaced in the studio by session drummer Anton Fig, who later became the drummer on David Letterman's late night shows. Peter drummed only on his own song, Dirty Livin'.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Dynasty tour drew younger crowds, including little children in face paint with their parents, and attendance fell. On Halloween night 1979, the band appeared on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show. A visibly drunk Ace laughed and joked over everyone, while an irritated Gene and Paul tried to keep control, and Peter talked about his gun collection. By December, Peter's playing had eroded badly, and at some shows he slowed down or stopped. His last concert with the band for almost seventeen years came on the sixteenth of December 1979. He appeared on the cover of the next album, Unmasked, and in the video for Shandi, but he did not play a note on it.[1] [2] [3]

Peter's exit became official in May 1980. Stanley later said that at the end of the Shandi video shoot, Peter took his makeup case and left, and Peter has said he broke down crying alone in the dressing room. His replacement was Paul Caravello, a Brooklyn drummer who was almost thirty and ready to quit music. He had been earning as little as seven dollars a night. His audition tape featured him singing over Shandi, and afterwards he asked the band for their autographs. He became Eric Carr, and after a hawk design was rejected for looking like Big Bird, he created the Fox. His first show was at the Palladium in New York on the twenty fifth of July 1980.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kiss promised a return to hard rock. Instead, they reunited with Bob Ezrin for Music from The Elder, a concept album released in November 1981, built around a fantasy tale by Gene about a young hero and a mystical council. It had orchestras, a choir and lyrics cowritten by Lou Reed, and it was meant as a soundtrack for a film that was never made. Fans hated it. It reached only number seventy five, and Kiss did not tour. Ezrin later admitted his judgment had been clouded by a cocaine addiction, and Paul and Gene called themselves delusional. Ace, who opposed the whole idea, mailed in his guitar parts from his home studio in Connecticut.[1] [2]

Ace was now outvoted two to one, because Eric Carr was a salaried employee with no vote. He was drinking heavily and dependent on prescription medicine after a car crash, and in April 1982 he led police on a chase in White Plains, New York, in a DeLorean. He later said that if he had stayed in the band he might have taken his own life, and he walked away from a contract worth fifteen million dollars. His exit was negotiated in June 1982. Kiss also cut ties with Bill Aucoin that year, amid falling sales and his drug use. And on the eighth of May 1982, Neil Bogart died of cancer in Los Angeles, at just thirty nine.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Faces revealed

The next album, Creatures of the Night, was the heaviest Kiss had made, driven by Eric Carr's thunderous drumming and dedicated to Neil Bogart. Ace's face was on the cover, but he did not play on it. Most of the lead guitar came from a session player named Vincent Cusano, who had written music for the sitcom Happy Days. Gene vetoed Cusano as a stage name, saying it sounded too ethnic, like a fruit vendor, and he became Vinnie Vincent, playing as a character in an Egyptian ankh design called the Wiz. The tour sold poorly in America, but in June 1983 about one hundred and thirty seven thousand people saw Kiss at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By 1983 the makeup felt like a trap. On the eighteenth of September 1983, Kiss appeared on MTV with their faces bare for the first time in public since their earliest club days. The new album, Lick It Up, went gold, their first certified record in three years, and the unmasked era had begun. Vinnie Vincent cowrote eight of its ten songs, but he refused to sign a contract, and his guitar solos kept running far past their cues. At a show in Quebec City in March 1984, he launched into an unplanned solo while the others stood waiting. Soon after, he was gone. Gene later said Vinnie was fired for unethical behaviour, not a lack of talent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With Gene often away making films like Runaway with Tom Selleck, Paul became the real leader. He felt abandoned, and later called Animalize almost a solo album. Released in September 1984, it featured new guitarist Mark St. John and the MTV hit Heaven's on Fire, and it became their best selling American album of the decade. But St. John clashed with the band. Paul said he could never play the same solo twice. A press release blamed reactive arthritis for his absence, and St. John later admitted that was a cover story. Bruce Kulick, younger brother of Kiss session player Bob Kulick, filled in, and by December 1984 he had the job for good.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The line up of Paul, Gene, Eric Carr and Bruce Kulick proved the most stable since the originals. Asylum followed in 1985 and Crazy Nights in 1987, whose single Crazy Crazy Nights reached number four in Britain, the band's best there. In 1989 Hot in the Shade gave them the power ballad Forever, cowritten with Michael Bolton, which peaked at number eight in the United States. Off stage, Gene had lived with Cher and then with Diana Ross, and in the early eighties he met the Canadian actress and former Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed. In July 1990 Paul survived a near fatal car accident after a Kiss show in Springfield, Massachusetts.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Losing the Fox

Early in 1991, Eric Carr began to feel ill. Tests found a tumour on his heart. It was removed in April, but more tumours were found in his lungs, and he went through chemotherapy. Eric was desperate to keep playing, but Paul and Gene told him to focus on getting well, and session drummer Eric Singer, who had toured with Paul in 1989, began recording with the band. In July, bald from treatment and wearing a wig, Eric Carr filmed the video for God Gave Rock and Roll to You Two, a song from the film Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. He was in great pain. On the record itself, his voice is heard singing an a cappella line.[1] [2] [3]

That September, Eric made his last public appearance with the band at the MTV Video Music Awards. Soon afterwards he suffered an aneurysm, and then a brain haemorrhage from which he never woke. He died at Bellevue Hospital in New York on the twenty fourth of November 1991, aged forty one. It was the same day Freddie Mercury died, and Eric's death was barely noticed by the rock press. The band wrote to Rolling Stone to say they were shocked and disappointed. At the funeral, Paul and Gene met hostility from Eric's family and friends, who felt he had been pushed aside. Paul later wrote that he sobbed uncontrollably and came to regret how he had treated Eric.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Singer became the new drummer. Revenge, released in May 1992 and produced by Bob Ezrin, was lean and heavy, led by the single Unholy, and it debuted at number six, their first top ten album since Dynasty. Surprisingly, Vinnie Vincent was back as a cowriter on three songs, before he fell out with the band again and sued them. The album was dedicated to Eric Carr, and it closed with Carr Jam 1981, a drum piece he had recorded during the Elder sessions. For years Eric had asked for a copy of that recording, and been told nobody could find the tapes. It surfaced only after his death.[1] [2] [3]

Fans still longed for the old Kiss. In 1995 the band toured official Kiss conventions, with displays of old costumes and acoustic sets of fan requests. At the first American date, Peter Criss joined them on stage, his first public performance with the band in almost sixteen years. On the ninth of August 1995 they taped MTV Unplugged in New York and invited both Peter and Ace to join them for the last songs, including Beth, 2000 Man and Rock and Roll All Nite. It was the only time the original four performed publicly without makeup. The crowd's reaction settled it. An album recorded that winter with Bruce and Eric Singer, Carnival of Souls, was shelved for almost two years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The makeup goes back on

On the twenty eighth of February 1996, at the Grammy Awards, the rapper Tupac Shakur walked on stage and introduced the original Kiss in full makeup and Love Gun era costumes. On the sixteenth of April, the four held a press conference aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid in New York, hosted by Conan O'Brien, who asked only two questions: what time, and what aircraft carrier? It was broadcast to fifty eight countries. The new manager was Doc McGhee, who had guided Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, and who had pleaded guilty in the eighties over a marijuana smuggling operation. When tickets went on sale for the opening show, around forty thousand seats sold out in forty seven minutes.[1] [2] [3]

The reunion tour opened on the twenty eighth of June 1996 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, in front of almost forty thousand fans. The set list came entirely from the seventies, and crew members were sent out of the building during soundchecks so nobody would see the band without their faces painted. It became the top grossing tour of 1996, beating Garth Brooks. But Ace and Peter were now salaried employees, not partners. Gene later wrote that he was shocked by the effect of twenty years of drugs and alcohol on them. Peter said he was determined to prove he was clean. He was hurt to learn that Ace was being paid more per night.[1] [2] [3]

The reunited band made one album, Psycho Circus, in 1998. It debuted at number three, their best American chart position so far, but it was not really a band record. Ace played on only a couple of tracks and Peter drummed on just one, Into the Void, with session players and future guitarist Tommy Thayer filling the gaps. Peter later claimed he and Ace were each paid eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars to stay out of the studio. Alice Cooper's publisher sued, saying the song Dreamin' copied I'm Eighteen, and the case was settled in Cooper's favour. The Psycho Circus tour opened on Halloween 1998 at Dodger Stadium, with 3D visuals projected on stage.[1] [2] [3]

In 2000 Kiss launched what was billed as a Farewell Tour. It did not stay a farewell. In January 2001, on the eve of the Japanese and Australian dates, Peter walked out over his contract, and Eric Singer took his place, wearing Peter's Catman makeup. In February 2002, Kiss played at the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It was Ace's final performance as a member. A month later, at a private show in Jamaica, Tommy Thayer appeared in the Spaceman makeup. Thayer, a former member of the band Black 'n Blue, had first come to work for Kiss painting Paul's house and cleaning Gene's gutters.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Peter returned in 2003, recording a concert in Melbourne with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and touring America with Aerosmith. When his contract ran out in March 2004, it was not renewed, and he said nobody had even called him or his lawyer. Eric Singer was back as the Catman for good. Gene's view was simple: Kiss owned the makeup. Peter later said he was angry with himself that his makeup had slipped through his hands, while Ace insisted he had only licensed his design, which Paul called a fantasy. Peter summed up his feelings with a line about the Lone Ranger. You can put the mask on someone else, he said, but it is not the Lone Ranger.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hall of Fame and the long goodbye

Some stories from the old days ended darkly. In September 2006, Mark St. John was jailed for a few days in Orange County, California, on drug paraphernalia charges. There he was brutally beaten by a group of inmates, in an attack a guard was accused of arranging. His girlfriend said he suffered headaches for months afterwards. He died on the fifth of April 2007, at fifty one, of a brain haemorrhage the coroner linked to an accidental methamphetamine overdose. Other musicians survived close calls. In October 2003, Bruce Kulick was hit in the leg and grazed on the head by stray bullets from a gunman on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He recovered and later joined Grand Funk Railroad.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The new line up of Paul, Gene, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer kept touring, and in 2007 Paul was hospitalized with an extremely rapid heartbeat, the first Kiss show he had ever missed. After years of saying they would never make another album, they released Sonic Boom in 2009. It debuted at number two, the highest chart position Kiss ever reached. Monster followed in 2012. In 2010 Bill Aucoin died at sixty six after complications from prostate cancer surgery, and Paul and Gene called him their irreplaceable original manager. In 2015 the RIAA announced Kiss had thirty gold albums, more than any other American band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kiss were eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from 1999, and in 2006 about two hundred fans rallied outside the museum in Cleveland to demand their induction. It finally came on the tenth of April 2014, in Brooklyn. The Hall inducted only the four founders. Paul and Gene offered to play as the current band and bring Ace and Peter out as guests. Ace and Peter felt insulted, and in the end nobody performed. On the night, though, all four were cordial. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine called Kiss a people's band, not a critics' band. Paul told the room that this was vindication for the fans.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There were controversies too. In 2014 Gene made callous remarks about depression and suicide in an interview, drawing anger from Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue, and some radio stations pulled Kiss songs before he apologized. In 2018 he settled a lawsuit brought by a radio host who accused him of touching her inappropriately during an interview, while denying the claims. That September, Kiss announced its final tour, End of the Road, which opened in Vancouver on the thirty first of January 2019. When Gene said Ace and Peter would never be in Kiss again, Ace hit back online, accusing Gene of groping his wife. Fans also accused the band of using backing tracks, and management said Paul sang along to them.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The pandemic stalled the tour, and on New Year's Eve 2020 Kiss played a livestream in Dubai that set two Guinness world records for flames. The tour finally ended where the band began, in New York. On the second of December 2023, Kiss played its last show at Madison Square Garden. Paul zip lined across the arena, Gene spat blood and breathed fire, and after Rock and Roll All Nite, Paul promised the fans that the end of this road was the start of another. Then digital versions of the four characters appeared on the screen. They were avatars made by Industrial Light and Magic and Pophouse, the company behind the ABBA Voyage show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After the last show

In April 2024, Kiss sold its song catalogue, brand, likeness and intellectual property to the Swedish company Pophouse Entertainment, in a deal reported to be worth around three hundred million dollars. Gene told the BBC the band had put its name on some five thousand products, from coffee to condoms and even coffins, and that the only things off limits might be Kiss cigarettes. He compared his future role to a mother watching her child grow up. Pophouse planned avatar concerts built on the characters, and as of 2026 those shows had not yet opened. Paul returned to painting and to his soul music project, and Gene kept performing with his own solo band.[1] [2] [3]

In late September 2025, Ace Frehley was hurt in a fall at home and began cancelling concerts, and soon he pulled all his remaining dates. On the sixteenth of October 2025 he died in Morristown, New Jersey, at the age of seventy four. His family said the cause was a recent fall at his home. They said they had been able to surround him with loving words in his last moments. Gene and Paul called him an essential and irreplaceable rock soldier during the band's most formative chapters, and Peter said Ace had touched the hearts of millions. Ace had been sober since 2006, and his final album, 10,000 Volts, had come out in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Two months later, Kiss was among the recipients of the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, with Ace honoured after his death. On the seventh of December 2025, Paul, Gene and Peter walked the red carpet together, in tuxedos and without makeup. Paul said they could mourn Ace and celebrate what they had achieved. Garth Brooks paid tribute to the band, and Cheap Trick closed the evening with Rock and Roll All Nite. Peter released his first solo album in eighteen years that December. Even then the old arguments had not ended. In early 2026, Billboard reported Gene saying again that Peter had nothing to do with writing Beth, and Peter publicly insisted he wrote its melody.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kiss helped change how rock bands tour and sell themselves. Their custom stage sets, pyrotechnics and huge trucking operations made concerts bigger and more expensive, and their merchandise showed other bands how to pay for it. They were never a critics' band. Rolling Stone's review of Alive! called the music awful and repetitive. But musicians from Kim Thayil of Soundgarden to Pearl Jam's Mike McCready have credited them as a first love, and Ace became the first guitar hero for a generation of players. With more than one hundred million records sold, the Kiss Army that started with two teenagers in Indiana is still marching.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Kiss

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. They met through a friend around 1970 and built Wicked Lester and then Kiss together. Paul says he first found Gene arrogant, and Gene cheerfully pleads guilty. For five decades they were the only constant members. They argued over Gene's film and business projects in the eighties, and Paul never once appeared on Gene's reality show. Still, both call each other brothers, and Paul says forty years together means they worked it out.[1] [2] [3]

Kiss and Bill Aucoin. A former television director, Aucoin saw Kiss at showcase gigs in 1973 and promised a record deal within two weeks. He paid for the Alive! tour himself, coproduced their Paul Lynde special and dreamed up the solo albums and the Phantom film. Kiss cut ties with him in 1982 amid falling sales and his drug use, but when he died in 2010, Paul and Gene called him their irreplaceable original manager.[1] [2] [3]

Kiss and Neil Bogart. Neil Bogart made Kiss the first signing to his Casablanca label in 1973 and stood by them when his distributor wanted the makeup gone. He produced Dressed to Kill, pushed for the live album that saved both band and label, and wrote a two million dollar check to keep them. He tried to bury Beth on a B side. He died of cancer in 1982, and Creatures of the Night is dedicated to him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kiss and Bob Ezrin. Ezrin, the Canadian producer behind Alice Cooper, ran the Destroyer sessions like boot camp and gave Kiss orchestras, choirs and Beth. He also steered them into Music from The Elder, a decision he later blamed partly on his cocaine addiction. They reunited for Revenge in 1992, and in 2012 he remixed Destroyer for its anniversary. He remains close to the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gene Simmons and Cher and Diana Ross. Gene's first serious relationship began in 1978 with Cher, and they lived together for about two years. She even appears on his solo album, in a spoken phone call. He then fell for her friend Diana Ross, and later said he fell in love with Ross while still dating Cher. He dated Ross until around 1983, and said the Intrepid reunion press conference was inspired by an event she had held on the same ship.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed. Gene met the Canadian actress and 1982 Playboy Playmate of the Year Shannon Tweed at the Playboy Mansion in the early eighties. For decades he joked that they were happily unmarried, and they raised two children, Nick and Sophie, on the reality show Gene Simmons Family Jewels. After twenty eight years together, they married at the Beverly Hills Hotel in October 2011. Gene says she holds him accountable.[1] [2] [3]

Peter Criss and Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Peter felt belittled by his bandmates' education and ambition, and said they would embarrass him in front of people. They blamed his drinking and drugs for his decline and say he was fired more than once. The bitterest fights have been over Beth and the Catman makeup, which Peter gave up in 2004. Yet in 2025 the three stood together to accept the Kennedy Center Honors.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ace Frehley and Gene Simmons. Ace designed the logo and gave Kiss its guitar sound, but he and Gene clashed for decades. Gene repeatedly spoke about Ace's drinking. In 2019 Ace accused Gene online of groping his wife and demanded his old job back. They had worked together only a year earlier on Ace's album Spaceman. After Ace died in 2025, Gene and Paul called him an essential and irreplaceable rock soldier.[1] [2] [3]

Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. The two party loving members of the original band stayed friends through the eighties while Ace fought with Gene. Peter sang backing vocals on Ace's 1989 album Trouble Walkin', Ace played on Peter's 1994 album Cat 1, and in 1995 they toured together on the Bad Boys Tour. Ace also voted, reluctantly, to remove Peter from Kiss in 1980. Peter said Ace touched the hearts of millions.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Carr and Kiss. Eric joined in 1980 as a salaried employee without a vote, and he felt like a second class member, even partly cropped from the Asylum cover. He answered more fan mail than anyone and was loved for it. When he fell ill, Paul and Gene told him to focus on recovery. His family felt he had been shut out, and Paul later admitted regret after crying at the funeral.[1] [2]

Vinnie Vincent and Kiss. Vinnie rescued their sound on Creatures of the Night and Lick It Up but never signed his contract and was pushed out in 1984. He returned to cowrite for Revenge, then sued them. He filed several royalty lawsuits over the years, and one judge ordered him to pay the band eighty one thousand dollars. In 2011 he was arrested for assaulting his second wife, Diane, and later completed anger management.[1] [2] [3]

Kiss and Tommy Thayer. Tommy Thayer met Kiss when his band Black 'n Blue opened for them in 1985, and Gene produced their records. From 1994 he did odd jobs for Paul and Gene, then managed their conventions and coached Ace and Peter to relearn their old parts for the reunion. In 2002 he became the Spaceman. Ace called it insane to replace him with a former road manager.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Kiss

• Kiss earned fifty dollars for their first ever show, two sets at a Queens club with fewer than ten people watching. It was the thirtieth of January 1973 at the Popcorn Club, soon renamed Coventry. Gene had cold called the club to land a three night stand.[1] [2]
• Gene Simmons borrowed his stalking stage walk from a movie monster, the Ymir in Twenty Million Miles to Earth. The creature appears in the 1957 science fiction film. His Demon eye makeup came from the wings of the Marvel hero Black Bolt.[1] [2]
• Gene's stage blood was made mostly from eggs, yogurt, red food colouring and maple syrup. He spat it out during shows from the mid seventies onwards, alongside his fire breathing routine, which set his own hair alight more than once.[1]
• The ink in Kiss's first Marvel comic book was mixed with blood donated by the band. Kiss first appeared in Marvel's Howard the Duck in 1977. Their own comic followed, part of a merchandising empire worth an estimated one hundred million dollars by 1979.[1]
• On the cover of Dressed to Kill, three of the four band members are wearing their manager's suits. Only Peter Criss owned a suit. The others borrowed from Bill Aucoin for the photo on a Manhattan street corner in October 1974.[1]
• Roadies zipped their leather jackets up and down to add rhythm to the chorus of Rock and Roll All Nite. Crew members, session players and Peter's wife Lydia all sang and clapped on the chorus, recorded for Dressed to Kill in 1975.[1] [2]
• The title Alive! was a tribute to the British band Slade's live album Slade Alive! Gene Simmons has also said Rock and Roll All Nite was a direct descendant of Slade's Mama Weer All Crazee Now.[1] [2]
• Beth is the only Kiss song on which no member of Kiss plays an instrument. Peter Criss sang over an orchestra and session musicians. Ezrin even had the players wear tuxedos and put Peter in his makeup for photos.[1]
• Beth became a hit partly because a Canadian radio boss's daughter preferred it to Detroit Rock City. The music director at CKLW, across the river from Detroit, added it after her daughter fell for it. Kiss later gave the daughter a gold record.[1]
• Ace Frehley's song Shock Me was inspired by a real electric shock he suffered on stage in Florida. In Lakeland in December 1976 he touched an ungrounded metal railing and was knocked backwards. It became his first lead vocal, sung lying on the studio floor.[1] [2]
• Eddie and Alex Van Halen played on the demo of Gene Simmons's song Christine Sixteen. Gene made Kiss copy the demo note for note, including the solo. The song was later sampled by Tone Loc in Funky Cold Medina.[1]
• Peter Criss recorded some of his drums for Rock and Roll Over in a bathroom. The album was cut in an empty theatre in Nanuet, New York, with amplifiers hidden under the stage to keep sound from bleeding into the drum microphones.[1]
• In 1977 a Gallup poll named Kiss the most popular band in America, ahead of Led Zeppelin and the Eagles. The same year they sold out five shows at Tokyo's Budokan, equalling the record the Beatles set there in 1966.[1] [2]
• Scriptwriters on Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park first gave Ace Frehley almost no lines except the word ack. They described him as an alien Harpo Marx. He threatened to leave, and real dialogue was added.[1]
• The Kiss Army began with two Indiana teenagers pestering a radio station, and a US Secretary of State later enlisted. Bill Starkey and Jay Evans started it in Terre Haute in 1975. Condoleezza Rice joined in May 2008.[1]
• Eric Carr's audition tape had him singing over the Kiss single Shandi, sent in a bright orange folder. A staffer picked it from the pile because of the colour. After his audition he asked the band for autographs, which Paul said sealed the deal.[1]
• Kiss shaved three years off Eric Carr's age when they announced him as the new drummer. Partly to protect his anonymity, and partly to make him seem like a young fan chosen from the crowd.[1]
• Before Kiss, Eric Carr survived a nightclub fire that killed twenty four people, including two of his bandmates. The 1974 fire at Gulliver's in Port Chester, New York, was set by Peter Leonard to cover a burglary. Carr was credited with saving two others.[1] [2]
• Before joining Kiss, Vinnie Vincent was a staff songwriter for the television sitcom Happy Days. He wrote many of the show's songs on his acoustic guitar at the Cunninghams' kitchen table between rehearsals.[1]
• Paul Stanley played the Phantom in a Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera in 1999. Born deaf in one ear with a deformed outer ear, he said he related to the character. Surgeons rebuilt the ear from rib cartilage in 1982.[1]
• Kiss and Casablanca paid one hundred and thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars for the Wicked Lester tapes, then shelved them. They feared the old folk pop recordings, and photos without makeup, would hurt Kiss. The album's cover art ended up on a Laughing Dogs record.[1]
• When Kiss played an early showcase for Epic Records, Peter Criss's drunken brother threw up on the executive's foot. That executive was Don Ellis, who had already rejected Wicked Lester. He turned the new trio down too.[1]
• Before becoming Kiss's guitarist, Tommy Thayer painted Paul Stanley's house and cleaned Gene Simmons's gutters. He was hired part time in 1994 to help with the book Kisstory, and worked his way up to managing tours and producing videos.[1]
• In 1981 a star was named after Ace Frehley in the International Star Registry. Fitting for the Spaceman, whose persona grew from his love of science fiction and space travel.[1]
• Kiss sold around forty thousand tickets for the first reunion show in forty seven minutes. The June 1996 concert at Tiger Stadium in Detroit launched the top grossing tour of the year.[1] [2]
• On the reunion tour, crew members were sent out of the building during soundchecks so they would not see the band's faces. It revived the old mystique of the seventies, when fans rarely saw the band without paint.[1]
• Gene Simmons asked Bob Dylan to write lyrics for a song they composed together, and Dylan refused. Dylan kept telling him, Mr Kiss, you write it. The song became Waiting for the Morning Light on Gene's album Asshole.[1]
• World Championship Wrestling paid Kiss five hundred thousand dollars for a single song on television in 1999. They played God of Thunder to launch a wrestler called the Demon, painted like Gene.[1]
• Gene Simmons says he has never been drunk or high, except once by accident from cannabis brownies. He credits his mother, a Holocaust survivor, saying he had no right to harm her. The brownie mishap happened in the mid seventies.[1]
• The late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell was buried in a Kiss Kasket. The branded coffin launched in 2001. Gene joked it made the alternative to living look pretty good.[1] [2]
• Eric Carr died on the same day as Freddie Mercury. His death on the twenty fourth of November 1991 was almost ignored by the rock press, and Kiss wrote to Rolling Stone to protest.[1] [2]
• MTV Unplugged in 1995 was the only time the original four Kiss members performed publicly without makeup. It was also the only time Ace and Peter shared a stage with Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer.[1]
• Kiss have thirty gold albums, more than any other American band. The RIAA announced the record in 2015, counting the four 1978 solo albums.[1]
• In 2006 about two hundred Kiss fans protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to demand their induction. It was the first known organised demonstration for a band's induction. Kiss finally got in in 2014.[1]
• Paul Stanley's rock and roll preacher stage voice began as an imitation of Humble Pie's Steve Marriott. Offstage his speaking voice is much softer. He has also sold art worth millions as a painter.[1]
• Kiss once released a single with the Japanese idol group Momoiro Clover Z. It came out in January 2015 and was the first time Kiss issued a collaboration record with another act.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.