“I didn’t have a choice”: the album Paul Stanley never wanted to make
Even before the bassist started painting his face and waving his tongue around like it was a flag and he was a patriot, Paul Stanley wasn’t sure that he wanted to work with Gene Simmons.
“I think he thought Lennon, McCartney and Gene were the only three songwriters in the world,” said Stanley when talking about weighing up whether he and Simmons should start a band. “And all of a sudden he had to make room for a fourth.”
Luckily, Stanley decided to give Simmons a chance, and thank the lord he did because Kiss went on to become one of the greatest and most exciting bands of the 1970s. Every album they released was packed with catchy stadium rock, and every show they played was a litany of fireworks, pyrotechnics and flamboyance.
When they originally started out as a support band, they were upstaging every single act that they played with, as nobody was embracing rock ‘n’ roll spectacle quite as much as these four. It meant that groups like Black Sabbath, despite being some of the biggest names in rock at the time, found themselves getting shunned by audiences who just wanted to watch more of the larger-than-life blokes with face paint on.
Of course, with big stage shows and big success comes even bigger egos, and it wasn’t long before Paul Stanley’s initial worries were realised. Gene Simmons started to peel off and wanted to do his own thing, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the band followed suit. Before anyone could say, “you wanted the best, you got the best,” all four members were working on solo albums, rather than working on music for the band as a whole.
There was a slight saving grace, though, as while the band were arguing and each member of Kiss was trying to make a solo record, the group figured if they all released their solo albums on the same day, it would still look like a group effort. Unity was promoted in this sense of isolation, but it also meant that Paul Stanley was forced to make a solo album when he really just wanted to keep working with the band that he had helped make famous.
“I didn’t have a choice,” said Stanley, reflecting on his solo endeavour. “The idea was to present group unity, which is kind of interesting, because the solo albums came out of the band being on the verge of splitting up. In the long run, it was putting a Band-Aid on a serious wound.”
The band’s solo albums were released in 1978, while their next group offering came in 1979 with Dynasty. That division could still be heard. There were a number of different influences at play on this album, which fans picked up on, as songs jumped from rock to funk to disco all within the span of a few minutes.
While this kind of divide might have turned fans away from other bands, lovers of Kiss were happy to embrace this strange approach to music, as Kiss were unified in their look, even if not in their music. Their flamboyance granted them freedom to experiment with different sounds and still come across as one unified band. If not for this look, the band might have suffered from this period of division.
“We also took pride in having the same freedom The Beatles had,” Gene Simmons once said, concluding, “Their philosophy was, ‘No matter what kind of music we do, it’s still The Beatles.’ That’s what was amazing about them… The Beatles were not trapped in that way. They could do music hall, psychedelia – anything – and they did. Yet somehow it always sounded like The Beatles.”
