The guitarists Paul Stanley modelled Kiss on: ” “The foundation of everything”
After the facepaint, the hair, the jumpsuits and leather, the tongues, the stage theatrics, the pyrotechnics and the sheer craziness of it all, the next thing that strikes you about Kiss is the music. It’s easy to forget that under the makeup, there is actually a very talented group of musicians and performers.
Since they were founded in 1973, Kiss have written some of the most exciting and popular music in the modern rock age. ‘I Was Made for Loving You’, ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’, ‘Lick It Up’, and ‘Love Gun’ are all famed for their stadium-sized chorus’ and vocal parts, but they are all underpinned with tight rhythm guitar parts and augmented with plenty of huge, memorable riffs as well.
In conversation with Guitar Player last year after Kiss hung up their platform boots, Paul Stanely talked about the music which had shaped the band he had co-founded 50 years previously and what he had set out to achieve all those years ago.
“I’ve always wanted Kiss to be like one big guitar,” Stanley explained, “Which means that the other guitarist and I play different inversions. The goal was to do something that one guitar couldn’t but play it in a way so that it becomes like one big guitar”. He later expanded that most of the inspirations that he looked to for Kiss were based around the rhythm guitar, which he says is “the foundation of everything. Without it, everything falls apart.”
But while he wanted Kiss to sound like one big—presumably double-necked, flying V-shaped, dripping with paint and blood and shooting fire from the headstock—guitar, which individual guitarists inspired his sound?
In the same interview, Stanley namechecks Steve Marriot and Peter Frampton of the British rock band Humble Pie as direct influences and an example of a group who brought the “one big guitar” vision to life. If you listen to their eponymous 1970 debut album, you may not immediately hear the Kiss connection in the first two songs, but on the third track, ‘One-Eyed Trouser Snake Rumba’ (a Kiss track title if ever you heard one), then you can hear exactly what it is that caught Stanley’s ear. The same is true for ‘I’m Ready and Red Light Mama, Red Hot!’ from the same album.
Marriot and Frampton weren’t the only British bluesmen who gave Stanley ideas for his guitar parts, either. Citing Keith Richards’ playing and use of open tunings on songs like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Brown Sugar’, Stanley said: “I didn’t realise that he was playing in open G, so a lot of my playing was about using sus chords and trying to get that feel”.
They also went straight to the source with some of their blues influences, as Stanley also name-checks three King personal guitar heroes, too: Albert King (who famously also played a Flying V guitar), Freddie King and the King of them all, BB King. With such distinct styles and tones that they played with, each of these three guitarists almost had an audio signature, a trademark fill or lick that let you know who you’re listening to without even needing to check the label. This is something that Kiss quickly mastered as a group, too – when they’re playing, you’re in no doubt as to who it is you’re listening to.
Stanley also cites The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whose lead guitarist, Michael Bloomfield, is one of the all-time greats. A criminally underrated guitar player, Bloomfield could take one guitar and make it sound like you were hearing four.
However, there is one guitar player who inspired not only Paul Stanley’s playing with Kiss more than any other, but also the playing of his bandmate Ace Frehley. “As much as Ace loved Clapton, Beck and Hendrix, and he really did, there’s so much Page and so much swagger in his early playing. It’s so clear and so obvious that some of Ace’s signature licks are very much inspired by Jimmy Page.”
