Kiss owe everything to their silly makeup: “A completely new direction”
There’s a photo of me and my dad lingering around somewhere, standing in the living room before my first gig, my face painted as Paul Stanley, his done as Gene Simmons.
Getting to the arena that night, it was clear that we weren’t the only ones who had had the idea to paint our faces like the band we loved. Dotted around every corner of that place were people who had clearly put in hours of work to try their best to replicate the iconic face paint of those who themselves admitted were the hottest band in the world.
Kiss is a pretty big first gig, and they set the bar very high. The music was good, that classic, stadium rock sound which the band had always championed for putting out rang truer than ever. On top of that, I was exposed to the insane pyrotechnics that the four-piece was constantly praised for, as fireworks were hurled up into the rafters, flames licked the sides of the stage, and at one point Gene Simmons was hoisted onto a platform, however many feet in the air to deliver a face-melting bass solo. It was a spectacle, and for a rock-loving kid like myself, it was the best show ever.
I’ve always had a big place in my heart for Kiss, the memories of those early gigs don’t leave you, and I stand by the fact that their music is damn good, despite a lot of my friends (including many colleagues at Far Out) have tried to convince me otherwise. However, the more I learn about them as a band, the more one undeniable fact becomes even more so, and that’s Kiss owes everything to their stupid makeup. It elevated their sound and allowed them to stay together when other bands would have broken up.
To explain this, we need to start by jetting back to the early ‘70s, when Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were both playing in their own respective New York bands and first met at a mutual friend’s apartment. The two jammed a little bit, and it became clear to Gene Simmons that he and Stanley should be making music together; however, while their tastes were similar, there was hesitancy to fully jump into a project together.
“I think he thought Lennon, McCartney and Gene were the only three songwriters in the world,” said Paul Stanley, and while he recognised Simmons was a whizz on the bass, he wasn’t too sure how good he would be at collaborating on a project, adding, “All of a sudden he had to make room for a fourth”.
Stanley eventually conceded, though, and decided to give the new band with Simmons a chance. While Paul McCartney and John Lennon weren’t exactly writing music with the duo, their influence did still ring true in Kiss’ ears, as Stanley admitted that they were the reason the band decided to start painting their faces. No, you aren’t forgetting a strange moment in The Beatles’ career when they decided to paint their faces like aliens, rather, Stanley and Simmons were sick of bands in the ‘70s not looking like actual bands, and so wanted to go back to the days of The Beatles, when you could tell all four of those members were a part of the same musical collective.
“Those ‘60s British groups all looked like real bands,” he said, “No member of The Beatles could have fit into the [Rolling] Stones. No member of The Who could have been in the Dave Clark Five. You had unified images of those bands, and at the same time, there was an emphasis on the individual members.”
Kiss certainly managed to present a unified look by wearing makeup, and that helped further emphasise one of the key assets of the band, their live show. The music was good, we can’t overlook that, but the thing that really made Kiss stand out was their commitment to putting on the best show that anyone had ever seen.
They were upstaging bands left and right thanks to their commitment to these great gigs. When they went on tour with Black Sabbath, people were starting to recognise Ozzy and co as the brains behind heavy metal, and they were one of the most adored rock bands on the planet, yet Kiss were showing them up, not necessarily because their music was better, but the way they tied everything into one big action-packed heap was exhilarating.
“Kiss was the first one to use pyro,” said Geezer Butler, “It was a completely new direction for people. People had to start thinking about stage production after Kiss. It was tough to follow them. We went on as just an ordinary band, no effects or anything, and everybody else still had their mouths wide open from seeing Kiss.”
It’s no coincidence that the band’s best-selling album is ALIVE!, a live record that transported listeners right into the heart of a Kiss show: the look, the sound, the flamboyancy, all created moments that people simply had to be a part of.
So, the makeup helped Kiss present themselves as a unified front, which made their live shows look even better and more exciting, but the makeup’s impact went even further than that. As is the case for many rock bands, tension grew as they were exposed to success, which meant that different members had different ideas. Stanley’s initial fears about collaboration were somewhat realised, but not just with Simmons, with every member of the band. People decided that they wanted to go off and make their own record, something that could have spelt the end for a lot of groups, but Kiss could present it in a different way.
Towards the back end of the ‘70s, when Kiss had well and truly skyrocketed to fame, and there was division present when it came to creative endeavour, all four of them released a solo album on the same day. The move was brilliant because it didn’t look like the actions of a band going through turmoil, and instead was reminiscent of Marvel spin-offs. The members of Kiss weren’t just musicians to a lot of people, they were characters, real-life superheroes who surrounded themselves with fire, blood and pyro, and so the idea of each member releasing a solo album looked more like each character getting their own dedicated comic book.
Paul Stanley admitted he never wanted to make a solo album and would rather have focused on the band; however, he recognised that if he didn’t release an album along with the other members, this illusion of unity would become transparent. “I didn’t have a choice,” he said, “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.”
Those split opinions trickled into their next album, Dynasty, which was released the following year. The range of influences present on this record was very telling, as the band jumped from rock to funk to disco all within the span of a couple of tracks. That being said, the record wound up being one of Kiss’s best-selling studio releases, as people welcomed the diversity on the album, seeing it as an extension of the solo albums that had come before, a picture of unity despite being the exact opposite.
Gene Simmons spoke about how their makeup gave them this creative freedom, as they had such a concise look, any sound which came out of it could be branded as Kiss, regardless of how it actually sounded.
“We also took pride in having the same freedom The Beatles had,” said Simmons, “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.”
This meant that the band could keep things together even when different members left as well. Kiss compadres Ace Frehley and Peter Criss opted to split one day, but when they were replaced, fans weren’t necessarily saying, ‘It’s not the same without x and y’, because x and y were still there, makeup and all. The band was a unified front, even if the members were chopping and changing.
This isn’t a critique of Kiss’s music, I’m a fan, always have been and always will be, but it would be naive to suggest that they don’t owe everything to their iconic look. That makeup, which will have started out as a simple ‘what if’ one day, helped take a good sound and make it astronomical, and it helped the band ride storms that would have sunk other groups. Kiss is good without their makeup; we know that, given they wiped the stuff off when working on Lick It Up, but their unique look is what made them the superstars we know today.
