The Kiss album Paul Stanley said was “unusable junk”
Kiss are not only a band, but the definition of a creative team effort. Their ethos when they started out, from day one, was to work together.
When Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons originally met, Simmons was under no illusion that he wanted to work with Stanley; however, ‘The Starchild’ wasn’t so sure. “I think he thought Lennon, McCartney and Gene were the only three songwriters in the world,” he said, discussing those initial reservations. “And all of a sudden he had to make room for a fourth.”
Despite Paul Stanley not knowing whether it was a good idea to team up with Simmons, Simmons proved himself early on as being a team player. One of the earliest examples of this is the fact that they decided to wear makeup. You might think that the makeup was a marketing gimmick (and you might be right), but according to the band, they decided to paint their faces because they wanted to appear as a unit.
The band certainly had a point. They referred to a lot of rock bands in the 1960s and how they all had their own unique style. If you lined up members of The Who, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, you would be able to pick out who was who. By the time the ‘70s came around, these independent looks were less common.
When Kiss painted their faces, granted, they were doing something which would help them stand out; however, they were also presenting themselves as a unified front. There can be no doubt that those four were in a band and were a team; just look at them.
When Paul Stanley was asked which band Kiss modelled themselves on, he confessed, “The Beatles, in many ways,” before continuing, “Those ‘60s British groups all looked like real bands. No member of The Beatles could have fit into The 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.”
This team effort led to the band becoming one of the biggest musical outfits of the ‘70s. Their solid studio albums, paired with the extravagant stage shows, appealed to audiences around the world as people joined the Kiss Army en masse.
Of course, like every band, there were disputes, and some of these led to band members such as Peter Kriss and Ace Frehley opting to leave. However, that original duo of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons was the partnership that kept the ship sailing, and it seemed Stanley’s original dispositions about Simmons being selfish were misplaced… most of the time.
There was a period when the band struggled, as before making an album, Gene Simmons was asked to appear in a Hollywood blockbuster. The album was Animalize, the movie was Runaway, and Simmons opted for the latter. The result was that Stanley was left to work on the record by himself, with nothing but his own intuition and some poorly put-together Simmons demos to work with. The result was hardly anything special.
“Gene had basically disappeared by that point,” wrote Stanley in his book Face the Music. “I felt abandoned when it came time to make Animalize. After informing me without any warning or discussion that he wouldn’t be around for the album, Gene went into a studio and crapped out some demos as fast as he could.”
Concluding, “Then he was off to do a movie [the Tom Selleck-starring Runaway]. He left me with a pile of mostly unusable junk.”
