The Kiss song Gene Simmons stole from The Hollies: “I ripped off the title”
It’s no secret that Kiss, while posing as a metal act, were far more influenced by pop music from the 1960s than they were by any of the acts from the scene they were pigeonholed into.
Rather than taking cues from the hard rock acts that paved the way for the birth of heavy metal, or indeed from the progenitors of the genre itself, The Beatles were a more significant influence on Gene Simmons’ songwriting approach, and he was always in search of ways to incorporate elements of their work in what he was doing, despite the heaviness that they added to it. Whether it was melody, a catchy hook or the simplicity of their songs, The Beatles were a strong part of Kiss’ lineage.
It worked for the band too, and they became successful for this unique merger of these two seemingly incompatible sounds. The entire point of heavy metal in its early years was to rally against the mainstream, but Kiss had found a way to make it available to this sphere, even if it did end up dividing the opinion of fans for going against the ethos of the genre. Kiss are often unfairly dismissed by pop fans for being too heavy, and by metal fans for being too kitsch and pop-oriented, when in reality, they were just master craftsmen of pop songs.
However, it wasn’t just after their ascent to stardom that Simmons adopted this way of writing, as he and Paul Stanley had been doing it long before the formation of Kiss. Having been in other projects prior to the band existing, they would attempt to record and release an album that leaned even further into this ‘60s pop influence.
In a 1992 interview with Guitar World, Simmons revealed more about the origins of one particular Kiss track that borrowed a particular element from a cover they’d done in their previous incarnation. “Before Kiss started, Paul and I had a group called Wicked Lester, which recorded a never-released album for Epic Records,” he explained. “We already had ‘She’ and ‘Love Her All I Can’, but the producer was screaming that we didn’t have any singles and suggested that we find another song at a publishing house.”
Going into further detail, he divulged how this classic pop track eventually found itself inspiring the title and chorus of one of their biggest hits. “We heard a Hollies song that wasn’t quite good enough to record. It had a chorus that said, ‘We want to shout it out loud, but we can’t let people know.’ I thought the idea of shouting out loud was great, so I ripped off the title.”
They may have only stolen one line of ‘I Wanna Shout’ in part, with it becoming ‘Shout It Out Loud’ on their 1976 album, Destroyer, but it was hugely important to them and their development as a band. If it hadn’t been for the work of Allan Clarke and Terry Sylvester, and various other British beat groups from the previous decade, Kiss may never have had half of their influences to lean upon, and even if the amount of theft happening in this instance is minimal, you can see how crucial it all is to the existence of Kiss.
