Remembering the ill-advised collaboration between Lou Reed and Kiss
Fans and critics alike were baffled when Lou Reed joined forces with heavy metal gods Metallica to create the joint album Lulu in 2011. Reed’s sardonic near-spoken word was in direct contrast with the bash and thrash style of Metallica, and the end result was one of the most baffling collaborations in the history of music. But Reed had never been afraid of a strange team-up: he had done it before with glam rockers Kiss decades prior.
In order to reverse their dire commercial fortunes, Kiss decided to write and record their own concept album, Music from ‘The Elder’, in 1981. One of the most peculiar tracks is ‘A World Without Heroes’, a ballad featuring Gene Simmons on lead vocals. The track gets even strange when you look at the songwriting credits and notice Reed’s name alongside Simmons, Paul Stanley, and producer Bob Ezrin.
“It is part of the storyline,” Ezrin told Ultimate Classic Rock. “And in a way is meant to be in the [character of the] Boy’s voice. But it also is a statement of some personal meaning to all three of the writers – Gene, Lou and me.” Reed contributed the title line “A world without heroes is like a world without sun,” and it was Ezrin who facilitated Reed’s involvement in the project.
“Lou was my dear friend from the time we did Berlin together in 1973 until he died 40 years later,” Ezrin explained. “I think he was one of the most brilliant lyricists of all time. Occasionally, I would ask him to step out of his sweet spot and write lyrics for other artists. And the story of The Elder appealed to him. So he came up to my farm in King City, Ontario, to do some writing on the project. He had just taken a new path in life and had started studying tai chi, and I remember the then very odd scene of Lou out on the lawn by our pond in the misty early morning, practising Parting the Horse’s Mane.”
Reed would also contribute to the track ‘Mr. Blackwell’, but it would be ‘A World Without Heroes’ that would be his most notable contribution. The track was released as a single, but like the album itself, ‘A World Without Heroes’ didn’t manage to find any commercial success.
“The whole track was uncharacteristically architected for Kiss,” Ezrin says. “But then so was ‘Beth.’ In this case, having Gene sing the ‘romantic lead’ and Paul be the guitar god, plus having Lou write these innocent, yearning lyrics, was an intentional change of normal roles to get an unusual effect. Unfortunately, this was not quite the song that ‘Beth’ was nor was the time right for it. But Gene sings it beautifully, and Paul played a fantastic, dramatic solo.”
Ezrin wound up calling The Elder “ambitious, [it] has moments of real musical majesty but was fundamentally ill-conceived, and the wrong thing for Kiss to do. They needed another Destroyer, and instead, I got seduced by the mirage of a dramatically different idea and steered the ship in the wrong direction. As we’ve all said many times before: Ace was right. Still there’s some pretty amazing music on it in places.”
