The artist Paul Stanley said was like “being in the presence of greatness”
When you think of Kiss, a few things spring to mind immediately: Stadium-shaking riffs, platform heels, and fire-breathing theatrics. What doesn’t come to mind is musical diversity, and that’s entirely the point. Kiss never pretended to be boundary-pushing artists, and they certainly weren’t chasing innovation. Paul Stanley and Co were there to blow the roof off and sell the spectacle, not reinvent the wheel.
They’re party boys at heart. Maybe a little Party City for some, but for most, the showmanship and silliness are absolutely what you go to Kiss for. They’re about hollering along to absurdly catchy choruses, bopping along to their pop-rock gems and picking your jaw up off the floor when you see Ace Frehley start shooting rockets out of his guitar. It may be shallow, but it’s expertly deployed and sweet baby James, is it effective.
Plus, it may be a little unfair to write their music off as lowest common denominator bar-band jams with the budget of five Marvel movies behind them. After all, Kiss’ music at its best is just as ludicrously thrilling as any of their stunts and gimmicks. Songs like ‘Black Diamond’, ‘Strutter’ and ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ don’t come from people who know nothing about constructing expertly crafted pop-rock.
An interview that Paul Stanley conducted with Forbes shows just how much of a student of pop music he is. When asked about the live shows that changed his life, he talks about all of the standard hard rock heroes that influenced his generation of bands, like the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. However, the very first one he mentions is an artist you might not expect from the Kiss mainman.
Which artist changed the life of Paul Stanley?
When asked about the first concert that changed his life, Stanley says “I was fortunate, as a kid I saw Otis Redding, which he was magic. And you hopefully know the difference when you’re in the presence of greatness as opposed to just an entertainer. So Otis was amazing.” Which is a hundred percent true, there’s a way of turning great entertainment into great art that Otis Redding was one of very few artists to get right.
Stanley elaborates on this concert later, saying “To hear ‘Respect’, ‘Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)’, you gotta write it down like that, ‘Try A Little Tenderness‘, Otis was a big man and he commanded that stage and even if you see Monterey Pop or some of these other concert films and you see Otis, I can only imagine what he would have gone on to do had he not met a tragic end.”
In a way, that’s basically the only thing that Otis Redding and Kiss have in common. Both acts were made up of consummate showmen who saw that great art could be great entertainment and vice versa. The problem is that Kiss went a little too far in the entertainment direction. Writing songs with the express intent of electrifying a live show rather than expressing something real, the way a song like ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’ does.
Of course, I’m sure the counter-argument to that from die-hard Kiss fans would be ‘if their desire to write songs that sound great live is real, surely that counts too?’ If that’s enough for you, then more power to you. However, if Paul Stanley could go to an Otis Redding concert, hear a song like ‘Respect’, and come away inspired to do nothing more than make entertaining live shows, one would wonder how much he was really listening.
