The one song Ace Frehley doesn’t want Kiss to be remembered for: “It was a huge departure”
No one in Kiss knew what they were getting themselves into when they first started putting together their live show.
They might have been celebrated as the biggest superheroes in the music industry, but there were also various times where they were going to look absolutely ridiculous in order to get to the top of the food chain. That didn’t matter so long as they had a good tune as the basis for everything, but Ace Frehley had his limit for how close to pop territory they got.
Because when looking at the early version of the group, there’s a case to be made for them being one of the originators of heavy metal. They certainly looked the part with Gene Simmons’s ‘Demon’ persona, but listening to a lot of the riffs that Frehley came up with like ‘Parasite’ and ‘Cold Gin’, they all had a strange blend of punkish fury, Stones swagger, and some strange third element that seemed to be beamed in from outer space.
It’s important to have that kind of maverick energy in the band sometimes, but that wasn’t going to do Simmons and Paul Stanley any favours when they started working on their later records. They were already having problems with Peter Criss following the terrible movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, but even after making solo albums, some piece of the chemistry got lost in the shuffle.
After all, half of Dynasty doesn’t have Criss on the record, and it’s not exactly the most tonally consistent record they ever made. There are some heavy-as-hell riffs from Frehley like ‘Hard Times’, and even the odd ballad like ‘Sure Know Something’, but no one was really expecting them to go disco when they heard ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’ for the first time.
Then again, there’s no shame in anyone trying to jump on the disco hype train. The Bee Gees made out like bandits when making Saturday Night Fever, and there was some genuine classics scattered amongst the Studio 54 playlist, but the more that Frehley listened to the record, the more he started to think that Kiss weren’t going in the right direction by having that four-on-the-floor beat.
Tensions were already high, but Frehley felt that there was no point in a band like Kiss performing a song like that, saying, “It was a huge departure and it was something I wasn’t happy about because it was starting to get into a disco vein. But somehow it happened and then it was a big hit, but do you want to be remembered for it is the better question.” If we’re being fair, it’s not like the song is all that bad.
Stanley was always a great pop songwriter for the band, and he goes for some great high notes in the breakdown section of the song, but the more you listen to it, it starts to feel a little bit too distracting seeing ‘The Starchild’ sing this tune. Had it been a Donna Summer tune, no one would have batted an eye, but seeing ‘The Demon’ bellowing in the background during the music video is far from the first image in people’s minds when listening to a song like this.
Although the band did eventually add a bit more muscle to the live version, it wasn’t really enough to convince Frehley to stay in the band that long. It’s one thing for the band to take chances and actually have them pay off, but if he wasn’t that thrilled with playing disco, him playing on albums like Music From the Elder was bound to be the last straw once the 1980s rolled around.
