Why Steven Tyler was offended by Kiss: “Do they really mean it?”
When Kiss arrived in 1973, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Pink Floyd were reigning supreme, and a handful of others, like Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd, were showing what they were made of with debuts that would maintain their grip on the industry for many years to come. Kiss, on the other hand, seemed to represent a different entity entirely.
The cover of the band’s debut album is a good place to start when delving into how they manufactured an image different from anything on the scene at the time. Although the stark figures against a dark background seemed somewhat reminiscent of the With the Beatles album cover, the glam-rock presentation of the band logo and the corpse paint quite literally painted a different picture entirely.
What’s even more interesting is that the entire shoot for that cover seemed strung together by each member doing, well, whatever they pleased, particularly when it came to the actual makeup itself. For instance, while the others applied their own paint, Peter Criss got his work done professionally and ended up looking like, as Paul Stanley later described, a “tribal lion mask”.
The band’s first-ever national television experience didn’t seem all that well-planned either, particularly after Gene Simmons proclaimed to be a reincarnation of evil, which made the audience and accompanying guests feel slightly uneasy despite the fact that these were clearly just musicians in makeup attempting to elicit trepidation among those who watched on.
In the early days, for these reasons and many others, Kiss became so divisive that it almost felt impossible to gain success. As Simmons wrote in the End of the Road tour programme, “It was like somebody pushing you into the deep end of the pool whether you can swim or not.” Between the strange talk show appearances and live performances, Simmons and the rest of the band rode in a station wagon down long stretches of road, living on nothing but “beans and franks because we couldn’t afford better food.”
Of course, things took a turn for the better, and they have since sold over 100 million records worldwide. However, some still claim to not understand their craft, like Steven Tyler, who once said he found their overt “otherness” so disassociative that he couldn’t feel anything but offended when asked about his opinion. “I sometimes get offended by their music,” the musician said.
He added: “I go, ‘What’s this all about? Do they really mean it?’ That’s why Aerosmith have been around forever. Because we take ourselves seriously.” lashing out at their image and perceived inability to maintain any sort of consistency as far as good music goes, he said they were nothing more than a “comic book rock band [with] spackled faces and a couple of hits.”
Unfortunately, many others in the limelight share a similar opinion, including Carlos Santana, who once mirrored Tyler’s sentiment by criticising Simmons’ image, claiming it to be a distraction from the fact that he is driven by hiding his talent beneath the costume. In his words: “He’s not a musician, he’s an entertainer. Kiss is Las Vegas entertainment, so he wouldn’t know what music is anyway. That’s why he wears all that stuff.”
