“Light shows and smoke bombs”: The 1970s band Patti Smith called an enemy of rock and roll
Ever since Patti Smith started writing, she has been a student of rock and roll.
Even though so many people tried to become one of the biggest names in rock by playing millions of notes, she was more interested in going down as an artist the same way that her idols like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix did. Her heroes were in the industry to help make the world a better place, and Smith could usually see when her contemporaries weren’t exactly onstage for the right reasons.
Then again, there’s no right or wrong way to make rock and roll. The whole genre has always been about freedom of expression to a certain degree, and even if some of the best musicians of the time were larger than life, it’s not like Smith was any less valid because she wasn’t properly trained. She was feeding off of her band’s energy whenever she performed, and you could feel that she meant every single word that she said whenever she tore through tunes like ‘Gloria’.
But New York by that time looked a lot different from the New York that she was born into. Lou Reed had opened her mind to what lyricists could be every single time a Velvet Underground song came on, but there were also plenty of bands trying to ape the glitter scene happening at the time. The New York Dolls were one of the biggest bands in the world, and even if they had mountains of attitude, Smith did feel a strange trepidation when it came to talking about a band like Kiss.
Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were clearly ready for primetime when they started their first bands, but when looking at them on the cover of that first Kiss album, it wasn’t exactly about someone expressing themselves like an artist. They were trying to make some of the greatest impact that they could, turning their shows into a circus, and while that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it was never going to be Smith’s cup of tea, either.
All of the bombs going off in arenas may have got a reaction out of a crowd, but Smith felt that she needed a little bit more substance than what Kiss had, saying, “I didn’t think a band like Kiss represented the direction I wanted to see rock and roll go. But it’s not fair to point the finger only at them; the atmosphere at the time was going toward light shows and smoke bombs.” Kiss was far from the only band to use pyrotechnics, but it’s not like they weren’t the main offenders, either.
In fact, Kiss may be one of the few bands that was almost allergic to making an artistic statement. They did have their moments where they could pile on the theatrics on albums like Destroyer, but when you look at some of the more embarrassing records they released, a record like Music From the Elder is what happens when a band wants to make a more sophisticated statement but has no idea how to express it.
And if you look at the way that Simmons talks about his job, it’s not like they were on the same wavelength as Smith, either. The bassist treated Kiss like a corporation from day one, and while there were more than a few times where he could write a great tune or turn a stage into one of the most exciting places in the world, it’s easy to see when they were pandering to whatever the rock culture was doing, whether that was trying their hand at hair metal or eventually making grunge-flavoured music in the 1990s.
Anything that Smith ever made had to come from the heart, but when you start digging into the background of Kiss, there’s a reason why she wanted to take rock and roll back to basics. She didn’t want the corporate side of rock and roll to win out, but Kiss was a business first and a rock and roll band second, and Simmons hasn’t let anyone forget that for as long as they have been going.
