Richard Hell & The Voidoids: The CBGB band who left Paul Stanley cold
If you’re after examples of members of Kiss being outspoken and highly critical of other music that isn’t their own, your first port of call ought to be bassist Gene Simmons. Known for being highly opinionated and unflinching in his assessments of the state of modern music, there are few notable bands on the planet who haven’t been on the receiving end of Simmons’ ire, and whether or not he’s ever right in his assumptions, he’s a pretty hard person to get to change his points of view.
He’s always been something of a traditionalist who takes pride in rallying against change. If a certain style doesn’t fit within the immediate canon of rock and pop, or demonstrate the same ethos or principles as he does, then it’s immediately made fit for his dismissal. As far as he’s concerned, you mustn’t dare fuck with the tried and tested forms, or you’ll risk receiving his acid-tongued wrath to the highest degree.
This sort of attitude can be taken in one of two ways. His fans, and by extension, fans of Kiss, are often of the same opinion – why fix something if it isn’t broken, and why tamper with the glorious sounds of rock and roll. Seeing as the band considered themselves to be the biggest rock band in the world, and I daren’t argue that statement, Simmons felt he was in a solid enough position to dictate what was good and what wasn’t.
On the other hand, people can take this the opposite way, and have labelled him with the ‘confused grandad’ archetype, whereby anything that requires more effort to comprehend or get used to is trashed. Don’t even think about trying to sneak a rap record under his nose – he’ll most likely berate you for hours for peddling a genre of music that lacks any artistic merit and is devoid of all melody and lyricism, despite how wildly incorrect that is to state.
However, this way of thinking clearly seeped its way throguh to the other members of Kiss, and while Simmons is busy running his mouth off about one thing, Paul Stanley is finding things of his own to be critical of. While the late ‘70s were a glorious period for Kiss and other bands of their ilk, it was also the same period that birthed punk and new wave, a strand of guitar-oriented rock music that Stanley positively seemed to detest.
When asked by Classic Rock in 2012 what he thought of all the bands emerging from iconic New York nightclub CBGB’s at the time, his reaction was one of revulsion. “I went there, but that scene was based more on wanting to express yourself than knowing how to play an instrument well enough,” he told the magazine. “There were a lot of artsy bands at CBGB that left me cold, like Richard Hell & The Voidoids and all that nonsense.”
Richard Hell & the Voidoids may not have been to Stanley’s tastes, but they were a hugely influential band who helped spawn a whole host of other equally inventive acts. Once again, it’s a member of Kiss simply refusing to open their minds to other types of music, and while there’s an underlying urge to convince artists like this to open their minds a little, it’s perhaps best that Stanley sticks to what he knows best in this instance.
