The classic album Kiss’ Gene Simmons claims saved rock ‘n’ roll from “a terrible time”
When Kiss first entered the scene, they faced the seemingly insurmountable task of proving their authenticity. In rock ‘n’ roll circles, adopting a somewhat extravagant or glam rock image seems to yield criticisms about artificiality, but Kiss’ music spoke for itself, and soon enough, they won over audiences and critics alike. They were as authentically artificial as you could hope to be, and that seemed to resonate with a new audience.
The rejection of mainstream theatricality in traditional rock ‘n’ roll spaces is an interesting one, not just because audiences have become far more open-minded about what constitutes art in the modern age but also because it implies a deep-rooted conservative mindset that opposes anything that appears in direct contrast to hard masculinity.
According to Gene Simmons, this resulted in a challenge that felt like “somebody pushing you into the deep end of the pool whether you can swim or not.” Most of the time, their divisiveness made it difficult to make ends meet. “The early years of Kiss were far from glamorous,” Simmons explained. “We rode in a station wagon hundreds of miles every day. We would take turns driving and sleeping in the back.”
The other issue that seemed to threaten the rock landscape was the overuse of technical synthetics, like drum machines and synthesizers, and the sounds took off in the 1980s that forced others to re-evaluate what, exactly, makes rock, rock. For some, rock was evolving. For others, the increased popularity of certain production techniques meant rock had surely lost its raw appeal.
For Simmons, the latter was true until one particular band came along and turned the tide for the better. “The ’80s were a terrible time when guitars didn’t sound like guitars, and there were drum machines. But then all of a sudden here comes this group: Guns N’ Roses,” he said. “They plug in their guitars and just didn’t mess around with any fancy stuff.”
The album that addressed this shortcoming, according to the musician, was Appetite for Destruction, which, in his view, “had an honesty that rock & roll had been missing.” Going a step further, he likened Axl Rose to another legendary rock singer. “‘Welcome To The Jungle’ is an undeniable song in the same way that ‘Satisfaction’ has that great riff with the lyrics on top of it,” Simmons said. “As soon as you heard that high-pitched voice that harkened back to a Robert Plant-ish approach to singing, which hadn’t been heard in quite a while.”
Whether or not it’s true that Guns N’ Roses effectively saved rock during a time when the genre was going through a significant transformation, they most certainly brought back a gritty, rebellious spirit that was reminiscent of rock’s earlier days. The band’s combination of hard-hitting riffs and gritty vocals reintroduced a sense of danger and excitement to the rock scene, which had started to become dominated by more polished, pop-oriented sounds.
