The Kiss song Gene Simmons regrets: “Do we really wanna play that?”
With their makeup and outfits, Kiss have always been a theatrical rock band. When they began in the early 1970s, they were something new and bold. They were leading the way for heavier rock, setting themselves apart from the classic rock and roll crowd. But as time went on, and as is always the case for pioneers, the rest of the world caught up, and soon, the band had regrets.
Regret is a harsh word, though. For a band like Kiss, you’d hope that they don’t have many, given the scale of success they’ve hit. They were a group that levelled everything up, daring other acts to be bolder, be more maximalist and be more out there, both in terms of their live shows and staging.
But a pioneer can’t be a pioneer for long. As is always the case for artists forging a new path, others will soon start walking it, and people will soon walk steps ahead. Kiss definitely felt that, not so much in terms of their unrivalled showmanship but simply in the fact that while they opened the door to heavier rock, more modern acts absolutely kicked it down.
All of this comes back to one song, and one of the band’s biggest hits – ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’. Gene Simmons can still recall the exact moment when Paul Stanley first brought the track to the band, so much so that he gave Howard Stern a playback of the exact conversation.
“So he walks in, ‘got an idea for you’, ‘what’s it called?’, ‘I Was Made For Loving You’, ‘Ah that’s great’”, Simmons remembered. For the next part, for a truly immersive effect, let’s lay this out like a script as the bassist gave a line-by-line rundown of the moment the track was introduced.
“‘What’s the first line?’” Simmons began, and the rest went like this:
“‘Tonight’
‘What’s the second line?’
‘I wanna give it all to you.’
‘Yeah, I know what it is, that’s cool.’
‘In the darkness.’
‘In the darkness? Yeah, that rocks’
‘Something I wanna do’
‘That’s really cool! What’s my part?’”
And that’s where the issue lies. As Simmons mockingly sang the song’s signature ‘doo doo doo’s, even in 1979 he already felt like a bit of a loser taking on such a bubblegum pop element when they were meant to be wild rockers. While the chugging guitar and lyricism match the band’s seductive, rebellious energy, Simmons’ additions in the background bring a lightness the group have never quite made their peace with.
There’s a part of it that they still find really embarrassing, as if that one detail in that huge hit makes them look less like the hard rockers they always were. “We do these shows, we’ll do festivals, and sometimes we find ourselves on a bill headlining over all these very heavy or metal bands and in the beginning we’d say, ‘do we really wanna play that?’” Stanley himself said, despite being the person who wrote that detail. But as they’re now playing shows with a whole new generation of heavier acts, who took what Kiss did and made it ten times darker and louder, the band have had a lingering insecurity about the joy of this moment.
But then the joy is also what makes them love it. Simmons said he dislikes the element “To this day,” but added, “except when stadiums full of people jump up and down like biblical locusts.” While it’s a part of the track that the band doubts, it’s also the part that absolutely gets their crowds going, providing exactly the kind of mass sing-along moment that creates an incredible atmosphere. So even if they cringe at the sound of it when they’re singing it, hearing it be sung back to them has kept them loving the track.
