How The Rolling Stones inspired the first song by Kiss
No member of KISS would claim to be a connoisseur of rock music. For Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, it was always about making the songs that the masses wanted to hear, whether that meant making shout-along choruses on tracks like ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ or dipping their toes into disco territory on ‘I Was Made For Lovin You’. When the group first started, though, their first original under the KISS name was indebted to the classic sounds of rock and roll.
Before forming their shock-rock outfit, Stanley and Simmons were in a band called Wicked Lester, making the same run-of-the-mill rock and roll that most bands had gotten tired of. Instead of going with the record deal that they had at the time, the songwriting duo decided to cut things off then and make something the audience hadn’t seen before.
Inspired by comic books and various spectacles, every group member had to have a certain shock factor about them, with Stanley taking on the role of ‘Starchild’ and Simmons becoming ‘The Demon’, inspired by works such as Phantom of the Opera and Dracula. When they approached songwriting, though, the subjects hadn’t changed.
Although Simmons had been working on a song before called ‘Stanley The Parrot’, Stanley took the crux of it and turned it into the song ‘Strutter’, recalling: “We started trying to recast it in the vein of The Rolling Stones. And the words just came to me”. Taking the makings of a Keith Richards-style shuffle, the song fits comfortably in the Stones-esque mould, as if Mick Jagger is singing about a girlfriend who isn’t giving him the time of day.
Having the song was half the battle, but the rest of the band needed to be finalised. After combing through Rolling Stone, Simmons came across an ad for a drummer willing to do anything to make it, who turned out to be Peter Criss. Despite the power behind the tune, Criss’s performance behind the drums kicks everything into high gear with a tom-tom-heavy groove.
As the band started shopping for a guitar player, a misfit kid turned up to the audition with two different shoes on both feet. After muscling his way into the rehearsal space, Ace Frehley became the band’s go-to guitarist, possessing the same confident swagger as most guitar slingers before him, eventually being cast as ‘The Spaceman’.
Although KISS would carve out their brand of rock and roll following their formation, the influence of The Stones would linger around for a while. Across their first album, nearly every track boasts the standard chord voicings of Keith Richards, including the now famous suspended sound that Richards would later utilise in his various open tunings.
During their disco years, Frehley would also end up covering the song ‘2000 Man’ from the group’s psychedelic album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, which perfectly fits his spaced-out aesthetic. The Rolling Stones may have had enough rock and roll in their ranks for decades’ worth of good times, but KISS managed to find their voice when they turned that swagger into a rock and roll circus.
