The true “heart and soul” of Kiss, according to Eddie Kramer
It’s borderline impossible to put the magnitude of a Kiss concert into words. The band are as close to superheroes as you could possibly come. A combination of face paint, flamboyant outfits, fireworks, fire, pyrotechnics, lights and huge sound, you have the makings for a true spectacle, and that’s exactly what they were.
If you were to ask Kiss about the face paint, their answer would be different from what you would expect. Rather than setting out with the intention to shock and compel, they mainly just wanted to look as though they all belonged in a band together. Paul Stanley once reflected on periods when all bands looked like they belonged in a unit and missed that underlying connection.
The answer was to all don make-up, essentially assuming the role of characters in a parallel world that people could read up on and feel a connection with. Very few bands took to the stage and appeared as unified as Kiss, and audiences were left stunned by everything about their live shows.
“Kiss was the first one to use pyro,” said Geezer Butler. Black Sabbath took the band on their first world tour and ended up regretting it as, because of the flamboyance of their show, they became a difficult act to follow. “You’ve never seen that,” he said, “I mean, the shock of that. And they were supporting us, so they weren’t even headlining.”
Butler continued, “It was tough to follow them. We went on just as an ordinary band, no effects or anything, and everybody else still hard their mouths wide open from seeing Kiss.”
Of course, there was more to the band than just the excitement of their live show. They also made great, loud, hard-hitting music that backed up their extreme look. There was a period when this sound may not have been achieved, though, as before the band were Kiss, they were Wicked Lester, made up of just Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons.
“At Electric Lady, I would see Gene and Paul up and down the hallways, doing their thing. Ron Johnsen was their producer, and I think at the time he was also managing the Electric Lady studios,” recalled Eddie Kramer, who would go on to help produce Kiss’s original demo, “He called me up after the disaster of the Wicked Lester album, which went straight in the bloody toilet.”
Johnsen told Kramer they were attempting to make some hard-hitting music but didn’t know how to get it off the ground. Kramer stepped in, agreeing to help produce the band’s first demo, and this led to him discovering what he continues to believe was Kiss’s secret weapon: Ace Frehley. While Wicked Lester was made up of Stanley and Simmons, the moment Frehley was on board, the music began to take shape.
“When Ace walked into the studio, he was so bloody skinny. He was driving a cab in the Bronx. And he was so thin, if he turned sideways, you wouldn’t even see him,” recalled Kramer, “Ace, for me, he was the real heart and soul. A bloody good guitar player, much underrated, I think, by a lot of folks.”
