Why did nobody like touring with Kiss?
Long tour dates with short stops spread out over a hundred no-good towns you couldn’t point out on a map; messy nights in dirty beds sleeping next to god knows who and pumping your bloodstream full of god knows what or why, where you can’t even remember why you wanted this in the first place, anymore.
You’re playing the same old song for the thousandth date in a row to the same few eager faces on the barrier, none of them here to see you but just waiting for you to get off the stage and for their real heroes to make their way out. Behind those beaming eyes lie a sea of disinterested ones and enough room to fit a bus through, but you also wouldn’t want the arena to be full, because the more people are around, the more you feel alone. You’re starting to feel like life on the road wasn’t all you thought it might be, like you’re Jan Kerouac rather than her famous father, Jack. You thought you’d have made it from strung-out support act to superstardom by now, or at least, you’d hoped you’d be a little bit closer than this.
And just when you were starting to think that things were on the up, where you found a new groove in one of your old warhorses and the crowds have been cheering your name extra loud these last few days, but remember that as good as things can be, you’re still stuck on the road with Kiss, and they’re making you want to kiss goodbye to these dreams that you’ve had for your whole life.
“We gave first tours to AC/DC, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, a whole bunch of acts… Rush was one of the first acts that we gave a break to, and time has judged that we made a good decision”, Kiss frontman Gene Simmons has said about the bands who have supported them over the years. Not all of their support acts were grateful for the spot, though.
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has even seen a photograph of the glam-metal four-piece Kiss, but they could be a little gregarious at times. Intense, overpowering and were certainly liable to get themselves right in your face-paint. If you thought it was bad enough having to deal with four of them backstage, then that was nothing compared to their thousands-strong Kiss-army fanbase. One would drive you wild, and the other would drive you crazy.
Despite carefully selecting their supporting acts, their fans didn’t care who came out first. All they wanted was to hear Kiss play, and they’d let you know it. They’d scream over any and all opening acts, chanting for the band and counting down the seconds until you were off the stage. Sammy Hagar got so fed up with this one night early in his career that he stopped playing halfway through one of his songs and said to the audience, “‘I’m so glad they flew in a special audience from Los Angeles for me’. Then I pulled my pants down, fucking shook it at them and then smashed my guitar to bits and walked off the stage saying, ‘Fuck you’.”
On another tour later on, when Black Sabbath were now opening for the metal giants, Tony Iommi felt a similar sort of ill-will towards the main event and showed it in his own similarly juvenile way. “We didn’t really get on with them”, he has said, “I remember seeing the sign outside which said ‘Black Sabbath and Kiss’. We changed the P to a K and put ‘Piss’.” Well, that sure showed Kiss.
Decked head to toe in outrageous outfits and with their faces covered in make up; long-hair becoming increasingly tangled with sweat while they performed their self-serious but actually quite ridiculous, overblown and overbaked, underwritten and derivative brand of aggressive, loud and in-your-face-rock which really oughtn’t be taken seriously by anyone over the age of ten, Black Sabbath would go on to be almost as big as Kiss in time.
Hey, at least they weren’t as bad as to their opening acts as the Grateful Dead were, who would regularly spike their support acts and send them into orbit before they took to the stage. Give me loud, abrasive and obnoxious over that any day of the week.
