The secrets to 
’s enduring appeal: Bloody loud funBy Peter Simpson, The Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA — It landed with a loud bang, as things your parents don’t like often do, in 1975, and it has been with us ever since. It wasn’t a seminal moment in music by any technical measure but, boy oh boy, when KISS sang, “You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy,” it was no empty promise.
My buddy Kirk and I sat in his bedroom and played Rock and Roll All Nite over and over again, and his mother asked us to turn it down so many times that her pleas seemed like part of the chorus. Thirty-four years later, our generation still likes to rock and roll all night — as does the generation it begat. KISS has tapped into that rich and infinite vein of cross-generational gold, and when they hit the main stage at Bluesfest Wednesday, it’ll be the biggest night at this year’s festival, with thousands of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters who grew up on the stuff or are growing up on it now.
“It’s almost like KISS fans can pass down their love of KISS to their kids like it’s some kind of hereditary condition,” says Eamon McGrath, a 19-year-old Edmonton rocker who played Bluesfest Sunday night.
Which prompts the question: How does the silliest band in rock ride ludicrous costumes and juvenile, even puerile, lyrics to a lifetime of success for the whole family?
“At the heart of KISS is the heart of rock ’n’ roll,” says Matthew Crosier, manager of CKCU radio at Carleton University, who sees in KISS’s music the “fun, unbridled, juvenile, endless summers of youth” and the “Detroit rocks of Bob Seeger, Radio Birdman and the White Stripes, wrapped up with the escapism of Marvel comics and Ziggy Stardust.”
I wrote to a dozen or so music-minded people: “How do you explain the enduring appeal of KISS?” Almost everyone sent a reply, and even those who stress that they’re not fans of KISS acknowledged the enterprise that is KISS.
“KISS endures because they are classic,” said Ottawa musician Ana Miura, who played Bluesfest last week. “Whether you interpret that adjective as corny or serious, I think both sides would agree that they are in many ways unforgettable.”
And they were instantly so, says Michael Murray, a pop-culture pundit and former Citizen columnist. “In junior high school, all the girls swore allegiance to the Bay City Rollers, while all the boys lined behind the mighty KISS,” Murray said. “This was purely tribal, of course, a girls-against-boys posture that was merely the musical equivalent of playing with dolls. The boys wanted to suggest danger and aggression, without actually having to do anything dangerous or aggressive, while the girls wanted to suggest romance, without actually having to be sexual.”
The Rollers are long gone back to Bay City, or Scotland, or wherever that unfortunate other bit of pre-fab pop squeaked out of. KISS, meanwhile, continue to ching-ching away with music sales, concert tours, and an almost pathological willingness to merchandise.
Check out the KISS online store for KISS blankets, cocktail tables, wall-sized murals of album covers, billiard balls and footballs, dart boards, clothes for men, women and children, a 2004 cabernet sauvignon and a “KISS Destroyer diaper bag.” Alas, there’s no sign of the “KISS Kasket,” which, says a story on bbc.com, “could double up as a refrigerator to chill beer while the owner was still alive, showed the four KISS members in full stage make-up and sold for $4,000 U.S.” KISS, truly, is cradle-to-grave.
“Through non-stop promotion and their branding of nearly everything under the sun, they have become an unstoppable force,” said Dave Sarazin, program director at CKCU, and proud owner of a KISS pinball machine.
The band is also timeless, for as we grow and age, they appear to stay the same. “The makeup, despite its obvious use as a gimmick, was pure genius,” said Maureen Hogan, lead singer of the Ottawa band Good2Go, which plays Bluesfest’s Hard Rock stage at 7 p.m. Wednesday. “The band could be 92 and the audience would be none the wiser. They get to look as young as they were when they made the music.”
And it’s not even the same faces behind those faces. Original members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley left years ago, but the faces on stage remain the same.
“The band’s popularity was always about the characters, not the music,” said Peter Darbyshire, author of the acclaimed novel Please and a former Ottawa resident. “Or maybe the mythology of the characters — not just the Demon and the Starchild and all that, but the sex orgies after concerts, the rumours about what the name stood for, the origins of Gene Simmons’ tongue, the Phantom of the Park, the money. KISS were never going to be the next Beatles or Rolling Stones. They were too busy being the Harry Potter of their day.”
What a book that would be: Harry Potter and the Bloody Tongue of Rock. Maybe there’s something to the analogy, something deeply — and craftily — rooted in our primal instincts.
“KISS appeals to people who like extremes — good and evil, etc. — and don’t like to dwell too much on the shades in between,” said James Hale, a jazz writer and critic based in Ottawa.
“KISS strives to be louder, cruder and more simplistic than any other band. For fans, those extremes offer an attractive alternative to the tough choices in everyday life. They offer escape, and that’s attractive to a lot of people.”
Louder, cruder, more simplistic — and bigger. Everything about KISS was bigger than everything else. Other bands had fan clubs, KISS had its own KISS Army. “Mere fan clubs didn’t have a chance,” said John Allaire, who plays the Subway stage at 1:30 on Saturday. KISS was, and is, a spectacle. It’s the showy, preposterous big bang of rock.
“KISS endures in the way a circus act does,” said McGrath. “People will always be amazed by a trapeze artist, people will always be amazed by explosions on a movie screen, people will always be amazed by a certain loud rock ’n’ roll band that sings about rock ’n’ roll all night and partying every day, particularly if the entertainment they create is doctored in such a way that makes it continually appealing to the most people possible. They made action figures of themselves, for God’s sake.”
Adam Mitchell didn’t make the action figures, but he co-wrote nine KISS songs, including Crazy, Crazy Nights, Creatures of the Night and, prophetically, Legends Never Die. Mitchell sees through the merchandise and explosions and fake blood to a more fundamental basis for KISS’s enduring appeal.
“KISS understands, more than any other band I’ve ever seen, that rock ’n’ roll is really about one thing: having fun. They know it. Their fans know it,” said Mitchell, who years ago was in a Canadian band named the Paupers that was managed by Ottawa’s Harvey Glatt, and who has since written songs for Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Paul Anka and others.
“That’s why they appeal across so many generations. If you go to a KISS concert, you’ll see eight-year-olds still dressed up like Gene or Paul. Having a spectacularly good time is the essence of the thing that KISS, unlike so many other bands, never forgot.”
It’s also why we haven’t forgotten KISS. They drove us wild, and we’ve been crazy for them ever since. I’ll bet that even Kirk’s mom, after she closed the door, was humming Rock and Roll All Nite to herself, nice and quietly.
