Showing posts with label Bruce Kulick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruce Kulick. Show all posts

12.09.2013

Kiss: Album by Album (1983 - 1998)

Let us continue our Kiss odyssey (Kissodyssey?) down through the years.

This period of the band's career saw big changes. Casablanca Records went out in a blaze of debt and angel dust, and their new label was more bottom-line-oriented. Bye-bye 24-hour limo service. Ace and Peter were out, Gene and Paul parted ways with manager Bill Aucoin, and then went through four guitarists in as many years. While they were still on the first of those four (Vinnie) they decided to ditch the make-up for the release of:

Lick It Up (1983)
Track Listing: Exciter / Not for the Innocent / Lick It Up / Young and Wasted / Give Me More / All Hell's Breaking Loose / A Million to One / Fits Like a Glove / Dance All Over Your Face / And On the 8th Day
Shrewd move. The visual impact of Kiss was known the world over, but it was strongly associated with their adventures in the 1970s. The band needed to re-brand themselves for the new decade.

Favorite tunes: Title track, "Exciter," "All Hell's Breaking Loose." The rest range from "meh" to not bad. "Dance All Over Your Face" is a damn funny title, though not a fave.

"Lick It Up" is such a crazy tune. Rock classic, definitely. Whatever else can be said of this era of Kiss, they produced at least three bona-fide classics. (Not to mention at least a dozen personal favorites.) This is the first of them. Beyond the rocking-ness, it is one of the funniest videos ever filmed. I'm positive they didn't mean it to be, but such are the waters 80s videos often navigate.

The other video from the album was for "All Hell's Breaking Loose." As a song, it clocks in at about Mach-2 on the absurdity-radar. But it's got nothing on the video. I was originally going to devote a whole blog to this one, but I think I can make do with only a few screencaps. Here's the full vid itself:

After fending off an attack by slow mutants, Gene pauses to roast his turkey leg on a random street fire.
They round the corner and meet a little person in Victorian garb accompanied by a man on stilts.
This little-person-and-man-with-stilts sequence is bizarrely paired with the lines "Street hustler comes up to me one day / And I'm walkin' down the street, mindin' my own business / Now he looks me up and he looks me down and says / Hey man, what be this and what be that / And why you gotta look like that?" In the video itself, the little man pantomimes haranguing Paul in such a manner.

Is this what was meant by "street hustler?" Paul's response by the way, is epic: "Well I just looked at him, I kinda laughed, I said Hey man, I am cool, I am the breeze..." You just know he really wanted people to take this and run with it. "Call me 'The Breeze,' damn it!"

From here, they continue to some kind of club, where a thrown knife is a visual reminder of the danger they navigate on our behalf.

The knife-thrower
This is followed by almost thirty seconds of fire-breathing and suggestive apple-eating by those inside whatever club this is.

Finally, they take the stage.
The ladies are taken with Paul.
An impromptu sword fight breaks out.
The little man re-appears. (No sign of the man on stilts.) Obviously Paul's "I am the breeze" line inspired him to follow Kiss to the club, where he throws Paul a sword so Kiss can escape the fray.
And off they go.

I'm not sure if this video was filmed before or after Motley Crue's "Too Young to Fall in Love," but there are a lot of similarities. Then again, when it comes to 80s metal, all rivers tend to empty in the same sea.

Ownability Factor: 8 out of 10. Nah, 10 out of 10. Why not.

Animalize (1984)
Track Listing: I've Had Enough (Into the Fire) / Heaven's On Fire / Burn Bitch Burn / Get All You Can Take / Lonely Is the Hunter / Under the Gun / Thrills in the Night / While the City Sleeps / Murder in High Heels
(God, that cover. Ugh. You just know it's something totally disgusting, as well, like their used furry Kiss thongs or something after a night banging the same blow-up doll, or something. Gross.)

I'd written some things about this album for this here overview but after another listen last night while making pasta, I decided it deserves its own entry. Stay tuned to this space for more details.

Ownability Factor: 10 out of 10.

Asylum (1985)
Kiss's glam phase continues; it's difficult to truly explain this stuff, now or then. It has its precedent in the 70s, of course, and even older than that, but how all that translated to hard rock acts on Dial-MTV remains a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter: still a total mystery.
Track listing: King of the Mountain / Any Way You Slice It / Who Wants To Be Lonely / Trial By Fire / I'm Alive / Love's a Deadly Weapon / Tears Are Falling / Secretly Cruel / Radar for Love / Uh! All Night
Favorite tunes: "Tears Are Falling" (the third of the three bona-fide classics aforementioned. Three guesses what the remaining one is. Hint: It's "Heaven's On Fire.") "Uh! All Night" (one of Paul's silliest, but also one of all rock's silliest) "I'm Alive" (another if-they-could-have-bottled-the-80s-it-would-have-smelled-like-this tunes) and "Who Wants To Be Lonely." The video for that one is just jawdropping. Not just the softcore porn of it all, but how exuberant everyone is. One of my favorite Kiss tunes, nonetheless. The "oh-whoah-OHH-OHH!"s in the chorus are so ridiculously fun. When explaining Paul Stanley to anyone, be sure to include this one, "I'm Alive," and maybe even "I Still Love You" from Animalize. (Okay, that's twice I've brought up Animalize since saying I'd save it for another blog, so zip it, McMillan.)

Actually, forget what I said. As Ch'gyam Trungpa once said of Wavy Gravy, "That man is self-explanatory."
So Dumb It Might Actually Be Brilliant: "Any Way You Slice It."

Ownability Factor: 8 out of 10.

Crazy Nights (1987)
Track Listing: Crazy Crazy Nights / I'll Fight Hell to Hold You / Bang Bang You / No No No / Hell or High Water / My Way / When Your Walls Come Down / Reason To Live / Good Girl Gone Bad / Turn On the Night / Thief in the Night
A comeback album of sorts, as it was their highest-selling record of the 80s. I'll spare you any further shots of Paul Stanley's thong from the back cover.

Favorite tunes: Title track, and (see below) Least favorites: "Turn On the Night" is just... words fail me. I'm shocked this was written by Paul and not Gene, actually.

Sagacity of the Starchild: I have no idea if this is the actual case or not, but it sure seems like Paul had so much fun writing "Uh! All Night" on the last album that he said, "You know what? Why even bother with innuendo?" And "Bang Bang You" is the result. You'd figure the chorus (I'm gonna bang, bang you! I'll shoot you down with my love gun, baby!) would be the silliest line in the song, but you'd figure wrong: If love's a crime I've got a hundred schemes / I'll be the villain in your book of dreams. This should probably be a "So Dumb It May Actually Be Brilliant" entry, but I'm pretty sure it's both with no ambiguity.

Ownability Factor: 5 out of 10.
In 1988, Kiss released another compilation album: 

The band recorded two new tracks: another facepalm-rocker from Paul ("Let's Put the X in Sex") and for my money the closest thing to "Love Gun" he ever wrote, "(You Make Me) Rock Hard." Not as cool as "LG," but minus the silliness of the parenthetical, there, this is a surprisingly melodic tune. It's definitely the prettiest song ever written about getting an erection.

Personal note: I hadn't heard too much 70s Kiss at the time this came out, so getting this one was akin to discovering "Space Seed" after having watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan so many times. And for that reason I'll give it an Ownability Factor of 9 out of 10. Plus, "Rock Hard." Maybe 10 out of 10.

Hot in the Shade (1989)
Track Listing: Rise to It / Betrayed / Hide Your Heart / Prisoner of Love / Read My Body (!?) / Love's a Slap in the Face / Forever / Silver Spoons / Cadillac Dreams / King of Hearts / The Street Giveth and the Street Taketh
Away (?!) / You Love Me To Hate You / Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell / Little Caesar/ Boomerang
At the time of its release, I really hated this album, and it seemed my decision to go with the Space Ace over these guys was the right one. Ace released Trouble Walkin' the same year, something I always let my buddy Dan know when he'd try and convince this was the superior release. Many a lunchtime argument over that one. My opinion has since been upgraded to "meh." I still consider it the band's weakest effort.

Favorite track: Technically, it's not a fave - and Ace Frehley's version is a little more to my liking, to boot - but the video for "Hide Your Heart" is pretty funny. 80s videos have several trends, and Kiss made a point - as they always do with any trend that overlaps with their target market - to check off each and every box: the live concert video, (everything from Crazy Nights) the rockers-in-post-apocalyptic-landscape video (we got two of those on Lick It Up,) the models-in-strange-make-up / band-on-neon-soundstage video, etc. ("Who Wants To Be Lonely.") And then this sort of thing: the pretense to social commentary/ story-video, usually (as is the case here) about a pair of star-crossed lovers whose tale is told interspersed between shots of the band performing.

"Boomerang" has its moments, even if it, too, is kind of generic. That's my main beef with Hot in the Shade. It sounds like literally every other hard rock album from this era. Maybe it's what the guys were going for. Their competition at this point were bands like Winger, after all.

Ownability factor: 3 out of 10.

Around this time, Kiss contributed a cover of Argent's "God Gave Rock and Roll To You" to the Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey soundtrack.

I'd always assumed it was written by Petra, who covered it for their '84 album Beat the System, which is where I first heard it as that album got a lot of play in my brother's Dungeons and Dragons group. Petra was a Christian rock band - not the most predictable company for a group that listened mainly to Demon, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden et al.
Kiss opened for Argent back in the early days, before getting kicked off the tour. (One of the many bands to fire them as their opening act.) The song's been retconned as a "tribute to Eric Carr," who would sadly die of cancer in 1991. As a tribute, it's a little lame. It may be bad manners to say that, but it's too silly to be taken seriously. If I was at a funeral and the choir broke into this, I'd feel like they were making light of the affair. If I find out, however, that one night, the band was all down, and Eric started quietly preaching the gospel of rock and roll and how God put it in the souls of everyone, and then touched a wand to Paul's, Gene's, and Bruce's foreheads, who then rose as avatars of this new religion, well, all right.

Even without this scenario, if there is a man on Earth who actually feels about rock and roll the way all frontmen preach it to the crowd, it may be Paul Stanley. Here he raises it to the highest platitude. His "straight-talk" over the ending minute has all the feel of a baptist tent revival.

It was included on:

Revenge (1992)
Track listing: Unholy / Take It Off / Tough Love / Spit / God Gave Rock and Roll To You / Domino / Heart of Chrome / Thou Shalt Not / Every Time I Look at You / Paralyzed / I Just Wanna / Carr Jam 1981
Despite the terrible title and the even more terrible cover, this album unexpectedly (and perhaps even unreasonably) kicks a lot of ass. Vinnie Vincent returned to co-write some songs, though apparently he got along with Paul and Gene even worse this time around.

Sometimes The Demon Surprises Me: Although the song wouldn't surface until Gene's solo album over 10 years later, even Bob freaking Dylan worked on it. A fact so bizarre that it bears repeating in boldface: Bob Dylan and Gene Simmons collaborated on a song. The experience must have inspired Gene, as he contributes some of his best work here: "Unholy" - a cover version by the German band Die Artze must be heard to be believed - "Spit," and "Domino." (It's amusing to think of Gene showing these songs to Bob Dylan, and Dylan singing them to himself on the way home.)

Sagacity of the Starchild: Ditto for Paul, who seems especially committed to exaggerating his usual tricks on this album. Whether it's the Uh-huhs that punctuate the verses of "Take It Off" or the ridiculous fun of "I Just Wanna" to the chomp-and-stomp surreality of "Heart of Chrome," (You taped our sexy conversations / and you sold them to the BBC has been puzzling me for 20 years now) it's Paul's strongest presence on a Kiss record since Asylum.

Ownability factor: 10 out of 10.

Alive III (1993)
Track listing at the wiki.
Another one that is way better than it should be. The version of "I Was Made For Loving You" is heavier than any that appear elsewhere, and Paul's stage banter is from another planet.

Just a great collection of tunes altogether. Ownability factor: 15 out of 10. (Yes, even more than the first Alive.)

MTV Unplugged (1995)

Favorite tunes: The acoustic version of "I Still Love You" is somehow even more bombastic and gothic than the electric one. The same can't be said for "Sure Know Something," but it's an equally surprising choice for an acoustic album and a great version of it. I love that damn song. I love both damn songs. And Gene dusts off "Goin' Blind" for some damn reason - something he does again on Alive IV.  * Ownability Factor: 10 out of 10.

* I only this weekend began reading Gene's book (Kiss and Make-up) and discovered his old buddy and Wicked Lester bandmate Stephen Coronel co-wrote this one. I knew that part of it, I guess, but what never occurred to me was the reason this one pops up so much on other recordings is so Steve can continue to realize royalties from it. That's a cool enough little story for me to give "Goin' Blind" a pass from here on out.

The main attraction is the original line-up getting together for the last few songs. Which is cool, but it's just an appetizer for the course to come. After:

Carnival of Souls (1997)
Track listing: Hate / Rain / Master and Slave / Childhood's End / I Will Be There / Jungle / In My Head / It Never Goes Away / Seduction of the Innocent / I Confess / In the Mirror / I Walk Along
What's weirder, that Kiss cut a grunge-y record or that it's actually a perfectly legitimate grunge record? If you replaced Paul Stanley's vocals with Lane Staley's, "Jungle" would be one of Alice in Chains' best songs. Not that I'm suggesting Paul's vocals are bad on that - or any of these - track(s), just a) you'd have to remove Paul's vocals to fool anyone, as his voice is so distinctively Kiss, and b) if you did, no one would blink if this was slipped onto an Alice in Chains CD.

Ownability Factor: 10 out of 10. Like The Elder, despite its being a solid record, Kiss more or less distanced themselves completely from it. They had good reason to, though, as they did the reunion tour and then the reunion record:

Psycho Circus (1998)
Track listing: Psycho Circus / Within / I Pledge Allegiance to the State of Rock and Roll / Into the Void / We Are One / You Wanted the Best / Raise Your Glasses / I Finally Found My Way / Dreamin' / Journey of 1000 Years
In the 90s, grunge did to metal what Rome did to Carthage. Kiss survived with its fan base intact - they and Metallica seemed to be the only metal acts of the 80s to do so - but even had they not, they always had a trump card. If times got tough, they could put the make-up back on, grab Ace and Peter from their respective small-venue tours / IRS problems, and go on tour.

Which is exactly what they did. And they made a gazillion dollars. (Well, $147 million, more precisely. The highest grossing tour in their history.)

Ace and Peter were paid per show and didn't get a cut of the merchandising/ ticket sales. Something both complain about a lot in their books. While I can sympathize - it's got to be tough to be hired back into the band you once quarter-owned as only an employee and seeing your former mates rake in the lion's share of the profits - let's keep this in mind. Peter got paid $40k per show, Ace $50k. They played around 400 shows between 1996 and 2001. That's over $16 million for Peter and $20 million for Ace.

Those are only estimations, obviously, but still. Not a bad chunk of change.


It's got to be tough to see yourself only "moderately" enriched while working just as hard as the guys who are getting five times as rich, sure. But we'll get to all of this in the solo books.

The tours aside, Psycho Circus is a reunion in name only. Peter and Ace appear basically only on "Into the Void" though Ace plays on a couple of other tracks.

Favorite tracks: Title track, "Into the Void," "Dreamin'."

Sometimes the Demon Surprises Me: It's Gene's songs that are the most surprising. There's not a clunker in the bunch - that makes Psycho Circus the only Kiss record where Gene outshines Paul. Even crazier: neither "Within," "We Are One," nor "Journey of 1000 Years" allude in any way to genitalia, his or anyone else's. This should have been the cover story of every magazine in 1998. (Compounding the oversight instead of correcting it, Time Magazine gave its "Men of the Year" Award to Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton. Way to go, nerds.)

And Men Shall Call Him... Space Ace: When Ace belts out "I'm losing power and I don't know wh-y-y-y..." it's a more-than-words moment of what's been missing from every Kiss record since The Elder.

Ownability Factor: 10 out of 10
~

At some point, I'll blog up my thoughts on Alive IV, (the DVD) Sonic Boom, and Monster. I always roll my eyes when a band goes on a Farewell tour, then keeps touring and putting out albums. I don't quibble with their right to do whatever they want, of course, but as my small protest to the practice, I won't include those in this 2-part overview. The albums are worth covering, though, and I'll probably turn my attention to other aspects of the Kissverse before I get there. 

12.05.2013

Kiss: I Pledge Allegiance to the State (of Rock and Roll)

Five months from now, Paul Stanley's memoir is due to be published, thus completing the cycle of original line-up memoirs from Kiss. I thought it'd be fun to read the other ones between now and then and blog 'em up. Before we get to any of those, though, let's get my biases out of the way via a brief overview of the Kiss phenomenon.

is as American as Bugs Bunny or Indiana Jones.

I'm not saying they're as cool as Bugs Bunny or Indiana Jones or are more American than, say, the Grateful Dead or Duke Ellington or whomever. Perhaps we should start with what I mean by American. What is it about America that Kiss embodies? Its irreverence? Its cult of hyperbole? Its rude and crude animal vigor? Its almost pathological optimism? Its sexism? Its inability to have a serious conversation without lapsing into dick jokes or emotional infantilism? All of the above?

If I could definitively answer that question, I wouldn't be blogging about it; I'd be putting it into practice. But that's my impression; when future historians and archaeologists reverse-engineer the American epoch from what they dig up about us, Kiss will be an irresistible primary source. It's a sobering thought, but perhaps only what we deserve.

More than pretty much any other band out there, they embody all the poison and the pudding of the American spectacle. (That will be my only "intellectual" link, right there. You can totally skip it, but just to define what I mean by spectacle, specifically.) But on another level, it's all just about rocking out. Which is essentially a spiritual practice. The other side of Americana - the sacred story of religious freedom. Sts. Mayflower and Horatio Alger, combined in the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman, and the Cat.

Which isn't to say they embody every aspect of Americana, of course. But that's the point: when future civilizations dig this stuff up and piece together the story of Kiss, we won't be around to distinguish their spectacle from a more comprehensive version of how we lived and what we believed in.
On the other hand, maybe we're kidding ourselves and Kiss is exactly what we believe in.
There are those that see the whole Kiss phenom as only marketing, their songs simply the application of some lowest-common-denominator formula. One part hard rock, one part "baby baby," one part Marvel Comics/ horrorshow, a dash of carnival blood and fire, platform shoes, and serve with "Rocket Ride." On the marketing side, well, of course. It's not a legitimate observation, is it? It's like criticizing a nation for being a country. They're not anti-corporate. But did they claim to be? Weren't they always saying, work hard, rock out, live by your own rules, and you can be rich like us? And have binders full of women?

I love Kiss, and I even love Gene - God help me - but man, this guy. I'll save it for when I cover his book.
As for their tunes, there are hundreds of blogs and fan-sites dedicated exclusively to discussion of their catalog, and everyone has a different favorite. This proves nothing, of course, certainly not that Kiss's impact as a band is equal to their legacy as a brand. But it's kind of funny. Literally every Kiss fan I know has a different favorite song than every other Kiss fan I know and, usually, elaborate criteria for their selection. But back to the question-at-hand: how do Kiss's songs stack up against other great rock bands of the past 40 years? Answer: better than most. It's not just P.R. that has enabled their survival for decades while so many of their contemporaries fell to the wayside.

When I got my first Kiss tape, they looked like this:

 
Not like this.
Which is another way of saying that in 1987 they looked like any other hard rock band of the era. A little hairier (maybe) but virtually indistinguishable from dozens of other hard rock acts. The same could never be said of Kiss in the 1970s.

Getting Crazy Nights that Christmas marked the end of a Kiss-ban in the McMillan household that had been in effect from 1979. What had happened was - and for some very adorable reason, my Mom gets defensive about this now; it's really okay, Mom! - my cousins were babysitting me and "I Was Made For Loving You" was on the radio a lot that summer. We were all dancing around to it, and they told me stories about their concerts and rumors of their on-the-road adventures. My eyes got wider and wider. 

When my mother got wind of my excitement - and presumably some of their drug-and-groupie anecdotes - that was it: Kiss was banned. Understandable enough. I'm not sure if it was just that I was older in 1987 or that the hard rock scene that emerged as a result of in the wake of Kiss's mega-success was suitably debauched enough to dilute the shock factor of her baby boy listening to drug-snorting, blood-gurgling, fire-breathing orgy enthusiasts making "grunt" songs. (Like this.)

Alas, it's not a great album. Even 1987-me knew that. A friend made me a mix with Frehley's Comet on it, though, and I instantly became an Ace fan.  

For the rest of high school, I brought up Ace, stubbornly, whenever Kiss was brought up.
I was obsessed with Marvel comics, so naturally I loved the make-up/ characters. And even though I chose The Demon for Halloween 1988, above, you can see evidence of my Ace fandom behind me, stage-left.

Hard to make out, perhaps, but that's the Space Ace, there. The little picture above the one marked is Ace, too. Double trouble!
Although I'd expanded my musical palette considerably by the time this came out (Trouble Walkin', 1989) I cranked this one an awful lot during my last few years of high school. (Get Shot Full of Rock! GET SHOT FULL OF ROCK!) That was it, by the way, for Ace solo records for another 20 damn years. (And Anomaly, released 2009, is his best since the '78 solo album. Something neither myself nor any Kiss fan, I imagine, expected.)
It wasn't until my friend and former Boat-Chipster Kevin made me four lavishly detailed mix tapes in 1998 that I once and for all grokked Kiss. 

Only one of which - Ace's, fittingly enough - survives now. They were all recorded from the original vinyl, and Kevin's tape player sped up the tracks ever-so-slightly. As a result, when I hear the "regular" version of "2000 Man," it always seems a half-step too slow to me.
Chuck Klosterman and J.M. Blaine wrote probably the most spot-on appreciation of Kiss (and by extension, cock rock itself) on the net; here's an excerpt:

"Over and over, particularly in the 80s, they (Gene and Paul) forward the idea that KISS fans are being persecuted and that people are trying to stop us from liking KISS. And that’s a brilliant aesthetic vision for the band. It’s something that never technically happens – and yet as one moves into the world of pop music and becomes more intelligent – I have to say that it’s true. People are often trying to convince me that KISS is terrible. Or that when I say I love KISS that I’m actually pretending. Or that if you like KISS somehow you are only trying to rediscover your childhood. I just believe that of all the bands to think about, KISS is by far the most fun."

The defense rests.
NEXT: Album by Album (pt. 1)