I was a KISS fan for a few months when I was in 10th grade. I was one of the first people to wear a KISS t-shirt in my high-school. It was a big plastic-like iron-on decal of KISS’s debut album cover that I selected from a wall of designs on display at a local record store. A month or so later, my interest in all things KISS disappeared and I became a fan of… some other band.
In my junior year, in a final hurrah, three of my friends and I attended a Halloween party in full, homemade KISS regalia, complete with dead-on make-up expertly applied by my artistic mother. Our costumes were really an inside joke, as none of us were KISS fans.
Many, many years later, I was intrigued when I discovered that my wife’s soft-spoken aunt — a teaching assistant at an elementary school — was a closeted KISS fanatic. I was floored when she revealed that she paid an unheard of twelve hundred bucks for a backstage, pre-show intimate encounter with KISS at a local stop on their then-current concert tour. (That story is related HERE.) I certainly didn’t begrudge her for what she chose to spend her money on. What confounded me was her interest in KISS in the first place. Some quick calculations brought me to the conclusion that she was not the right age to have been a KISS fan in their initial wave of fame, let alone in any subsequent resurgence in popularity. The appeal didn’t make sense… to me, anyway.
A couple of years ago, my wife — the illustrious Mr. P — accompanied her Virginia-contingency of cousins to an outdoor show featuring 80s rockers Def Leppard and KISS. Mrs. P, an affirmed Dead Head, is the last person you’d expect to find at a KISS show. Her cousins were all set to leave after Def Leppard’s set, but Mrs. Pincus was adamant about staying. She stood firm, saying that she paid her twenty bucks and she was determined to see what this “KISS thing” was all about. She was not impressed, but she did like when they performed “Beth.”
My brother-in-law was briefly married to a woman who was considerably younger than he. She admitted to being a fan of the face-painted purveyors of pop-metal. My brother-in-law, just like my wife, is a long-time devoted follower of the Grateful Dead. But, as an obedient husband, he agreed (albeit reluctantly) to attend a KISS concert at a casino showroom in Atlantic City. I saw them a few weeks later and asked, “How was the show?” My sister-in-law gushed and she began to tell me all about the experience. I stopped her and said, “No. Not you.,” then I pointed to my brother-in-law. “You.,” I said, “I want to know how you liked the concert.” He shrugged, “I don’t know. I left before it began and spent the time in the casino until it was over.”
KISS founding guitarist Ace Frehley passed away this week at the age of 74, after some health issues related to a fall he’d taken in his home recording studio. I really don’t have any KISS stories…. just some funny anecdotes. If you think about it, KISS, as a band, had become just a bunch of funny anecdotes.