KISS- Destroyer 50th Anniversary- Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons
The fourth KISS studio album Destroyer, and their first to sell over a million copies, is turning fifty. Destroyer was teed up perfectly by the success of the preceding KISS Alive!, and the band wisely sought out the services of the hottest producer of hard rock then, Alice Cooper collaborator Bob Ezrin, to get the most out of “Detroit Rock City”, “Shout It Out Loud”, and the improbable hit written and sung by KISS drummer Peter Criss, “Beth”. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons co-host In the Studio.
To this day I still recall receiving in early 1974 the debut album from a largely unknown New York City band called KISS, and my ambivalence on whether to take it seriously or not. It started right there with the startling high-resolution cover, before hearing even the first note. “Alice Cooper was the biggest thing in music in 1973,” Cooper himself once told me here In the Studio, “so a band with four Alices? Couldn’t miss.” Kiss lead singer/guitarist/songwriter Paul Stanley told me about the band fraternity of groups with whom they shared the stage some fifty years ago, “The love fest ended when we hit the stage, because we were there to destroy them.” Gene Simmons agrees. “Putting on the make up was like putting on warpaint.” 
Everyone remembers their first Kiss concert. I sure do, in the Ohio Northern University gym, with that new Canadian band Rush opening. Interviewing lead singer/guitarist Paul Stanley sans makeup about forty-five minutes before KISS took the stage, while guitarist Ace Frehley crashed beside us in the little Winnebago which served as a dressing room, I was not fully prepared for what was about to happen next. Few things from the mid-Seventies can totally freeze time the way that listening to Kiss Alive! does. While the world was weary of the Viet Nam War and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the puckered foursome had cranked out three studio albums in eighteen months, somehow managing to play every college gym and theater between their New York City base and the Rockies. Now they could perform the strongest of that material while making the leap to select arenas, such as in rock-and-roll-mad Detroit and Cleveland, and record their amalgam of testosterone-fueled comic book fantasy, horror movies, and good old teenage lust. How could it not work? 
Yet, with the KISS legacy secured, would they even be allowed to develop over three studio albums in only eighteen months to get that shot at a “best of, live” album in the 21st century music business? “I think the record climate is very, very tough on bands,” notes Paul Stanley. “What makes or breaks a band is their own heart and desire to rise to the top. Certainly the thing that made KISS in the beginning, which has kept KISS alive, is that nobody will ever decide when we come, when we go, what we do or don’t. It’s the inflexibility within a band, and their desire to stick to their own set of rules, that will make them…It’s totally within a band’s ability, if they have the goods, to succeed,” assures Paul Stanley. “It’s very easy to blame the record company, apathy, the climate, trends in music. There’s ALWAYS room for something great.”
Gene Simmons adds, “We had an advantage, I think. It was a little like the Wild West…We could play on bills with Dr. John and the Raspberries. I remember as a kid going to see The Chambers Brothers, a soul rock thing; Albert King; and Poco…You could see Led Zeppelin and the Woody Herman Orchestra on the same bill!” KISS kollaborators Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons join me In the Studio for a remarkably frank, insightful look at the golden anniversary of Kiss Destroyer, –Redbeard
