The Kiss Interviews

By Warren Lapine

Collected here for the first time are sixteen interviews and articles with and about the hottest band in the world: KISS. Warren Lapine is an experienced interviewer and a long time KISS fan. This book is just what the doctor ordered for the hard core KISS fan. These interviews are insightful and intelligent, Lapine asks Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons the questions that KISS fans want to have answered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Jun 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781627931694

Book preview

THE KISS INTERVIEWS

By Warren Lapine

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright © 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-62793-169-4

This book is dedicated to

Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons

Thanks for all the music.

An Interview with Paul Stanley

WL: How different do you think your life would have been if the Wicked Lester album had been released and had managed a Top Forty hit?

Paul Stanley: Had that album come out, we probably wouldn’t have even merited the VH1 segment on Behind the Music. We’d be a footnote in late sixties or early seventies music. We were smart enough to realize that what we were doing was neither a reflection of us, nor good enough to compete with what was out there. I give us credit for dismantling a band that already had an album finished. You need to look early on to whether your architecture and design is sound; if it’s not, you have to fix the foundation before you build on top of it. Wicked Lester was a learning experience which, thankfully, didn’t affect us in any other way except to give us some studio experience in what we should do and what we shouldn’t.

WL: Looking back on the Wicked Lester days, could you have imagined still playing with Gene Simmons thirty years later?

PS: No, but I couldn’t have imagined being in a band thirty years later. You have to remember that there was no precedent, at that point, for a band lasting more than perhaps eight years. So the idea of being able to do this thirty years on was preposterous, preposterous and inconceivable. There was no template, no one had done it. What changed was the evolution of rock and roll. As rock and roll grew up, it became obvious to the bands and the people making it that, like the blues, if rock and roll reflected the people making it, it could stay viable because it would reflect the audience.

WL: So in the sixties, rock and roll didn’t realize it was going to grow up with its listeners?

PS: Probably, because prior to bands writing their own material, teen idols were really a commodity that was handled or manufactured by managers and record companies, and they were disposable. There was nothing except the flavor of the week, and when the audience grew tired of that person, the same song-writing team would be writing for someone else. So the performer was just the image and the physical presence of the music, but was not representative of the music in the sense that they wrote it. As teens would grow tired of Fabian, they could get Frankie Avalon. When the Beatles came along, it became a whole new ball game; a door opened to a whole other way of doing things. The bands grew up listening to mostly black R&B, the Everly Brothers, Elvis, and things of that sort, and wound up emulating it by writing their own music. So you wound up with groups which were a real reflection of the music because they wrote it. There was no obsolescence, because the music was so valid that, as long as the music continued to connect with the audience, it didn’t matter that the musicians got older. That was the major difference. Certainly when I first started in a band, that was not the blueprint that had ever been followed before. The idea of doing this for thirty years was absurd. I was hoping for five years.

WL: On October 31, 1976, I was twelve and I rushed home from trick or treating to see KISS on the Paul Lynde Halloween Special. When I turned on the television set, I was a kid, and when I turned it off, I was an adolescent. Did you realize at the time that your appearance on that show was going to change a generation of kids, much the way that the Beatles’ and Elvis’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan show had?

PS: I think that part of success— although it can be planned— is that the naivete of the people doing it is imperative. If you really knew the impact you were going to have, you couldn’t do it as well. You wouldn’t be able to see clearly because you’d be clouded by your own bloated sense of self-importance. I think that’s true of writing, too. I listen to songs that I wrote when the band first started that I couldn’t possibly write today. Not that I’m not technically a better writer, but the writing process was different because I didn’t know the rules. When we first started, my intention, certainly, was to take over the world. Perhaps when you’re doing it, you’re not aware that the process has already begun.

WL: Have you ever worn the makeup of any of the other members of the band?

PS: No, no, why on Earth . . . no. Never even contemplated it. It would be like wearing someone else’s underwear. It’s not acceptable.

WL: How does KISS with the makeup feel differently than KISS without the makeup?

PS: I think it’s a validation and a magnification of who we are anyway. When I put on the makeup, it’s Paul Stanley on steroids. It’s one hundred percent me and it’s totally comfortable, but it is a magnification of a certain part of me taken to epic proportions. It’s very empowering.

WL: Is Paul Stanley any more important to KISS with or without the makeup?

PS: Well, not to blow my own horn, I think I proved my importance over the years with and without. It’s doubtful that there would have been a band at certain points of our history had I not rolled up my sleeves.

WL: Crazy Nights reached number four in the U.K., Shandi was a number one hit in Australia; do you ever finish writing a song and say to yourself, This is going to be huge in the U.K., but I think the Australians are going to hate it?

PS: That’s interesting . . . nope. But I’ve certainly written songs where I said a certain segment of our audience might not like this. It’s important for people to understand that part of the reason I’m in KISS is to make my own rules. As much as I want to please as many people as I can, I also can’t sell myself short or not avail myself of the freedom that I’ve earned. There certainly are times when I’ve written certain songs and said, Gee, some people might not like ‘Forever.’ Or some people are not going to like ‘I Was Made For Loving You.’ It’s a two-way street; if someone doesn’t like it, they don’t have to listen to it. In the scheme of things, it all seems to balance out.

WL: I like to play your solo album for people who have never heard it, and then ask them when they think it was released. They invariably say between 1984 and 1988. Obviously, you had the eighties’ metal/hard rock sound down ten years before it came to dominate the airwaves. Has it ever occurred to you that your solo album may have shaped what the eighties sound was going to be?

PS: I’ve always managed to reflect the music that I love without blatantly copying something. I think that my influences come through. It started with me trying to write songs that I heard on the radio that I couldn’t afford to buy. When I was in New York in my teens, there was a radio show called The British Power Hour. They would play the top ten from England each week, which was drastically different than what was on the charts here, and I loved those songs. When I would hear them, I’d try to retain some of them, and I would write my version of what I had heard. That’s basically how Fire House and some of those other songs came to be. My roots are clear; maybe for some people, that became their roots and was a template for them.

WL: I understand you are currently working on a solo album. Can you tell me anything about it?

PS: Anyone who has heard any of it thinks it’s great. But then again, there’s no shortage of people to tell you how great you are. You have to be discerning enough to realize that a compliment is only as good as who it came from. I think it’s great, there’s great singing on it, the songs are really good. There’s no reason for me, at this point, to do a one-man KISS album. That would be the easiest thing for me to do. The reason my first solo album was critiqued as sounding so much like KISS is pretty clear: for me to go into the studio with that type of line-up in mind or point of view will undoubtedly sound exactly like KISS. Some of the KISS songs on the albums are virtual copies of my demos. On the box set,