Mitch Lafon | BraveWords.com
Special Series By Mitch Lafon
May 19th, 2012 will mark the 20th anniversary of the brilliant KISS Revenge album. BraveWords.com will mark the passing of this landmark record with a five part series of interviews conducted in the last couple of weeks with the major players on the disc as well as a few musicians that you may not know took part in the album’s recording sessions. Our second such surprise is dr
ummer, Kevin Valentine (DONNIE IRIS & THE CRUISERS). Like Tommy Thayer before him, Revenge was Kevin’s second appearance on a KISS album (having come in to cut the drums for the track ‘Take It Off’). His drum work can first be found on the track ‘You Love Me To Hate You’ from the band’s 1989 Hot In The Shade album. After Revenge, Kevin continued as a ghost musician for KISS playing on the entire Psycho Circus album save for one track (Into The Void) and before the recording of that album, he served as Peter Criss’ drum coach on 3-D Psycho Circus tour that came on the heels of the highly successful 1996 Reunion tour. Kevin has kept quiet over the years about his involvement with KISS, but in this exclusive interview with BraveWords.com, he finally breaks his silence.
BraveWords.com: How did you get involved with KISS? It’s been suggested that you first played with KISS on their Hot In The Shade album.
Kevin Valentine: “Correct. I did play on some stuff, but let me back up. Eric Singer and I are friends from high school in Euclid (a suburb of Cleveland). So, the Hot In The Shade record – he’d been playing live with Paul and doing demos with Paul, but he had to go back on the road with ALICE COOPER. He said to Paul, ‘Kevin’s a good guy, why don’t 
you give him a shot.’ So, I went in a played on a lot of Paul’s stuff. That was with Pat Regan at Fortress (studios). It was an electric kit except for the cymbals. Supposedly, my drums were replaced even though Pat said that most of my drums ‘weren’t quite replaced’. I don’t really know.”
BraveWords.com: But if you listened to the album, would you be able to recognize your parts?
Valentine: “Well, yeah I recognize my parts because it’s what I played when Paul and I put them down, but it’s hard to tell if they were actually replaced or not. There’s an issue of ‘feel’, but if someone is playing the same exact parts – it’s tough to tell.”
BraveWords.com: The accepted truth is that you played on the song ‘You Love Me To Hate You’. Does that sound reasonable?
Valentine: “Yeah. There’s always the craziness with the band, but sure it’s reasonable. I view the drum track and rhythm track as the foundation of the house and sometimes it’s hard to just rip out that foundation and put another one underneath there – no matter who is playing the foundation. It just doesn’t work and sometimes the demo has a certain feel over the master. So, you keep the demo because of that.”