Jody Havenot
Daily Archives: November 12, 2018
Paul Stanley slams the haters as rock icons Kiss vow to go out on top
Cameron Adams | Herald Sun
AS soon as Kiss announced their farewell tour, frontman Paul Stanley knew there would be cynics.
Because The End of the Road tour, starting next year, is actually Kiss’s second goodbye.
The original Kiss line-up reformed for a farewell tour that ran from 2000 to 2001, but lost drummer Peter Criss before it finished and guitarist Ace Frehley soon after.
Stanley and fellow co-founder Gene Simmons would later state Criss and Frehley’s playing skills meant they weren’t especially proud of the reformation tour musically, even if it was the line-up the fans wanted to see.
“The first farewell tour was almost 19 years ago,” Stanley says. “Cynics be damned. Those people will always find something to say. That (reformed) line-up of the band was dysfunctional. People in the band weren’t showing respect to the fans or the band itself. We decided to put the horse down. The truth is we’ve carried on for 19 years (since the first farewell) because we realised people still wanted to see Kiss, we just had to have a tyre change.”
Ace Frehley Says KISS Is “Testing the Waters” for Reunion
Andrew Magnotta I iHeart Radio
Ace Frehley Says KISS Is “Testing the Waters” for Reunion
By Andrew Magnotta
If there’s one guy in the world who knows how Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons run KISS, it’s Ace Frehley.
Frehley formed Kiss in 1973 with Stanley, Simmons and drummer Peter Criss and has collaborated with his former band mates both on stage and in the studio in recent years.
While fans of Kiss (and Frehley) have been hoping for a reunion for years, Frehley says that will only happen on the band’s upcoming End of the Road farewell tour if Stanley and Simmons find they need a reunion to get the tour sell out.
He points out in an interview with Loudwire that Stanley’s stance on a reunion dramatically changed this fall after the tour announcement.
“Six months ago, when Paul was asked, ‘Is Ace gonna be involved in future concerts?’ he said, ‘Absolutely not. The past is the past and now is now,'” Frehley recalled, paraphrasing Stanley’s statements to Billboard this past spring. “In the last week or two he’s saying, ‘I wouldn’t rule it out,’ and then he did another interview where he said, ‘There’ll probably be some old members coming back as guests for the last tour.’ But he’s not mentioning any names.”