Rock legends Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss formed the band KISS in 1973 in New York. In 2023, Simmons chatted with USA TODAY about the final band’s days: “It’s complex. I can sit here in my hotel room and wax poetic about all of this stuff, but those are matters of the mind, the semantics emanating out of my oral passage. You can talk about something but until you’re there, the matters of the heart don’t kick in. There is an enormous sense of pride the band has, including Tommy (Thayer) and Eric (Singer), who have been with us more than 20 years. We’re enormously proud of what we did.”