Fittingly enough, for a band who are more of a marketing campaign than a band, the most heavy metal thing about Kiss is their look. Everything from the face paint to the guitars to the pyrotechnics that have singed the eyebrows of generations of concert-goers screams metallic excess. This is a band whose awe-inspiring heaviness is something to be feared and respected. Whose music is just as fearsome as their blood-spitting demon of a bassist.
Then you play Destroyer and find out that Kiss are basically just Cheap Trick after bingeing a few seasons of Dragula. It’s true, Simmons and Stanley’s shock-rock troupe are, at their core, a really sassy power-pop band, especially in their 1970s heyday. As time went on their tried to darken their sound and add the menace of their look to their music, but there’s a reason why the last 20 years of their touring career was essentially a megabudget reboot of their 70s concerts with nothing from, y’know, Revenge.
None of this is a criticism, by the way. If anything, it makes sense that a band with the business sense of Kiss would make their image cool and scary enough to appeal to any teenage boy worth their salt, but the music accessible enough for them to actually want to listen to it. With that in mind, it also makes sense that one of their extensive back catalogue of 1970s hits wasn’t written with them in mind, but ex-Faces frontman, Rangers enthusiast and man intensely curious as to whether you find him sexually thrilling, Rod Stewart.
This is mid-to-late 1970s ‘Rod The Mod’, too. We’re not talking Nod’s As Good As A Wink…, man of the people, proto-Oasis Rod; we’re talking soft-rock Godhead, gunning-for-a-knighthood Rod. Worst of all, this is ‘Sailing’ Rod. Y’know who was a massive fan of this kind of Rod Stewart? ‘The Star Child’ himself, Paul Stanley.
After the success of the live album Alive made Kiss a hard rock sensation, a number of the songs that Stanley was writing had to be shelved for not being “Kiss enough”. One of these was a number Stanley was working on called ‘Hard Luck Woman’, which Stanley envisioned being a hit for, you guessed it, Rod Stewart. He even wrote the song to be sung with a Stewart-esque raspy vocal. However, what constituted a Kiss song changed irrevocably with their own bid for MOR stardom, Peter Criss’ 1976 megahit ‘Beth’.
Where once Kiss songs were all about hypercharged guitar riffs and flying around arena stages with sparks shooting out of your nipples, now, Kiss could be classy. This expanded the kind of songs that could go on a Kiss album, and when bandmate Gene Simmons and producer Eddie Kramer heard the song, they insisted that Stanley keep it for the band’s new album, 1976’s Destroyer. The finishing touch came from Criss himself.
In singing lead on ‘Beth’, the drummer showed his own singing voice, which had the same sandpaper quality as Stewart’s. So, when he heard Stanley’s demo for ‘Hard Luck Woman’, he kindly requested that he himself have a go instead. Or, as written in the band’s 2005 biography Kiss: Behind The Mask, he said “Hey fuck-o, how about me? Fuck Rod Stewart, I’ll sing the shit out of it.”