Jody Havenot

Michael Brandvold

Matt Porter

NPR

After nearly 50 years, KISS is saying goodbye to touring. The over-the-top purveyors of heavy metal have embarked on a year-long finale tour titled “One Last KISS: End of the Road World Tour.” The 105-stop tour spans North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand and will encapsulate KISS’ larger-than-life show for the last time.

Before his storied rock rise, KISS’ lead singer Paul Stanley recalls being a New York cab driver and driving people to Madison Square Garden to see Elvis. He remembers telling himself that night, “One of these days, people are going to be driving here to see me.”

Stanley formed KISS in 1973 along with bassist and back-up vocalist Gene Simmons. Inspired by glam rock, the band was determined to make its performances into an all-encompassing experience.

“As a rock fan I had gone to see bands who oftentimes made you think they were doing you a favor by showing up when I just paid them,” Stanley says. “I think there was a lot of apathy onstage in a sense of complacency.”

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KISSmuseum.com

Tons of new additions of unique one-of-a-kind KISS items added to the KISSmuseum.com website.

See the new KISS Merchandise additions at KISSmuseum.com

Joe

UCR

Kiss frontman Paul Stanley had to abandon his traditional zipline stunt during the band’s appearance at the Domination Festival in Mexico on May 3.

In a regular part of the show on their End of the Road farewell tour, Stanley can be seen climbing onto a metal hoop and chain to be flown over the audience during classic track “Love Gun.” In Mexico, however, an apparent technical issue led him to tell the roadie who was trying to help him climb onto the wire to change plans.

Instead of being carried over the crowd, Stanley turned away from the audience until it was time for him to sing again, while the empty prop made its movement to the back of the performance area without him.

In February Stanley told the Los Angeles Times that while he doesn’t look forward to practicing the zipline flight in an empty arena – “I’m not really fond of it” – he very much enjoys the moment during the band’s shows. “With an audience it has an air of invincibility, and that’s exhilarating. To be Superman with a guitar doesn’t suck.”

In the same article bassist Gene Simmons explained the constant attention to detail required to ensure all the moving (and exploding) parts of the band’s stage show are in sync. “At the first show we had some problems onstage,” he explained. “The fans didn’t know anything. They just went, ‘Wow!’”

Fans attending the band’s Feb. 9 show in Sacramento, Calif. definitely noticed when Simmons berated a crewman for failing to light him properly during a performance of “God of Thunder.” As you can see in the video he bellows, “Give me a white spotlight, motherfucker. Asshole has been on tour with us for 20 years and doesn’t get it… bitch, I know where you live. Oh by the way, fuck you.” However, some responding posts suggested it was an occasional part of Simmons’ act, done on several occasions in the past, perhaps as a “ribbing” between “very friendly coworkers.”

UCR

Veteran journalist Jaan Uhelszki recalled the moment she witnessed Kiss co-founder Gene Simmons getting high for the one and only time in his life, after he ignored her warning to avoid eating hash brownies.

Uhelszki, a co-founder of respected music magazine Creem, was able to tell Simmons’ bandmates Tommy Thayer and Eric Singerabout the night in Detroit in 1974, which delighted them because they’d only ever heard it from Simmons himself.

“We’d heard that story a hundred times, but we never knew that there was a witness,” Thayer told her, as recounted in the May edition of Classic Rock Magazine. “We weren’t even sure it was true!” Singer added.

“It was the promoter’s birthday as well as a party for Kiss, so there was a giant birthday cake,” Uhelszki wrote. “But after it was cut, waitresses made the rounds with plates of chocolate brownies. ‘Don’t even think of having any of those,’ I cautioned Simmons. ‘Why not? I love brownies,’ he replied, a little queriously. ‘I know you love brownies. But just don’t. They’re hash brownies.’ He looked bewildered, as if trying to figure out why anyone would want to defile chocolate with drugs.”

She went on to tell how Simmons grabbed three and “devoured” them, while the bassist tried to claim it had been six. “It was three,” Uhelszki told him. “One would have put you over the top.” She said that, once the hash had begun to take effect, “it was like being with E.T. tentatively discovering the wonders of planet Earth, complete with long fingers outstretched to touch ordinary objects.”

Simmons asked, “Are my feet as big as I think they are? Does my head look funny? Is it really small? Why are my hands so big? Are my teeth shiny?” As they left the party in a car, he continued with “a steady stream of questions, the border between what he was thinking and saying all but demolished.”

Suddenly deciding he wanted milk, Simmons directed the driver to a late-night store. “When we entered the place, Simmons said in a carefully articulated but booming voice, ‘May I have a glass of milk, please?’” Uhelszki recalled. “I remember the man behind the counter as if it were yesterday. ‘We don’t sell glasses of milk, son.’”

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Michael Brandvold

Indianapolis KISS Expo

Tickets for the Indianapolis KISS Expo 2019 HERE at this link.

iHeart Radio

By Andrew Magnotta @AndrewMagnotta

KISS front man Paul Stanley goes into detail about the state of his relationships with his fellow Kiss co-founders, drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley, in his new book, Backstage Pass.

While the Starchild writes he’s grateful for his rekindled friendship with Frehley*, he indicates that he has no misgivings about his lack of a relationship with Criss.

“Peter unfortunately is a different story,” Stanley writes (per Ultimate Classic Rock). “I don’t think Peter has any life. He seems consumed by some kind of reality that his wife tells him. He’s always been negative and always maintained an us-against-them mentality.” I don’t want that in my life.”

Stanley called it “nice” to get to work with Frehley on his 2016 solo album, Origins Vol. 1. He added that he knows he has “differences” with both the Spaceman and Criss.

The reason he and Criss can’t get beyond those issues, in Stanley’s opinion, comes down to the drummer’s attitude.

“It’s Peter’s overall sense of anger and resentment and feeling like a victim,” Stanley writes. “He needs to acknowledge his participation and then change things. I think Peter’s life is probably very one-dimensional, uninteresting, un-stimulating — which is a result of seeing the world negatively and seeing everyone from the band members to the hotel service people as disrespectful.”

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Michael Brandvold

Joe

Metalhead Zone

Anthrax’s rhythm guitarist Scott Ian shared a recent photo on his Instagram page and celebrated his followers’ Easter Day.

As you can see below, he said that he’s painting eggs like this for almost 45 years.

Here’s Scott Ian’s statement:

“Painting eggs like this since 1975.

Happy Easter! @genesimmons”

You can see the photo below:

Last week, Megadeth bassist David Ellefson spoke in an interview with Rock Sverige and revealed the reason why KISS bassist Gene Simmons is one of the greatest rock stars ever.

Here’s the statement:

“Gene and Paul [Stanley] very much credit The Beatles for the whole concept of KISS. KISS was my Beatles and it’s funny, as big of a KISS fan as I was and I was the biggest, as we all claim to be, funny thing is that in my bands growing up, we never played any KISS songs because they were hard to play.”

Click here to read the whole article.

Vinnie Vincent says that his appearance at one of last year’s Gene Simmons Vault Experience shows almost didn’t happen because of his lengthy battles with Kiss over royalties. He ultimately did decide to go, but says he was already regretting it on the way home.

As he recalled in a new Rock Talk With Mitch Lafon interview (embedded below), Vincent was driving to the event in Nashville when, thinking about his history with Simmons and Kiss, “I almost turned around and said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Why in the world would I come down and greet you with a smile and try to make this work when what you did to me was reprehensible at best?”

Vincent says he filed suit in 1997, claiming that he was owed millions of dollars from his tenure in Kiss. “These are mine, the fruits of my talent, my labor,” he explains. “These are my earnings and you have no right to them. … I was not giving up. I was going to my grave making sure I sought justice, one way or another. I was going to fight this lawsuit until there were I don’t care how many justices retired.”

All of this was replaying in Vincent’s head on the car ride to the Vault appearance, particularly a moment when he says Simmons’ attorney told him, “Oh, Gene would rather pay us $2.5 million in legal fees to fight you than to give you one penny.'”

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Matt Porter

KISSmuseum.com

We haven’t had one of these in awhile – a sale of nothing but rare KISS items from the ’70s. This stuff gets harder and harder to find, but we have been scouring the earth and came up with some good stuff recently…

KISS ’70s Sale at KISSmuseum.com

YouTube

Ultimate Guitar

Back in 1982, you auditioned for KISS. You were, I think, 18 years old at the time. What was it like standing there with one of the biggest rock bands on the planet and you’re just basically a kid? What did it feel like at that point?

“It was kind of… When you think about Hollywood, you think about… You know, people come from all over the world and they come to Hollywood to make it. And I didn’t plan on it being with KISS but I felt, like, ‘Okay, this might be what I’m supposed to do – to come to Hollywood and join KISS.’

“I just didn’t really think about it too much. I was definitely… I was scared to look at them in the eyes, in a sense. Because at that time people had never seen them without their makeup and I felt like I was breaking the rules if I looked them in their face. [Laughs]

“But in the end, I was just too young. But we had some good jams and it was the first time I ever got to play through giant stacks of Marshalls. I’ve never done that before. It always has been like a half-stack.”

How did that end? Why didn’t you get the gig?

“I was too young. They knew it – I was a kid. These guys were international rock stars and I was just a kid. My experience…

“Look, here’s the thing, David, if you want to get a gig, it’s 50% how good you are and it’s 50% how cool you can hang out together. Because in a band, you’ve got to be like a… it’s like a family.

“You have to hang out together and be comfortable and not have anything weird going on. Because you’re gonna be together on a bus, you’re gonna be together in hotels. It needs to be comfortable for the band.

“And probably they could see I was not comfortable because I was so young, I was nervous. So that’s probably why they decided. My playing was probably okay but they’re not gonna be comfortable on the tour bus with a kid.”

What was it like being with Gene Simmons? He does sometimes seem like a very demanding, not only a musician but a businessman, in a way.

“He was very funny. He was very kind and he basically spent the most time with me in the studio. They were working on their record ‘Creatures of the Night’ at that time. And I remember there was a song called ‘War Machine,’ I think.

“And he asked me to play a part of the song to check how I would record. And I remember playing that song, thinking, ‘This is a crazy riff, it’s really cool. It’s very different.’ And I’ve never heard a riff like that before. I was trying to figure out what key it is.

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