Or was it a shark? It may have been a whale...
"There are many rumors flying about outside musicians playing on 'Psycho Circus.' Set the record straight. First, is Peter playing drums on the entire record?"
"No one played on the whole record. I didn't play on every song, Gene didn't play bass on every song. Paul didn't play rhythm on every song. Peter didn't play drums on every song."
"Who did?
"I have no idea."
Ace Frehley interview in Goldmine Magazine, November 20, 1998.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
I keep seeing the phrase ‘jump the shark’ everywhere. I had no idea what it meant, so I looked it up. Apparently it’s an expression that denotes the precise moment when something that was previously cool starts to suck.
It comes from the TV show ‘Happy Days,’ which apparently ‘jumped the shark’ during an episode when Fonzie literally jumped a shark while on vacation. I don’t remember Happy Days very well, but I suspect that it jumped the shark some time before Fonzie actually...well...jumped the shark.
I began using the expression myself recently, when I began to ponder the precise moment when the rock band Kiss jumped the shark.
I think a lot of people would point to the release of the ‘Dynasty’ album, which featured the pseudo-disco ‘I Was Made For Loving You.’ Some might say the shark was jumped with the hubris-heavy simultaneous release of the four Kiss solo albums in 1978. Personally, I’d go back even further. Kiss jumped the shark when Gene Simmons delivered the regrettable spoken work “I don’t usually say things like this to girls your age” monologue on ‘Christine Sixteen,’ from 1977’s ‘Love Gun’ album.
Anyway, I mention all this because I somewhat sheepishly picked up a copy of ‘Kissology’ the other week, a collection of Kiss concert and television performances spanning 1974 to 1977. I now retract my embarrassment. Any notion of this being a guilty pleasure has given way to a less abashed sense of having gotten a great value for my 20 bucks. Back in the day, this band killed.
The real meat in the collection consists of four concerts: San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January of 1975; Detroit’s Cobo Hall in January of 1976; Tokyo’s Budokan Hall in April of 1977; and Huston’s Summit in September of 1977.
My favorite is the San Francisco performance. Filmed in black and white, it shows a pretty raw, fierce outfit. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to wander into a smallish venue in 1975 and see this kind of freak show.
The live sound in the early days was a bit different. The guitars were less overdriven, less saturated with distortion than they were in the later years, giving them a spare, gritty tone. There are no staircases on the stage, no hydraulic lifts all over the place. Just a relatively little-known band (albeit one with a notable live cult following) offering a display that, if it were performed today by a group in shaggy hair and blazers would have hipster critics fawning.
A lot of Kiss’ early songs stand up fairly well. What I like about many of them is that they often have really cool ‘middle eights,’ or take unexpected turns toward the end. The nifty instrumental passages in ‘Parasite’ and ‘Cold Gin,’ for instance, or the breaking into a different riff for the last section of ‘Hotter Than Hell,’ or the dramatic, slow ending to ‘Black Diamond.’ There are a lot of places where the band really needs to lock in together, and I while I don’t think these sections add up to serious virtuosity, they nontheless convey a degree of instrumental pinache.
I think this is key, because it gives the band a measure of metalhead credibility, but also because these passages make for great stage theatre (the ending of ‘Black Diamond,’ for instance, always features Simmons and Paul Stanley in choreographed headbanging mode while Ace Frehley kneels in front of them, wailing on his Les Paul).
The Detroit show takes place in early 1976, after Kiss released their breakthrough album, a live compilation of their first three records called ‘Alive!’ It’s a superb performance as well, with the hunger and dirt of the earlier show giving way to a more triumphant but still intense blowout.
Then comes Japan. You can almost see the band cruising the coast of Maui, looking for shiny fins in the water, when they emerge atop a pair of flashing staircases to start the show. After a not quite badass descent in their eight inch heels, they put on a concert that’s still pretty cool. The material off of the just-released ‘Rock and Roll Over’ album is solid, and the Japanese crowd is fun to watch (and Paul Stanely makes a rather good ESL teacher). I suspect a certain amount of audio cleanup has taken place, and there’s no escaping the fact that the band is becoming more teen idol than sleazy freak-rockers.
Six months later they’ve produced the aforementioned ‘Love Gun’ album, and we see them in Houston, Texas, hanging on for dear life while a giant hammerhead starts out on a 29 year-and-counting ride.
I mean, it’s not a total disaster, but things have definitely turned a corner. Aside from the execrable ‘Christine Sixteen,’ we get over-long drum and guitar solos, Paul Stanley donning a double necked guitar (so that he can play the rhythm parts on ‘Hooligan’ of all songs), and hydraulic lifts that would seem to render the platform shoe-unfriendly staircases redundant.
But the main thing is, the songs just aren’t quite the same. Old standards like ‘Firehouse’ and ‘Rock and Roll all Nite’ are a bit perfunctory; they just lack the guts of the earlier eras. And the sound of the band has deteriorated into a mess of over-loud, distorted bass, over-loud, distorted guitar, and drumwork that is not quite as convincing as it was in the days before Peter Criss started adding un-catlike green makeup around his eyes.
On the whole, though, Kissology is a great package. Kiss has always been seen as the next step along the (d)evolutionary ladder from Alice Cooper, yet in reading interviews with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley I’ve always noted how much they used the Beatles as a frame of reference. You can see it, not only in the variation-on-a-theme identities cultivated for each band member, but in the stage show as well.
The use of only two microphones for instance. Two guys stand at one mic and sing backup while the other sings lead...very Beatles. As is the one or two songs per set that go to Peter, just like the Fab Four did with Ringo. And the syncronized stage moves are actually more like Paul Revere and the Raiders than anything you’d see from any of Kiss’ hard rock contemporaries.
Oh, one more thing. The DVD package opens out into a colour photo-adorned gatefold.
And there’s a booklet and a sticker.
It comes from the TV show ‘Happy Days,’ which apparently ‘jumped the shark’ during an episode when Fonzie literally jumped a shark while on vacation. I don’t remember Happy Days very well, but I suspect that it jumped the shark some time before Fonzie actually...well...jumped the shark.
I began using the expression myself recently, when I began to ponder the precise moment when the rock band Kiss jumped the shark.
I think a lot of people would point to the release of the ‘Dynasty’ album, which featured the pseudo-disco ‘I Was Made For Loving You.’ Some might say the shark was jumped with the hubris-heavy simultaneous release of the four Kiss solo albums in 1978. Personally, I’d go back even further. Kiss jumped the shark when Gene Simmons delivered the regrettable spoken work “I don’t usually say things like this to girls your age” monologue on ‘Christine Sixteen,’ from 1977’s ‘Love Gun’ album.
Anyway, I mention all this because I somewhat sheepishly picked up a copy of ‘Kissology’ the other week, a collection of Kiss concert and television performances spanning 1974 to 1977. I now retract my embarrassment. Any notion of this being a guilty pleasure has given way to a less abashed sense of having gotten a great value for my 20 bucks. Back in the day, this band killed.
The real meat in the collection consists of four concerts: San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January of 1975; Detroit’s Cobo Hall in January of 1976; Tokyo’s Budokan Hall in April of 1977; and Huston’s Summit in September of 1977.
My favorite is the San Francisco performance. Filmed in black and white, it shows a pretty raw, fierce outfit. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to wander into a smallish venue in 1975 and see this kind of freak show.
The live sound in the early days was a bit different. The guitars were less overdriven, less saturated with distortion than they were in the later years, giving them a spare, gritty tone. There are no staircases on the stage, no hydraulic lifts all over the place. Just a relatively little-known band (albeit one with a notable live cult following) offering a display that, if it were performed today by a group in shaggy hair and blazers would have hipster critics fawning.
A lot of Kiss’ early songs stand up fairly well. What I like about many of them is that they often have really cool ‘middle eights,’ or take unexpected turns toward the end. The nifty instrumental passages in ‘Parasite’ and ‘Cold Gin,’ for instance, or the breaking into a different riff for the last section of ‘Hotter Than Hell,’ or the dramatic, slow ending to ‘Black Diamond.’ There are a lot of places where the band really needs to lock in together, and I while I don’t think these sections add up to serious virtuosity, they nontheless convey a degree of instrumental pinache.
I think this is key, because it gives the band a measure of metalhead credibility, but also because these passages make for great stage theatre (the ending of ‘Black Diamond,’ for instance, always features Simmons and Paul Stanley in choreographed headbanging mode while Ace Frehley kneels in front of them, wailing on his Les Paul).
The Detroit show takes place in early 1976, after Kiss released their breakthrough album, a live compilation of their first three records called ‘Alive!’ It’s a superb performance as well, with the hunger and dirt of the earlier show giving way to a more triumphant but still intense blowout.
Then comes Japan. You can almost see the band cruising the coast of Maui, looking for shiny fins in the water, when they emerge atop a pair of flashing staircases to start the show. After a not quite badass descent in their eight inch heels, they put on a concert that’s still pretty cool. The material off of the just-released ‘Rock and Roll Over’ album is solid, and the Japanese crowd is fun to watch (and Paul Stanely makes a rather good ESL teacher). I suspect a certain amount of audio cleanup has taken place, and there’s no escaping the fact that the band is becoming more teen idol than sleazy freak-rockers.
Six months later they’ve produced the aforementioned ‘Love Gun’ album, and we see them in Houston, Texas, hanging on for dear life while a giant hammerhead starts out on a 29 year-and-counting ride.
I mean, it’s not a total disaster, but things have definitely turned a corner. Aside from the execrable ‘Christine Sixteen,’ we get over-long drum and guitar solos, Paul Stanley donning a double necked guitar (so that he can play the rhythm parts on ‘Hooligan’ of all songs), and hydraulic lifts that would seem to render the platform shoe-unfriendly staircases redundant.
But the main thing is, the songs just aren’t quite the same. Old standards like ‘Firehouse’ and ‘Rock and Roll all Nite’ are a bit perfunctory; they just lack the guts of the earlier eras. And the sound of the band has deteriorated into a mess of over-loud, distorted bass, over-loud, distorted guitar, and drumwork that is not quite as convincing as it was in the days before Peter Criss started adding un-catlike green makeup around his eyes.
On the whole, though, Kissology is a great package. Kiss has always been seen as the next step along the (d)evolutionary ladder from Alice Cooper, yet in reading interviews with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley I’ve always noted how much they used the Beatles as a frame of reference. You can see it, not only in the variation-on-a-theme identities cultivated for each band member, but in the stage show as well.
The use of only two microphones for instance. Two guys stand at one mic and sing backup while the other sings lead...very Beatles. As is the one or two songs per set that go to Peter, just like the Fab Four did with Ringo. And the syncronized stage moves are actually more like Paul Revere and the Raiders than anything you’d see from any of Kiss’ hard rock contemporaries.
Oh, one more thing. The DVD package opens out into a colour photo-adorned gatefold.
And there’s a booklet and a sticker.
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