Автор: Dave Everley
Издательство: Future Publishing
Год: 2019
Формат: PDF
Страниц: 148
Размер: 158 Mb
Язык: English
A confession: I got into Kiss late. It was 1987, and I’d just seen the video for their new single, the fizzing, poptastic Crazy Crazy Nights, on some long-forgotten late night TV music show. Even as a young teenager just getting into rock music, their reputation preceded them. Kiss were the dudes with the make-up and the flashbombs and the tongues and the blood-spitting anthems about rock’n’rolling all nite and partying every day. This couldn’t have been them. Could it?
Turns out it was. No one - not even Gene Simmons - would claim that Crazy Crazy Nights is the greatest Kiss song, but it was enough for me. I was hooked. I dived deep into their older stuff, spooling back to the great records of the 70s - Destroyer, Hotter Than Hell, Love Gun, Alive!... the albums on which the entire Kiss legend is built. And suddenly everything started to make sense.
Like the Cadillac and Coca Cola, Kiss are a great American icon (or four great American icons, if you prefer). These stackheeled superheroes busted out of the New York club scene to build the greatest empire music has ever seen. You could listen to their albums while eating from the Kiss lunchbox, playing the Kiss pinball machine or, thanks to the Kiss condom, getting your Uh! All Night on. And then when it’s all done, there’s the Kiss coffin to carry you away to the great Firehouse in the sky.
But as Gene himself admits, all of that would have been nothing without the music. Kiss aren’t the cleverest or most sophisticated band around. They’re not reinventing the wheel or changing the world or winning any prizes for poetry. But the songs they’ve written since they exploded into life back in the multi-coloured swirl of the early 70s stand among the greatest songs in the history of rock’n’roll, anthems of love, lust, rebellion and rock’n’roll that have soundtracked millions of lives the world over.
We’ve brought all of that together in this special collection of exclusive interviews and features taken from the pages of Classic Rock magazine and beyond. Inside, you’ll find the stories behind the landmark albums and the greatest songs, as well as thoughts of Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Tommy Thayer, Eric Singer, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. So bust out the panstick, fire up the flashbombs and get ready to rock’n’roll all nite...