Paul Stanley on the Last Days of KISS
By BRIAN HIATT / Rolling Stone
I’m sure you’ve noticed that Kiss is one of many acts of your generation announcing some form of retirement.
It’s not a coincidence that there are so many people and so many bands, performers announcing their retirement or farewell. As much as you want to believe an icon is ageless and timeless, time will prove that not to be so. For a band like us – and there is no other band like us, you don’t have other people running around onstage with 30 or 40 pounds of gear… if I was just up there prancing around singing, that would be fine, if I was on a Persian rug sitting on a stool playing a Martin guitar, yeah I could do it forever. But that’s not the case, there aren’t basketball players, football players, or athletes my age out there doing it so…I want to make sure that we go out there and fully represent and celebrate everything that we are, everything that we have been, and it’s bittersweet but it seems very much the right thing to do.
Are former members going to be joining on this tour in some form?
I really can’t say.This will be a celebration of Kiss and not any individual lineup or any individual members… I wouldn’t rule anything out but it’s not the crux of what we’re doing. It really isn’t at the heart or at the center of what we’re doing. We’re going out proudly as Kiss, a few months ago we were in Portugal and Spain playing for anywhere from 20 to 50,000 people so we’re doing this in all our glory and we’re doing it unapologetically. And we’re gonna do it bigger than we’ve ever done it. This show will really dwarf some of the things we’ve done before.
The Rolling Stones had Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor come out for a couple songs each night on a recent tour. Are you ruling out any scenario like that?
No, but I’m not…and I’m not being coy either. I don’t want to mislead anybody. Really, that’s not something that’s been given a lot of thought at this point, the majority of our time has gone into what is the stage going to be, what is the show going to be, and we’re actually in the midst of toying with setlists now.
Are you going to bring some songs back into the setlist?
That’s an interesting question always, because when somebody who’s a rabid fan says, “are you going to bring in some deep cuts,” the majority of the people who come to see the band want to hear those songs that are best known. I always say rarities are rarities for a reason, ’cause they’re not as good. If they were that good they wouldn’t be rarities. So I understand when somebody comes to ten shows in the course of a tour but the majority of people show up once every x amount of years and they want to hear what a band like us has in multitudes which is classic songs, what do we drop, “Detroit Rock City,” “Love Gun,” “Shout It Out Loud,” “Rock and Roll All Nite,” “Firehouse,” “Black Diamond”? I always maintain that if you put on a live video concert of any classic band I will tell you…turn off the sound and I will tell you every time they’re playing a new song because the audience sits down. I don’t want the majority of the people to have to tolerate something they don’t know and it doesn’t benefit the show to start throwing in things that most people are going “what’s that?”
Is Kiss also done recording albums at this point?
II reached a point where I had to acknowledge that nothing you do now is ever going to measure up to what you once did, because the older songs are tied to a time in your life, they’re a snapshot of a time in your life and that grows over time. We’ve done songs on the last couple of albums that I will argue are every bit as good as anything we ever did, but somebody hears “Modern Day Delilah” and goes “that’s great, play ‘Love Gun.'” And I get it, I get it, but interestingly also a song like “Psycho Circus” which is now 20 years old has kind of, at this point, become a classic. That doesn’t happen overnight. For whatever reason songs grow a patina over time and they grow a weight and a gravitas that they don’t have when they first come out – so yeah, you’re up against that.
Gene made a mildly rude remark onstage about you, which made me wonder whether there was some kind of problem between the two of you after all this time.
No, look, Gene and I have been together I think 47 years or something around that, so look, he say…he’s out having a great time. He’s doing these, most of them are free concerts, and when he charges tickets they don’t sell a lot of tickets and I’m sure he’s trying to keep it light for the couple hundred people or whatever and, you know, and that’s great. I was just with Gene, obviously, day before yesterday and we have a bond that is enviable and I’ll always maintain that, I mean Gene lives down the street from me, he’s literally a neighbor… I think we both long ago came to terms with who we are and what we can expect from each other and look, our families have grown up…I just saw a photo of me, an old photo of me holding [Gene’s son] Nick when Nick was less than a year old, I just saw Sophie [Simmons] a couple of days ago and she’s going to be playing in Los Angeles and I’ll be there. This is family. So we can snit all we want and we can, you know, take little potshots but at the end of the day nobody would stick up for him more than me and vice versa.
