KISS horrified the elites — which is why Americans loved them
By Marc A. Thiessen / Washington Post
I have a confession to make. I’m a member of the KISS Army.
In 1976, I bought my first Kiss album. I loved the rock band’s makeup and crazy characters, and quickly I was hooked. I had Kiss posters, Kiss action figures, a Kiss lunchbox, and on Halloween I dressed up in a Kiss costume to go trick-or-treating. Two decades later, I took my future wife out on our first date … to a Kiss concert. (She married me anyway). And now, a couple of decades after that, we just took our kids to Philadelphia to see Kiss on their farewell “End of the Road” tour. Some of us (yes, me) even wore Kiss makeup.
In a sense, Kiss prefigured today’s age of populism. Just like a certain American president, they horrified the elites — but inspired a loyal, devoted following that reveled in their scorn and condescension. Being a Kiss fan was an act of rebellion against the establishment. The band was panned by the critics, never won a single Grammy, and were only reluctantly admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 — 15 years after they first became eligible. They got in by popular acclamation, despite the best efforts of the music industry establishment to keep them out. As lead singer Paul Stanley put it in the Philadelphia concert, “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hates us!” The crowd cheered.
Kiss is a uniquely American phenomenon. Co-founder Gene Simmons was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel, the son of a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who saw her family killed in a concentration camp. His mother emigrated to Israel, where they lived in abject poverty. “We had nothing — torn sweaters and we never even saw toilet paper,” he says. When Simmons was 8, they moved to New York, where he learned to speak English by reading comic books — which later inspired the costumes and makeup that made Kiss famous. Stanley (born Stanley Bert Eisen) also grew up in New York to a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany. They seized the opportunities this country gave them, rising from nothing to sell more than 100 million albums, license more than 3,000 product categories, play more than 2,000 shows and earn more Gold Records than any American band. Kiss is arguably both the biggest rock band, and the biggest rock brand, in history. “I am a direct result of the capitalist system. I came to America and I had nothing,” Simmons says. “We’re blessed to be living in America, which is the land of opportunity.” Simmons will turn 70 during the course of this tour, yet he is still breathing fire and selling out stadiums. What a country!
