Paul Stanley & Gene Simmons Talk The Elder With Yahoo Music
By Lyndsey Parker / Yahoo Music
1981 was a tough, transitional year for KISS, following the replacement of original drummer Peter Criss with Eric Carr, so the hard-rock titans decided to move in a bold new direction with an orchestral prog-rock opera, Music From “The Elder.” The risky concept album was based on a good-vs.-evil, light-vs.-darkness fairytale initially scrawled on Beverly Hills Hotel stationery by the band’s Gene Simmons — a coming-of-age story about a starry-eyed protagonist known as “The Boy,” who is recruited by the Council of Elders to a heroic freedom-fighting troop called the Order of the Rose, and then mentored by a wise old caretaker named Morpheus.
Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, at the time, it seemed like a lot could go right. The Elder reunited KISS with legendary Destroyer producer Bob Ezrin (a seemingly exciting development for old-school fans who’d been turned off by KISS’s previous two pop/disco-flavored albums, Dynasty and Unmasked), and it featured lyrics by none other than Lou Reed on "Mr. Blackwell,” "Dark Light,” and “A World Without Heroes.” It was even intended to be a fantastical feature film starring of-the-moment Meatballs/My Bodyguard teen actor Chris Makepeace as the Boy and possibly Patrick Stewart as Morpheus, according to Simmons. But the album, KISS’s ninth, wasn’t at all what fans wanted from the band, and it utterly bombed upon its release on Nov. 10, 1981.
KISS did not tour Music From “The Elder” — the first KISS album to not go gold in the U.S. — and they have rarely performed any of its tracks in the years since, aside from a memorable “A World Without Heroes” on MTV Unplugged in 1995. Original guitarist Ace Frehley, who reportedly hurled a tape of The Elder against a wall after his solos were edited out of the final mix, left the lineup soon after the record’s failure. And needless to say, that Elder movie never happened. Makepeace did record some spoken dialogue for the album, but his contributions also didn’t make the cut, and all he got was a mysterious “thank you” in the sleeve’s credits.
