The wild history of KISS — and how they almost never made it out of Queens
By Michael Kaplan / NYPost.com
In the early 1970s, David Bowie, Lou Reed and the New York Dolls made men in makeup cool. So it was no wonder that a Queens band wanted to try it out, too.
“Kiss originally wore lipstick and eyeliner,” recalled musician Binky Philips, who went to high school with guitarist Paul Stanley. “But Gene [Simmons, bassist] saw himself in the mirror and realized he looked like a pro wrestler in drag.”
The only way they could make it work was to create theatrical characters inspired by comic-book superheroes: a starchild, a demon, a spaceman and a freaky-looking cat.
But success was a long shot. Former yeshiva boy Simmons and opera-loving Stanley were nobodies who couldn’t cut it at Manhattan hot spots. Instead, Kiss played its first gig, in 1973, to an almost empty Popcorn Club in Sunnyside.
“Most musicians thought the kabuki makeup was lame,” Philips told The Post. “They made a big noise as a group but, individually, there were no stellar musicians in Kiss. They were not handsome. Peter [Criss, drummer] had a weak chin and Ace [Frehley, guitarist] had bad skin.
”Stanley (real name: Stanley Eisen) and Simmons (born Chaim Witz) met through a mutual friend and teamed up for the short-lived band Wicked Lester.
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