Just working some old fan stuff out of my system here.
I heard the other day how a bunch of Kiss fans staged a big protest to get the band into the R&R Hall of Fame. I immediately came down on the side of my "Army" buddies and got mad that they haven't been inducted. They're only being disqualified because of their theatricality, which after all wrote the book for a million other bands. Look at their body of work that's being ignored, I thought. Like for instance "Alive", I can still listen to it today and it's a brilliant metal album. And after that there's, uh, "Alive", and... and... then I start to get bogged down.
They really do have an epic back catologue if you look at the classic era. If they had kept throwing up material of that caliber
throughout their career, today they'd have a strong body of work to point to, and far more memorable hits. Eventually they could have transcended the clown factor. Unfortunately they let their marketing swallow them whole somewhere around the second live album, which is where their body of work effectively ends. After that it was all novelty radios, session musicians and bad tv movies, and they really did become the empty image that people accused them of being.
As strenuously as I tried to hold the faith into the 80's and beyond, I was really a fan of Paul and Gene as personalities. Today I can listen to maybe half of "Lick it Up", a bit of "Carnival of Souls", the unplugged album.
But if you were a fan as a kid, you never quite get the hook out of you, no matter how vigorously Gene embarasses himself in public year after year. I saw them on the reunion tour in the 90's when they boldly decided to break with their past by becoming a Kiss tribute act. It was a great show, but I kept thinking, I'd really rather see them take these characters to the next level. At that moment, the nine-year-old who lives in the back of my head proptly broke out his bic pens and mead spiral notebooks and started sketching ideas.
Maybe when I get the four of these out of my system I can finally get past my heartbreak and move on.
