I’m actually not objective about the significance of Kiss as a part of rock history. I’m not sure whether their impact is that of a true super group, or whether they were just a niche band with a large and loyal fanbase.
That’s because they have a large foothold on my childhood memories. Just like ABBA when they toured in 1976, Kiss initiated a giant frenzy in Australia in 1980 in the lead up to their November tour.
Or… at least it was the case in my primary school, where Kissmania ruled. The perspective of an eleven year old is a tad more limited than that of an adult.
Forty five years on, I believe my brother still has the combined collection of Kiss cards we had at the time (I let him have all of mine).
The concert at VFL Park in Waverley in November 1980 drew 45,000 people. That I remember details about a concert which I did not even attend is significant.
I’ve been to see Kiss three times since then, twice in the 1990s, and once about three years ago. Those concerts, at the Tennis Centre, were only a third the scale of that first tour in 1980.
When Eric Carr, the replacement drummer when Peter Criss got booted out, died in 1991, the number of death notices in the Herald Sun was quite impressive.
‘Goodbye Little Caesar’, one of those death notices read.
Now Ace Frehley, the original lead guitarist from Kiss, has died, after falling and injuring his head in his home studio.
74 is not that old – not when compared to the fragile souls I visit regularly in nursing homes in my local area. So I cannot help but feel a degree of shock at this.
But Ace did not live a sedate life. He partied quite hard, and drank very heavily for much of his career, hence causing his forced departure from Kiss in the early 1980s. Given that I have read the autobiographies of all four original members of the band, I am skeptical about the sincerity of the loud lamentations from Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Gene did seriously bag Ace in his memoir, Kiss And Make Up, some 20 years ago. Ace returned the favour, somewhat more articulately, in his own memoir, No Regrets, 5 years later.
But Ace is dead, and perhaps Gene and Paul have felt it best to bury the hatchet in memory of their lost band mate, rather than out of commercial self interest. After all, no man is an island, and all that. Ace’s death might well remind them of their own mortality, and indeed of that of all of us.
I cannot help but feel sad about Ace passing, as it represents the severing of yet another of the links to my childhood, to the frenzy which enveloped my school for most of 1980.
Lost For Words! 