>> Rock music's monarchs in makeup reclaim their trashy throne

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

"Very few people fall asleep during a Kiss concert," Ace Frehley tells me, "unless they're doing heroin. Most people walk away with a smile on their face. They've been bombarded with a multimedia rock 'n' roll extravaganza, and it's something they walk away from feeling good about."

When the Molson Centre empties out on December 1, there'll be a lot of people feeling good about what they've just seen... victims of heart attacks and epileptic seizures aside. Because Kiss are the once and future kings of arena rock, and in a day and age when the staples of arena rock--flashpots and fireworks and laserbeam lightshows--have become tired, embarrassing clichés, the bar simply must be raised.

Raise it they have. "Everybody that buys a ticket gets a pair of polarized glasses," Frehley explains when grilled on just what the hell is meant by the "3D show" they're pimping in their publicity. "They're very, very cool 3D effects. Plus, we have a live 3D camera. It's awesome, awesome. I don't think that anyone in the world is doing what we are... not at this scale, anyhow. It's everything we've done in the past and a lot, lot more.

"Basically, the only people we have to compete with is ourselves, when it comes to planning a new show. We gotta top what we did the last time."

The seeds of greatness

When you think about it, "the last time" would have to mean the second half of the '70s. Punk rock was stumbling through its glue-addled baby steps and disco was laying the foundation for today's house and techno culture, but Rock with a capital R ruled the suburbs of the nation. And no one in Rock stood taller than Kiss--their demon-faced platform boots made sure of that.

It wasn't just the Kiss Army, the long-haired teenage miscreants in Trans Am iron-ons mobbing the stadium parking lots, bustin' air-guitar solos and screaming, "Kiss rules, dude" between hits off the hash pipe. It was every damn body and his kid sister, too. Platinum albums and sold-out arenas, that's no small shakes. But the Kiss phenomenon had become something far greater than that.

It had begun as a harebrained scheme in a filthy loft on the corner of 23rd and 5th in Manhattan, in the last months of 1972. Bassist Gene Simmons and guitarist Paul Stanley were nailing shut the coffin on their band Wicked Lester. They had greater plans. They saw it.

Stanley spotted an ad in Rolling Stone for a drummer "willing to do anything to make it." Enter Peter Criss. Stanley placed an ad himself, in the Village Voice, seeking a lead guitarist with "flash and balls." Enter Ace Frehley. They chose the Kiss monicker because Stanley said "it sounded like a name you had heard before."

There would be makeup and costumes. Not the smack-chic transvestitism of the New York Dolls, the Big Apple's darlings-of-the-hour. No, they would become genuine icons, horrorshow cartoon characters as instantly recognizable as Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald, and every bit as crassly commercial. The global teenager was a cow to be milked and, with the spirits of Elvis, Frankenstein and P.T. Barnum guiding their busy little paws, they would milk the bitch for every cent the bucket would hold.

There would be T-shirts and trading cards. There would be pinball games and poseable dolls. There would be a Kiss comic book, published by no less than Marvel Comics itself, with the blood of Kiss themselves mixed into the red ink.

And there would be the movie, of course.

Kung fu cartoon Kiss

"It's a good comedy," Frehley says of Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, released in October of 1978. "I think it's a little dated, to be honest, but I think it's kinda funny. I find it funny, anyway. When I went to the premiere, I remember I was probably laughing harder than anyone else there."

Produced, appropriately, by Saturday morning cartoon cartel Hanna-Barbera, Kiss Meets the Phantom was possibly one of the most ridiculous, the most absurd oddities ever committed to celluloid, seemingly spat forth from the mind of an 11-year-old in the grip of potentially fatal sugar shock.

Set in an amusement park, the "story" had Kiss battling a mad scientist and his army of berserk, Westworld-styled robots. After kicking the shit--in slow motion--out of a pack of albino werewolves, Kiss flew--literally--into their climactic confrontation with their own evil clones. Combining state-of-the-art magic laser beams with good old fashioned kung fu, they vanquished their nemeses and... uh, played some rock songs.

"A lot of people think I was doing my own gymnastics, when we were, you know, fighting those albino... (laughs) werewolf robots (laughs harder). Very few people know that my stuntman was black."

"After we did that film, we all went our separate ways and did our solo albums. Luckily, mine turned out to be the most successful, with the hit 'New York Groove.' What happened was, I did that album with just basically me and Anton Figg, the drummer from the David Letterman show.

"It was a revelation to me, that I could do a whole album on my own. I played all the instruments and did all the lead vocals. When I saw its success, I felt that maybe Kiss was holding me back. I keep setting higher goals for myself, and at that point Kiss had kinda reached its pinnacle."

Back in the ring for another swing

Kiss had reached their high point, and it's all downhill from there. "The greatest rock band in the world," to quote one character from Phantom, was losing altitude fast. By the early '80s, Criss and Frehley had bailed for modest solo careers/quality rehab time, Simmons was flirting with Hollywood, and the dramatic ditching of the makeup that so defined the band had relegated them, ironically, to the faceless ranks of the lightweight hair-metal set.

The band was a non-issue until Simmons called a theoretically one-off reunion on MTV's Unplugged in 1995. "When me and Peter came out," recalls Frehley, "the place went completely apeshit. I looked in Gene's eyes and I just saw dollar signs (laughs). Me and Peter, at the time, were doing a co-headlining Canadian tour. During the course of it, Gene called up my manager, and started negotiating a Kiss reunion. And the rest is Kiss-tory... how many times have you heard that line?"

This would be the comeback to end all comebacks. They were paunchy, punchdrunk prizefighters, summoning the ghosts of glories past, ready to kick ass for Rock with a capital R.

"It was almost like déjà-vu. We all got personal trainers, we slimmed down and got back into the same costumes. When I tried on my costumes from the '70s I fit right into them. We didn't want to get up on stage, four fat old guys, 20 years later, and try to pull off the same thing. We wanted to look as good as we did back then. If you look at us in photos, with the whiteface and stuff--which kinda hides some of the wrinkles (laughs)--I don't see much difference.

"Timing is everything. When we decided to reunite, I think the industry was ready for a big show again. Because prior to Kiss, people were getting up there in jeans and T-shirts and whatnot, singing about heroin and suicide.

"We don't care about political issues or negative things. We just want to put on a good rock 'n' roll show and take people away from their problems. That's basically our mission in life."

Kiss play the Molson Centre on Tuesday, December 1 at 7:30pm. Tickets $42.50, $35.50, and $29.50+taxes. Bionic opens!