Better 30 years late than never…

I remember thinking as a kid, in the mid-70s, that all the good music in the world must have already been made and wasn’t being made anymore because all I had access to was AM radio. There was Hall & Oates and Seals & Croft, Michael Murphy and the Starlight Vocal Band, Kenny Rogers… you get the picture. In my little corner of teenage hell, there was shitty music or there was nothing.

Even the albums my kid sister and I had inherited from our older siblings inspired scant confidence, stuff like Herman’s Hermits and The Buckinghams. My Mom played the piano but all the music she played was old, too. Some of it was pretty cool, like the Claire de Lune, but she also favored show tunes.

And even then I knew Johnny Cash was cool (I had the “Boy Named Sue” 45 at the time of its release in the late 60s, but liked the “San Quentin” song on the B-side better. It sounded like genuine trouble rumbling, just waiting to happen); but alas, Cash too was old. And in a career slump — his no-bullshit style did not mesh well either with radio formats at the time or the evolving country/western music scene.

I literally had given up on music till KISS came along. Lord almighty, looking back on it now, I can’t imagine going through the disco era that was to come without KISS.

KISS provided the necessary link from a.m. radio to album rock and led to later Colombia House Record Club-based experimentation with more genuinely dangerous bands like Rush, Zepplin, Pink Floyd, Springsteen, Warren Zevon… you know, the harder stuff.

KISS was I guess what you’d call a gateway band.

(I could name the friend who turned me on to KISS, but he’s a big-shot lawyer in the fetid, blistering hellhole I escaped from and we didn’t part on such great terms. We’ll call him BS Lawyer. Thanks, BS Lawyer. That’s one I owe ya.)

I instantly liked everything about KISS. I knew I was not listening to any kind of musical geniuses (Mom also covered the classics; Beethoven, Bach, complicated church chorale stuff) but they appealed to every part of my teen-aged self. I was into comics, they looked like they’d come out of one. I was angry and lonely and agitated and so was their music and its lyrics. I blew shit up and set fire to it and so did they.

Oh, and my Mom just hated them with a particular vigor. That sealed the deal.

Since then, I’ve been to about a million concerts, but smehow never saw the band that initially turned my head from top-40 despair to AOR ecstacy… until now. On their “Milking It Till Your Wallets Are Empty Tour XXXV,” coming soon to an arena near you, KISS graced Christmas Island with their presence last night and I had tenth-row floor seats with The Last Boy Scout (thanks to a resourceful Mrs. TLBS, wise in the ways of Ticketbastard).

It’s been a long time since I’ve lost both my hearing and my voice at a concert, but I definitely did last night.

TLBS said he especially enjoyed watching me jump like a little girl at all the pyro, which is probably an accurate interpretation, in retrospect. We were very close and it was very loud. And since this was my first KISS show, I didn’t know where to expect the ear-shattering explosions. But TLBS did and he directed my attention in the appropriate direction on a couple of occasions. Did I mention TLBS is KISS Fan Number One? He is. He even loaned me one of his vintage, glow-in-the-dark t-shirts for the event.

Everybody at the show was cool. Lots of face paint and a few folks who really went the distance. Which made for a funny moment about ¾ of the way through the show. One doughty guy completely dressed-out as Gene Simmons, sitting slumped in his crappy almost-obstructed view seat with his frowny face resting on his hands while everyone around him was standing and rocking in place like they should have been.

The opening band Buckcherry exceeded expectations, which in this case could have meant nobody died while onstage. But still... The songs were mostly agreeable arena-ready rock anthems and the band did indeed kick some serious arena-rock ass.

Plus we were close and it was loud.

Their lead singer was tattooed and skinny and lithe and made a great frontman, but was somewhat derivative in terms of style. As I told TLBS after the show, while we searched and searched for our damned missing car, Buckcherry’s singer ought to write Axl Rose a check after every show, except maybe only 50¢ on the dollar as he didn’t have any of Axl’s upper range.

Then came KISS, after more than 30 years of following their career (admittedly not that closely for long stretches at a time), there was Gene Simmons doing his Demon thing, right there in front of me. They played a boat-load of hits, the early stuff, the stuff the mostly post-boomer generation crowd came to hear.

There were a lot of people there younger than me with their kids older than mine. The tall, hefty guy in front of me (I have lots of photos of his blindingly white left arm if anyone needs any) and his maybe 10-year-old son were both wearing face paint, and Dad kept taking cell phone pictures of his kid. It made me so warm and fuzzy on the inside I didn’t actually mind that his massive limb ruined at least 30 percent of the photos I took.

That’s probably also because I got at least one good one of each major player and a few nice ones of the whole stage. Thirty years ago I never would have been able to sneak in a proper camera!

Their set was a tight two hours, but it had everything you go to a KISS concert for; Gene Simmons breathing fire and puking blood, platforms rising and musicians flying, Paul Stanley bitching repeatedly about how poorly attended the evening’s performance was during his between-song banter… even some things I didn’t expect but should have, like Stanley introducing early hit “Cold Gin” with a warning not to drink and drive, apparently sincere.

Anyhow, it was great. I’m glad I didn’t wait too long. These guys have to be pushing 60 now. They can’t keep it up at this pace forever. Stanley has to be dying his trademark chest hair black by now. But they can still kick out the jams and put on a hell of a show. I went expecting a nostalgia show and instead got rocked off my ass.

Plus we were close and it was loud.

Here’s a couple of the few photos that came out well. (My new camera is too fucking smart for my own good. It kept compensating for shit and ruining shots. “Jesus Christ, H.A.L., just stop thinking about it and open the Goddamned pod bay doors”)