Kiss and Make-Up by Gene Simmons

“Now I feel like a star,” he said. “Let’s go kick some ass.”
    We piled everything into the limo, the guitars and the girls and the four of us. It was like one of those old college stunts where everyone crams into a phone booth. We were barely able to breathe. But we went in style. That’s how it went all the time: the ship would start sinking, and Paul and I would plug the leak and keep paddling.

     
    We wanted the entire band to sing, and we wanted everybody to write. We wanted everyone to be a star. We wanted to do it like the Beatles, but with a twist, because we were taller and didn’t have those little-boy looks. An early photo from around that time shows us in semidrag, with heavy makeup. But as time went on and glambecame a bit more familiar, we started to rethink our dedication to dressing in drag and wearing makeup.
    The first thing we did was go to all-black costumes. I had never seen a band all in black. When we started to design the mature version of KISS, we were doing things that no one had ever done in rock and roll. For example, the idea of having a big sign with the band’s name on the stage, which later became a cliché with almost all heavy-metal bands, started with KISS. You didn’t have bands getting up there with big flashing signs telling you who they were. That was Las Vegas stuff. And that was precisely what we were doing. Other bands would come out, and the audience wouldn’t know who they were. There were no signs. Sometimes they’d put their name on the drum set, but even that was fairly low key. From the beginning, we envisioned everything bigger, grander, more over the top.
    We also started to put more thought into the makeup and specifically into the idea of creating a character for each band member. Later on in our career, when we went to Japan, the reporters there wondered if our makeup was indebted to the Japanese kabuki style. Actually mine was taken from the Bat Wings of Black Bolt, a character in the Marvel comic
The Inhumans.
The boots were vaguely Japanese, though—taken from
Gorgo
or
Godzilla
—and the rest of the getup was borrowed from
Batman
and
Phantom of the Opera
, from all the comic books and science fiction and fantasy that I had read and loved since I was a child. As KISS became more comfortable in this second skin, we started to see how powerful our new look really was, and how it moved far beyond glam rock, which was already feeling as though it was running its course.
    The first official KISS gig I ever got for us wasn’t as KISS but as Wicked Lester. In the early days, I used to go to ridiculous lengths to get us booked into shows. Sometimes I would literally go door to door, knocking and waiting until the manager came out, then trying to convince him to hire us. There was a nightclub called Coventry (originally Popcorn) in Astoria, Queens, and I managed to get Wicked Lester a spot there. It wasn’t the weekend slot, though. It was the middle-of-the-week slot, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, which was pretty much a dead zone. We gave our picture to theclub, and by this time we had decided to be reborn as KISS, thanks in part to Epic’s decision to drop Wicked Lester. I remember very clearly when our picture went up on the outside of this club, Ace took a marker and wrote our new name right on the picture. The way he drew it was pretty crude, but it resembled our logo, with the two
S
’s like lightning bolts at the end of the word. It didn’t make much difference for the show, which had a crowd of maybe three people: Peter’s wife, Lydia, a girl named Jan who I was seeing, and Jan’s friend. But it was a booking, and soon there were other bookings, including a club called the Daisy in Amityville. Those shows were packed, but mostly because it was a drinking club, with cheap beer and a biker crowd. It was the kind of place where you might see a pregnant woman with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It didn’t matter to us what the