Romantic Kissing Images Biography
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Kiss will always be known, above all else, as the band without a face. Until 1983, when the group removed its distinctive comic-book makeup, the four members' faces supposedly had never been photographed (although pictures of them applying their makeup for an early photo session ran in Creem magazine in the early Eighties).
Theatrics and basic hard rock have been a main calling card for Kiss, who were one of the biggest-selling acts of the Seventies and who inspired the Kiss Army, as fans refer to themselves. The quartet formed in the heyday of glitter and rock theater, and it set out to define, at first, evil cartoon-character personas, highlighted by Gene Simmons' bass-playing, fire-breathing, tongue-wagging ghoul.
The group was founded by Simmons and star-eyed rhythm guitar-playing frontman Paul Stanley, who met in a band in 1970. They found "Catman" drummer Peter Criss through his ad in Rolling Stone. After rehearsing as a trio, the group took out an ad in the Village Voice for a guitarist with "flash and balls" and discovered Ace Frehley, who adopted a "Spaceman" persona. At the time, they were all working dead-end jobs, with the exception of Simmons, who taught school at P.S. 75 in Manhattan. Their visual image and game plan were in place from the start. After a few New York shows, Kiss met independent television director Bill Aucoin, who helped the group get a deal with Casablanca Records.
The critics hissed at the anonymous heavy-metal thud rock on the band's first three albums and howled at its mock-threatening image. Nonetheless, Kiss hit it off with its fans (the Kiss Army) from the very start. After some hard financial times (an entire 1975 tour was reportedly financed on Aucoin's American Express card), the band took off with Alive! (Number 9, 1975), which contained the Top Twenty hit "Rock and Roll All Nite."
In 1976 the band's sound and image shifted toward not necessarily softer but certainly more commercial fare, beginning with Criss' ballad "Beth" (#7, 1976), a million-seller that he wrote for his wife, Lydia. Accordingly, Kiss' audience grew from mostly male adolescent heavy-metal fans to include more teenyboppers. As the group racked up more and more platinum records - six between 1976 and 1979 - it became increasingly less threatening. Young fans were frequently photographed wearing the makeup of their favorite Kiss member.
On June 28, 1977, Marvel Comics published a Kiss comic book. The red ink used supposedly contained a small amount of blood from the band members themselves. It sold over 400,000 copies. In the fall of 1978 NBC broadcast a feature-length animated cartoon entitled Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, and Marvel issued a second Kiss comic. But the group's popularity was beginning to wane. Four simultaneously released solo LPs sold poorly — Frehley's was most popular — although the group had several hit singles, including the disco-metal oddity "I Was Made for Loving You" (Number 16, 1
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/kiss/biography#ixzz2w3B8XND8
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