Frank "Starchild" Murtaugh
FedExForum’s lid will be in jeopardy on Saturday, February 23rd, when KISS takes the stage for the 15th show on their “End of the Road” world tour. This will be the 15th concert the masked rock heroes have played in the Bluff City since 1974 and, if Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons are serious this time, the last. (They played the Pyramid in 2000 on what they called a “Farewell Tour,” and again in 2004.) I’ll be there, a 40-year member of the KISS Army, convinced certain songs played in bombastic style keep a man young in ways no fruit or pharmaceuticals can. It’s one thing for a Hall of Fame rock band to reach the end of the road. What of us fans?
My makeup-streaked KISS road began in Knoxville in 1977. I was in third grade, visiting a friend’s house, tossing a Nerf football in his backyard. I was a rather typical 8-year-old: liked baseball cards, comic books, and playing with one ball or another until sundown. When my pal, Tim, said he had a record I needed to hear — and see — I tucked the football under my arm and followed him inside.
My buddy put Destroyer on his parents’ record-player, an album released a year earlier and by then already a platinum-selling sensation. (My rock taste to this point leaned toward my dad’s favorites: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, a Beatles tune now and then.) As the opening guitar riff of “Detroit Rock City” played — following a creepy intro recording of a car crash — I got my first glimpse of KISS on the album cover. It floored me.
Left to right on the cover were Stanley (the Starchild), Peter Criss (the Catman), Ace Frehley (the Spaceman), and Simmons (the Demon), four comic-book characters rising above an apocalyptic wasteland. I needed to read their adventures, find out where they fit between Superman and Spider-Man on the superhero landscape. No, Tim corrected me; those aren’t comic characters. That’s the band.
The idea of the Starchild actually singing “Detroit Rock City” makes me feel 8 years old to this day. The fact that a single man (Stanley) has been taking stages as that rock god for 45 years is beyond my abilities to blend reality and fantasy. The same goes for the blood-spitting, fire-breathing Demon, a creature inhabited now by the 69-year-old Simmons. (I didn’t watch a solitary minute of Simmons’ once-popular reality show, Family Jewels. There are areas of our lives where reality is an intrusion.)
It took some time before my skeptical parents allowed a KISS record in our house. (Started with Criss’ solo album. The drummer, for crying out loud.) And I didn’t see the band perform live until 1994, their makeup — not to mention Frehley and Criss — cast aside in a form of cultural conformity I’m convinced Stanley and Simmons regret today. But I was on the floor at the Pyramid on July 10, 1996, when the original foursome returned in full, costumed glory for their “Reunion” tour. When the curtain dropped and I caught my first look at Simmons atop his seven-inch dragon boots, the bassist appeared 20 feet tall. It’s a “live-capture” memory I’m glad no cell phone can borrow.
I’ve been asked about my enduring devotion to all things KISS. And I’ve had a hard time explaining, beyond the enduring power of that first impression 42 years ago. I continued to enjoy their music through the “down” years, songs like “Heaven’s on Fire” and “Domino” delivering my preferred flavor of rock-and-roll crunch, no makeup required. Nirvana changed the game in the Nineties. U2 has endured with songwriting — and performances — to rival any in rock history. The Rolling Stones may be the only band worthy of a conversation about rivals to the Beatles’ supremacy.
But for me, it’s KISS. On February 23rd, and for however many days I have remaining. I interviewed Simmons for a Memphis Flyer cover story in 2000, shortly before that “Farewell Tour” appearance. He relished the chances he still had to deliver an entertainment package unlike any other, before or since: “In a very real way, KISS is much more on the edge than it’s ever been, because rock-and-roll is dead. Everybody looks like a pizza delivery boy, and KISS stubbornly refuses to insult the audience by taking the stage looking worse than they do.”
It turns out those superheroes on the Destroyer album cover are indeed merely human beings. Which makes the KISS phenomenon all the more breathtaking, at least for those of us who see ourselves in them.
