Paul Stanley said a cruel moment in a press interview triggered Kiss’ decision to take off their masks in 1983.
The band, who were experiencing a slump in popularity as genres changed around them, responded by abandoning the characters and costumes they’d been using for nearly a decade.
They changed back in 1996, moving on from a period that Stanley admitted had seen them involved in some low-quality moments – but also saw some of their biggest hits including “Crazy Crazy Nights” and “Lick It Up.”
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“I mean, the clothes got ridiculous,” the guitarist told Billy Corgan in a recent episode of the Smashing Pumpkins leader’s The Magnificent Ones podcast (video below). “We looked like we got dressed in the dark in a costume store! ‘What do you think my feather earrings?’ ‘Oh, good – goes with your eye makeup!’”
He added: “But it was a way for us to continue [and] I wanted the band to continue. … [N]obody can tell me when this band is over. And I did do interviews with journalists towards the end of the makeup period, where there could be such vitriol [because] somebody has joy in making you squirm.”
Stanley theorized that such negativity came from “people angered by how long we had succeeded. He went on to describe what he called the “death knell” moment in an interview.
The Interview Question That Angered Paul Stanley
The question, he said, was: “How does it feel to be on the Titanic?” His reaction was: “I’m a human being. How, how could you say that?”
He continued: “And all I could think was, ‘Nobody’s going to tell me when this ends… watch this.’ [Y]ou have to have a reason to continue, and mine was that nobody gets to tell me when it’s over.”
Stanley accepted: “There were certainly some missteps that I listen to now and go, ‘Gee…’ All I can say is that we committed ourselves 100 per cent to everything we did, and believed that we were doing the best we could when we did things.
“And some of it is pretty awful!”
Watch Paul Stanley’s Interview with Billy Corgan
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Gallery Credit: Matthew Wilkening
