Can hype and branding sustain a career lasting the better part of a half-century? If so, that hasn’t been the case for KISS. The hard-rocking quartet’s kabuki makeup and extra-human personas made glam approachable to kids for whom David Bowie was too androgynously exotic and Gary Glitter too ham-fistedly corny. Though the bombast of their greasepaint, flash pots and costumes may have been the initial draw for many to the band, Friday’s Fiserv Forum date on their “End of the Road” tour evinced the band’s gift for enough hooks and anthemic escapism to make the gimmicks pay off.
Set production—including two stages and cranes by which bassist Gene “Demon” Simmons and rhythm guitarist Paul “Starchild” Stanley rode over the near-capacity audience—gave the group’s true believers in KISS Army and KISS Kruise gear a theatrically memorable send-off to an act whose aficionados’ loyalty is roughly tantamount to the critical derision they have received since their mid-’70’s debut. But critics be damned: The force of their fans’ will landed the band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite the hatred Stanley claims the hall’s brass has for them. The same popular endearment has made Milwaukee a regular stop for the band since their 1975 Riverside Theater debut.
Stanley’s between-tune musings resonated somewhere between that of a carnival barker genuinely sold on his hustle and a somewhat humbled dude grateful for being able to make such a great living plying such silly, over-the-top showmanship. Those glimmers of humility contrasted with the nearly uniformly aggressive music undergirding the evening’s attitudinal and literal pyrotechnics.
They opened with “Detroit Rock City” and “Shout It Out Loud,” both from 1976’s Destroyer, and the 18 numbers that followed touched on many of their studio albums, including the makeup-free, career-revitalizing 1983-’97 tenure that firmly positioned KISS as a forerunner of the gaudy-in-its-own way hairspray metal that stole much of the act’s luster. The libidinal streak present in “I Was Made For Loving You” informed a fair amount of the back catalog KISS revived this night, including “Lick It Up” and “Love Gun.”
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Simmons’ shtick was more amusing when he mythologized his monstrous alter ego on “War Machine” and “God of Thunder.” Stanley’s best moment on the mic may have been singing lead on their first album’s ode to inebriation, “Cold Gin.” Guitarist Tommy Thayer, sporting the Space Ace guise once donned by Ace Frehley, got his time to shine soloing on “Gin,” too. Eric Singer, taking the place of original Catman drummer Peter Criss, not only showed off his percussive chops with a solo on deep track “10,000 Years,” but also sang lead on the night’s one respite of lower key tenderness, “Beth.” In the grandiose manner that informs most everything about KISS, a grand piano made its way to the stage for that song alone.
As a probable matter of course, the set ended with the statement of purpose with which they’re most associated—“Rock and Roll All Nite.” As the lights went up, though, their remake of Argent’s “God Gave Rock and Roll To You” gave the crowd a KISS equivalent of a benediction. And the band its attempt at divine imprimatur? Either way, KISS was bound to make a spectacle at the end of their road.
