“Kiss” in Munich – culture

As the young New York glam rockers kiss When they decided in the spring of 1973 to perform with made-up faces, they had no idea how much this decision would one day make their aging as a band easier. Fifty years later, as part of the farewell tour “End of the Road”, which will last until the end of 2023, Kiss are on the stage of the well-filled Munich Königsplatz, and the problems that other grandmasters of their generation have are faced by Paul Stanley (71), Gene Simmons (73) and the bandmates Thomas Thayer (62) and Eric Singer (65), who joined over twenty years ago, are not. Make-up faces have no wrinkles. Kiss can do without like Abba to send computer-generated avatars onto the stage to recreate the illusion of the 1970s. They also succeed in the show with a live cast.

On the Königsplatz, whose neoclassical buildings are about as old as Simmons and Stanley put together, you can see the fashions and gestures of a past century on this summer evening: high heels, black-and-white striped jeans, denim vests covered with stickers, men who pensively play the air guitar or join in stoically stomp one leg to the beat for minutes. Overall, however, the audience is surprisingly mixed. It consists not only of the 50 to 60-year-old warriors who were already bawling “Rock and Roll All Nite” or “I Was Made For Loving You” when the songs were released, but also of many younger couples or entire Kiss families painted faces.

The rocker with the many tattoos burst into tears on “Black Diamond”.

Shortly after half past eight, the well-known ritual begins with the sunset: the huge one falls with a cannon bang kiss-Curtain in front of the stage. Like a thousand times before, Gene Simmons announces “the hottest band in the world”, and the staccato guitars of “Detroit Rock City”, the song with which Kiss have opened their concerts since 1977, ring out. Shortly before, the fans in the crowd at the front were still talking about the first Kiss appearance of their lives: 1980 in the Olympiahalle, 1983 in the tiny Löwenbräukeller, 1996 on the acclaimed comeback tour in make-up and the original cast. Kiss fans are loyal, they could tell their biographies along the lines of concert visits and songs, and the decisive questions in the Munich schoolyards at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties still have authority for them: Kiss or AC/DC? “Demon” Gene Simmons or “Starchild” Paul Stanley?

Kiss celebrate one hit after another, “Shout It Out Loud”, “Deuce”, “I Love It Loud”, “Cold Gin”, and on the band’s farewell tour a peculiar temporal distortion becomes abundantly clear: Kiss has liked it for fifty years give, but their creative spirit, from which they still live today, only blazed for a very short time, actually only for three euphoric years without irritation, from 1974 to 1977. After that came the first crises, separate solo albums, disco experiments, what in retrospect was grandiose, But the concept album “Music From The Elder” was rejected by critics and audiences and the first defamatory tours without masks, followed by routinely played later records whose songs nobody remembers anymore.

Of the 18 songs that almost 20,000 fans sing along to on Königsplatz, 17 were written before 1983 and 14 between 1974 and 1977. Kiss are no longer an active rock band, but a company that expresses longings and fantasies from a distant time can revive. A circus for adults. The year 2001 therefore appears to be the most important threshold in the band’s history, in which Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley decided not to assign new masks to new members as before, but simply to transfer guitarist Thomas Thayer and drummer Eric Singer to the fantasy characters of the original members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss . For more than twenty years there has been no congruence between musician and mask in Kiss. That was the logical decision of a band that doesn’t want to be a viable group, but a reliably working nostalgia machine. Consequently, Thomas Thayer was a member of a well-known Kiss cover band before he was recruited, so he can play the songs even more adeptly than his earlier idols.

In the 1970s, the two refused to perform in Germany

In any case, Kiss has long consisted only of Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, supported by two employees on temporary contracts. The band’s recipe for success probably has a lot to do with the relationship between these two antipodes. Their approach to music, at least in the public staging, is exactly the opposite: money versus art, business cynicism versus romantic sincerity. They are united in the success story of their biographies. Two Jewish immigrant children named Chaim Witz and Stanley Eisen, sons of Holocaust survivors in New York, who use their stage names and music to break free from post-war poverty in Queens. In the 1970s, the two refused to perform in Germany. Now Stanley and Simmons are standing on the Königsplatz, the former main square of the movement’s capital, and for several minutes between two songs they get the audience to chant slogans and song lines separately according to blocks and genders.

In these moments, Kiss are the larger-than-life stars, with the crowd at their feet like they did in the 70’s and 80’s. At the same time, however, no other band shows more clearly how the changes in media technology in the 21st century have shrunk the pop star myth. In their heyday, the rare snaps of a Kiss member without makeup were an event reported in the magazine Bravo was fully appreciated. Despite their celebrity status, Simmons and Stanley were able to go to restaurants and bars when they were not on tour because there were no cameras there. Today, the strict rule of anonymity that Kiss imposed on itself between 1974 and 1983 would be doomed to failure from the very first moment.

Every music consumer can now also be a paparazzi, journalist and publisher. The alignment of star and fan pursued by both sides is also evident on Paul Stanley’s Instagram channel, for example, in which the once so aloof, mysterious rock star presents his followers with the latest achievements as a hobby cook. The star child in an apron, with a pizza tray or pasta plate in hand, talking about choosing the right tomatoes: a sad sight for veteran admirers. The pop star has become approachable, but some fans now have media coverage similar to that of the bands. The current overcoming of well-established abuse rituals at concerts has undoubtedly only become possible through these communication-technological shifts.

It’s an easy feat looking at the fake Ace Frehley, at the original members exhausted and hoarse after thirty minutes, who use the younger two’s overly drawn out guitar and drum solos to disappear backstage for minutes, find Kiss’ farewell show tasteless and calculated. But then, at the grand finale with “Love Gun” and “Black Diamond”, when Paul Stanley lets himself be pulled across the Königsplatz on a high wire and sings the haunting intro of “Black Diamond” on a small stage in the middle suddenly there again: the deep happiness that this band can kindle. Then it doesn’t matter at all whether the performance from 2023 is an exact copy of 1996 and 1976. Presence knows no simulation. The hardened rocker over there, with the many tattoos and the original T-shirt from the “Destroyer” tour: When Paul Stanley drives back onto the stage directly over his head, tears suddenly come to his eyes.