Band's farewell tour signals end of classic hard rock; Ace Frehley truly is from outer space
3/18/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
I have witnessed the sacred ceremony of the Gods of Life and Youth.
I have seen Kiss on their Farewell Tour.
I saw the band in Tucson, Arizona, on Sunday evening, March 12, 2000, at the Tucson Convention Center. I sat on the floor, in the center of Row P (the 16th row).
My life has been changed for good.
I have experienced the infinite and immortal creative urge on the grandest scale. I have felt the rage of raw expression course through an electrostatic atmosphere. I have felt the full return of the rage of my pre-teen years -. the uncontrollable red-and-yellow strobe-light craving for blaring heavy metal music. I have once again embraced the full pyrotechnic splendor of a rock .n. roll concert.
My veins have felt the hulking, thunderous roar of Gene Simmons plucking the strings of his bass guitar, stepping high, like a warrior, in his scaly, metallic platform boots. My brain cells have been shocked by the alien noise of Ace Frehley, having just arrived from the stars, bending another starry note into infinity. My ears withstood the intergalactic, catlike tap of Peter Criss slamming the high-hat and snare. My eyes have been mesmerized by Paul Stanley gliding over the crowd to a small stage in the center of a coliseum floor.
I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed some more and yelled and yelled and grasped toward the mad fireworks explosions of the world.s last great classic rock band and I can genuinely say my sense of self has been altered for once and for all.
Instinct is immortal
The Tucson Convention Center is an arena that Kiss hadn.t played in 20 years. It was clear that Kiss was getting back to its roots. The venue is an arena that.s perhaps too small, by today.s standards, to hold a world-class stadium-rock band. The scene was just like the back cover of Alive!, but with fewer seats. And this time, instead of two kids holding a banner featuring the four band members, there was a guy in bleach-spotted jeans jumping up and down on a chair, waving a painted bed sheet that read, "ROSWELL, N.M. WILL MISS YOU," with alien-headed versions of Gene, Ace, Paul, and Peter rendered in green. Times have changed.
Then again, times haven't changed. Three of the guys in Kiss have already turned 50 (Gene and Paul are 50; Peter is 52; Ace is a spry 49), but they rocked like they were 25. They put in a two-hour show. Gene can still spit blood three feet, like the God of Thunder that he is. Peter rode his drum riser four stories into the air, revealing a typical feline tapestry below, during his solo. Paul twirled his microphone around, and wrapped it around his neck in a coup-de-grace move. And Ace jammed. All of these things prove to me that age is totally in our heads. Sure, our bodies may slow down a little, but some 25-year-olds act like they never had that much attitude.
Half-way into the show, the lights around the stage dimmed, and a few beams of very intense red and green light cascaded down toward the stage.s center. Out of nowhere, a light flashed on Gene, who leered at the crowd with true horror-show theatrics. Blood started to drip down his chin. The massive projection screen behind him magnified his head 20,000 times, and the spring of cinematic red frothing from his mouth was shocking.
With a fiendish smile, Gene started to gurgle-up blood. Then he played a threatening bass line on his ax guitar. Blood started trickling out of his mouth more quickly, and he gurgled a few times more, playing up the crowd, thumping his ax. It.s hard to believe he taught grade school in his first career, sometime around 1970.
A moment later, the band broke into "God of Thunder," that warlike anthem, where Simmons growled out sneering lyrics ("You've got something about you / You've got something I need / Daughter of Aphrodite / Hear my words and take heed") in the middle of a cloud of dry ice. And the dry ice captured a circle of light that was shadowed to look like stained glass. Gene commanded the pulpit, delivering a rock 'n' roll sermon.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was stymied. It had been years since I had seen such arena-rock theatrics. I'll probably never see something like this again.
Unquestionably, Ace Frehley is an alien
I swear that Ace is from outer space. He always seemed that way for me anyway, as explified by the liner notes of Alive!, which read, in Ace's handwriting: "The gravity on Earth isn.t quite the same as it is on my planet, but I.m slowly getting used to it." What if he were really telling us the truth? Without thinking twice, I accept Ace.s message at face value.
I should add that I also take at face value a sentence that appears at the end of this note, where Ace.s logic soon takes a quick turn: "When I play guitar on stage it.s like making love. If you're good you get off every time. Thanks for helping me get off ----."
On UFO experts' list of well-known aliens, probably the most famous is Semjase, the celebrated blonde Pleiadian woman who visited Switzerland to communicate telepathically with Billy Meier. But ufologists should really pay more attention to Ace. I.m absolutely convinced that Ace was sent by some alien race to abduct the ears of the youth, and make their minds receptive to party-happy aliens. messages of love and fun .- two things that Earth needs more of desperately. Think of all of the kids who, over the decades, walked away from Kiss concerts scared to death that their ringing ears would never detect sound again. What if their brains were simply scanning and reading a just-downloaded extraterrestrial code, all zeroes and ones? Maybe their heads had been abducted by the siren song of an alien intelligence, a starship voyager from some planet with heavy metal deeply embedded in its core.
Ace matches technique with style, standing around and pounding out power chords like he.s floating, occasionally bending his inwardly pointing knees. Judging from his characteristically ecstatic, open-mouthed expression, you.d have to believe that he.s permanently spaced out. During his thoroughly maddening guitar solo, his fingers frantically traveled all over the fretboard of his fiery Gibson Les Paul, pumping out the insanely divine, futuristic song of some faraway galaxy.
Bands just don.t do guitar solos anymore. They should, though. There.s something at once bold and absurd about them. They.re too much for today.s toned-down, simplified, streamlined attitude. Long hair .- let alone white face paint, dry ice, and spandex costumes .- just seem to get in the way. Rock and roll is dead, anyway: It.s an analog relic of the 20th century. Supplanted by it is the nameless and faceless .- yet equally soulful and stirring .- pulse of electronic music, which, like a tidal wave, has swept across the stereos of the world.s youth.
Hearing Ace, I couldn.t help but imagine what a novelty 70s-style electric guitar playing will be in 2050. The guitar solo of "Rocket Ride," on Alive II may be viewed the way recordings by John Lee Hooker are seen today. Think of how weird it will be to see a 75-year-old grandparent pull out his ax to play "I Stole Your Love" for his children.s children. Considering how Kiss influenced youth music in unfathomable ways, I wonder how some band in 2012 will be inspired by Rock and Roll All Night. The day may soon be upon us when musical performers resort to pyrotechnics and strange outfits once again.
The at-times-overserious, at-times-amazing heavy metal rage of the late 70s and early 80s .- the period beginning with Judas Priest.s Sad Wings of Destiny and ending with Motley Crue.s Shout at the Devil -- is more than due for a revival. When Ace and the rest of Kiss play their last chord on stage, the era of classic hard rock era will end.
Wigged out
At one point in the show, I just wigged out. I couldn.t stand up. My legs got heavy, because I was dancing around like I was in Ibiza, bugging out to deep house music, not hard rock. Waving my hands with index and pinkie pointed up like horns .- the salute given by every heavy metal fan in the 80s -. I must have looked very strange. But I didn.t care.
Anyway, I sat down. My perspective changed immediately. I felt like I had found a clearing among a forest of legs. Everybody around me was standing, and I could only see their backs. Yet, I still was able to watch the screen that towered above the stage.
In front of me, though, sat a young mother cradling her 3-year-old son. He slept on her shoulder practically all the way through the concert. She, in turn, protectively rested her lips on the crown of his head, as if kissing her son. Like a 21st century Madonna with Jesus, the sight of the pair provided a mellowing contrast to the mayhem going on 16 rows up. The woman.s husband was standing next to her, holding their 5-year-old son in his arms.
Out of many surrounding rows of onlookers, we must have been the only three people sitting down. I became absorbed by what I was seeing before me. Why bring two young boys to a concert like this? Was the Kiss-in-concert experience special enough to be passed on between generations? I pictured the sleeping boy being told by his mom, at age 21, about the concert: "You don.t remember this, but we took you and your brother to see Kiss when you were 3. You slept in my arms all the way through."
I could imagine the boy, at age 80, telling his grandchildren, "I went to see Kiss when I was your age. Your great-grandmother used to love to tell me about how I slept in her arms all the way through. Of course, back then, we didn.t have sleep-replacement pills like we do today."
Sitting down got me thinking about how I started listening to a makeup-free Kiss when I was 11, when Lick It Up came out. Vinnie Vincent, who was kicked out of the band seemingly months after his arrival, was the guitarist at the time. I stopped listening to Kiss in 1985, when Asylum was released. Kiss-Ted Nugent was actually my first concert. By then, Kiss was emulating David Lee Roth.s wardrobe and Motley Crue.s Theater of Pain sound. By 1986, I was spending my allowance on Megadeth and Metallica tapes. In my rebellious, junior-high point of view, Kiss had somehow lost their edge.
Coming out of being lost in memories, I felt the passage of time starting to creep me out. I had to stand up again and jump up and down, and rid myself of my self-analytical thoughts. "Detroit Rock City" was being played.
You drive us wild, we.ll drive you crazy
As the show ended with "Rock And Roll All Nite," a pair of balloons . or something like balloons . popped, and rainbows of confetti rained on us from above. I could hardly see. As I looked up at the shreds of colors falling, I felt like I was going to accidentally swallow and choke on one of the rectangular shards. I felt like I was swimming in them.
Behind the flickering layer of colors, Ace was spinning yellow sparks from the neck of his guitar, as if he were a part of a carnival attraction. Beyond that, the huge projected screen showed a close-up of Paul singing. All of these layers of lights and sparks and confetti were spinning and meshing into each other. I felt dizzy, like I was in the scene on the dust cover of Alive II, where fans, with eyes closed, reach toward the ceiling ecstatically.
Life should be approached as if it were a perpetual version of "Rock & Roll All Nite." No joke. The lyrics rule. They.re so positive . an anthem about the interaction between entertainer and entertained. Gene starts it off, "You show us everything you've got / You keep on dancin' and the room gets hot / You drive us wild, we'll drive you crazy / You say you wanna go for a spin / The party's just begun, we'll let you in / You drive us wild, we'll drive you crazy." Here it is, the end of the show, and Gene is singing that the party has just begun. Life should be that party. And we should be shouting, and shouting, and shouting about how lucky we are to be alive, and feel love, friendship, and sunlight.
As the song approached its end, I greedily pocketed some of the paper scraps, so that I could put it in a plastic bag and remember what really was, in all honesty and seriousness, my first religious experience. But something in me urged me to empty my pockets, and live with the memory, not the souvenir. After all, confetti fades. So as I walked down the aisle, toward the exit, I reached into my pockets, and released all of the scraps into the air, re-creating for a moment the feeling I had just minutes before. Just once more.
In two brief hours, I was reminded what it was like to be 12, but without all of the gloomy, antisocial dread that accompanies that stage in life. I encountered a rare and wonderful sense of awe, for life and youth . what it means to have a young mind, and not give a piss about anything else but good music.
After all these years, Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter still rock. I.m so thankful that I had one last Kiss experience. The night makes me want to learn every guitar solo that Ace ever recorded with Kiss, and crank the amplifier to 11, irritating the hell out of my neighbors -- just like I used to.