KISS - DESTROYER @ 45

 

Released on March 15th, 1976, KISS Destroyer is celebrating 45 years on the shelves. It was the first LP I bought with my own money by my own choice. Well, technically it was the second. The first was More More More by the Andrea True Connection, but I took that back to Zellers the next day for an exchange. Its booming disco kick drum couldn’t track on my shit-box of a record player and I hadn’t discovered the ol’ “tape a penny to the tone arm” trick yet, so I ended up with the KISS record instead.

After the breakout success of KISS Alive, the band were desperate to get it together to do a studio album that could properly capture the intensity of the band. Their previous three attempts had only middling sales, belying their impact as a live band. They simply sounded flat and listless and lacked the dynamics and spectacle they were getting across on stage. To help them with this objective, the band’s label, Casablanca, brought in Bob Ezrin, who’d had major success working with Alice Cooper. Ezrin brought along the same sense of discipline he’d used to whip the Cooper band into shape and applied it to KISS, pushing them with near militant determination to get their shit together as musicians. He even insisted on them taking lessons in music theory to help their song writing chops. He flat-out rejected most of the demos they originally brought to the table and even took to sporting a coach’s whistle he’d blow whenever he wanted to rally the band for recording sessions & rehearsals.

In addition to instilling a more rigid work ethic in the band, he brought a lot of color to their sound in the form of elaborate production techniques and embellishments, which included adding things like strings, choirs, sound FX and even brought his own kids into the studio to get the sounds of them playing around to use as disturbing atmosphere on God of Thunder. Initially, critics and fans were taken aback by all this excess and they felt it detracted from their raw intensity, but over the years, most people have tended to look back on Destroyer as the pinnacle of KISS’ studio output. It was a gamble that, while it may have initially alienated some, worked in the bands favor with the LP becoming their first platinum seller, mostly thanks to the unexpected success of the Peter Chris sung B-side, Beth, an acoustic ballad!

I’d be the first in line to dismiss KISS as opportunistic hucksters as far as a band willing to sell its soul for the all-mighty dollar. Gene Simmons has long been well known for his unapologetic capitalistic values and willingness to slap his brand on anything that’ll sell. I was 12 years old when I first heard them. My cousin had Alive and the whole shtick instantly appealed to my tween brain. They were the first band that seemed “dangerous” and there was a brief moment in their early career where they did carve out a unique niche for themselves that deserves some acknowledgement for its innovation. However, it didn’t take long for them to bankrupt their credibility by indulging in a long series of increasingly crass commercial gambits which only served the purpose of lining their pockets in a way that was obvious to even a naive teenager. After a couple of years, I’d moved on to far more substantial artistic territory as the late 1970s exploded with new and dynamic artists who left bands like KISS in the dust. But there’s always going to be that part of my inner child that looks back on those early days as a moment of wonder and fascination and I have to give credit where its due to a band that understood how to take spectacle to a new level. Destroyer, as an album, captures the best of that effort at its peak and still has the ability to conjure up some satisfying nostalgia for that strange era of mythological rock.