Yeah, me, neither. Also! I am not, and never was, a KISS fan. I always thought they were bubble gum. Needless to say, I enjoy Clay Jones’s commentary re KISS!
I’m a KISS fan, to an extent. When I was in the 4th or 5th grade, a friend introduced me to KISS, and I was hooked. I had posters and albums. I wanted to be Ace Frehley and started playing guitar. I was obsessed with KISS. Other than my guitar obsession (I’m still obsessed), all that was over by the time I hit the 8th grade. With a bit more maturity, I had become more interested in not just the current music of the time, like Van Halen, but another friend had introduced me to The Beatles, and I think I discovered the Rolling Stones on my own. I started paying attention to my mom’s music and got into CCR.
A few years later, I was walking through the music department of K-Mart, and saw the album cover for KISS’s latest album, Lick It Up, and learned that they had a couple of replacement members and had taken the makeup off. This was huge news in KISS world, but I was out of the KISS ARMY (that was the fan club) by that point.
And that’s the thing about KISS. Their audience was mostly little boys, such as myself. While KISS looked like a dangerous rock and roll band, at least at the beginning, they had become more of a marketing product than a rock and roll band. In addition to the posters I had, KISS were marketing lunch boxes, action figures, trading cards, bed sheets, pillows, comic books, and even had made a TV movie, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, which might be the worst TV movie ever.
KISS may have been serious about their music, but they weren’t taken seriously, which is difficult to obtain when each member is face-painted like a clown. The Insane Clown Posse is probably more respected. And while there are some gems in their catalog, most of their songs actually sucked. KISS chased trends. They started as a rock band striving to be on Led Zeppelin’s level, but they didn’t have the songwriting chops or musicianship, despite Ace Frehley being a badass (when he was sober enough to play on the albums, and didn’t force the band to use a hidden replacement for his lead guitar playing). KISS went from trying to be the next Beatles to producing a disco track, to chasing hair metal in the 80s, to writing songs with Michael Bolton and Bryan Adams, to making a grunge album. Critics didn’t like them, and they never made the cover of Rolling Stone during their prime (but did make it decades later for an article that was mostly retrospective).
They were more noted for their theatrics, fire-breathing, blood-spitting, and smoke pouring out of Frehley’s guitar than for their music.
Most musicians in respected rock bands are invited to play on other artists’ albums, such as Bob Seger, members of Fleetwood Mac, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and every member of The Eagles. Even members of Cheap Trick got invites, and even lured Beatles producer George Martin to produce their albums. But I can’t think of a member of KISS who has ever played on another artist’s album. After leaving KISS, Ace Frehley called John Waite (the Missing You guy) to see if he’d like to start a band with him, and never got a return call. And Ace was the most successful solo artist to come out of the band (though his last album was embarrassing). Peter Criss’ albums are unlistenable.
Gene Simmons was not a good songwriter (sample lyric: “Let me put my log into your fire”), and his bass playing is still mocked today (they often used a hidden replacement, or Paul and Ace would play bass on the songs they wrote). Paul Stanley had an operatic voice (that didn’t have a natural sound), but he tried too hard to show it off, and his guitar playing and songwriting were cheesy. Peter Criss was more of a jazz drummer than a heavy rock guy like John Bonham of Zeppelin, and he had timing issues, but his voice had an amazing sound, especially considering that he was tone deaf. Ace Frehley, who is unfortunately a racist who used to get drunk and bang on his Jewish bandmates’ hotel room doors dressed as a Nazi (really. They used to call him RACE Frehley), inspired millions with his guitar playing, but his skills decreased due to his laziness and addictions. By hiring studio musicians to pretend to be Criss, Frehley, and Simmons on their albums and hiding it from the fans, KISS didn’t even take themselves seriously.
KISS was never a great band. So why are they the first to be honored by Donald Trump since he made himself the head of the Kennedy Center? Because Trump has no culture (ketchup on burnt steaks), and he has the maturity of a 12-year-old boy.
Trump will be hosting the ceremony for these “honors,” which will be interesting. People will probably tune in because folks love a good train wreck.
Each member of KISS expressed how honored and humbled they are for receiving these “honors,” but boys…being “honored” by Donald Trump isn’t really an honor.
That’s another difference between KISS and bands taken seriously. Musicians sue Trump to stop playing their music at his rallies.
And, yes. KISS has a song glorifying pedophilia. Gene Simmons wrote it. I had to adjust the lyrics for space, but those cited in the cartoon say,
“I don’t usually say things like this to girls your age, But when I saw you coming out of the school that day, That day I knew, I knew, I’ve got to have you, I’ve got to have you.”
Even as a kid, I thought it was weird that Gene only saw Christine because he was hanging outside her school. (snip-MORE)
Hi Everyone. I’d like to share an artist that I think many will like. I enjoy learning of great singers that don’t seem to hit the radio. This is Dave Fenley. He’s got a great soulful and gravelly voice.
In the case of Saturday Night Fever, “[t]he use of disco-inflected classical music in the film represents the economic and social success to which Tony and his friends ultimately aspire,” argues McLeod. “The disco milieu represents one form of illusion—the illusion of power in the outside ‘real’ world that Tony imagines.”
Indeed, classical music represents an exotic world of sophistication, elitism, and wealth which, especially when merged with a homogeneous disco beat, becomes an enticing symbol of the unattainable, illusory, and artificial nature of Tony’s dreams.
Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” makes its appearance when Tony and his friends arrive at the 2001 Oddyssey (sic) disco club.
“To some extent he is represented as the new heir to the cultural prestige of classical music,” writes McLeod of Tony’s appearance. The soundtrack, with its
seemingly contradictory and almost synthetically forced fusion of classical music and disco underlines the artificiality of his entrance and of the world into which he has crossed. It is likely no accident that the famous “fate” motive, heard here near the beginning of the movie, functions as a foreshadowing of the dramatic events that will soon unfold within this world.
“A Fifth of Beethoven” is easily the highest-profile instance of disco appropriation of classical music. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is typically associated with notions of monumentality, heroism, fate, and relentless transcendence of the will. And while Beethoven’s version is about transcending humanity, Murphy’s is steeped in humanity, as it represents acceptance of common human desires—such as dancing—rather than superhuman transcendence of them.
The soundtrack also featured another instrumental disco–classical interpretation: David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain,” which adapts Mussorgsky’s orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (which is also the Chernabog segment in Disney’s Fantasia). “Night on Disco Mountain” is heard when Tony and his friend pretend to jump off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
“The faked suicides are symbolized by the ‘fake’ classical music,” writes McLeod.
Shire’s track adds another layer of grotesque ambient sounds to further heighten the atmosphere of chaos and alienation, producing what McLeod calls “an international and futuristic potpourri of sounds.”
“A Fifth of Beethoven” and “Night on Disco Mountain” weren’t isolated instances of classical–disco fusion. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach and Switched-On Brandenburgs recordings became instant commercial radio and dance hits. K-Tel Records initiated their popular Hooked on Classics series that combined classical music with elements of disco and pop music. This trend spawned a number of disco–classical albums such as Klassiks Go Disko, featuring “A Sixth of Tchaikovsky” and “Brahms’s Disco Dance No. 5,” and Saturday Night Fiedler, an album of disco arrangements by the Boston Pops.
“Many of classical music’s qualities, such as structural complexity and cultural prestige, were natural targets for simplification, reduction, and transmission to a mass audience,” argues McLeod. Artificiality is another common thread, as both genres thrive on the notion. “As in a discotheque,” he writes, “classical music is often enjoyed and appreciated in escapist settings by wealthy, well-dressed devotees.”
There are also similarities between classical and disco compositional style.
I was not a massive fan of Ozzy Osbourne, but I was still a fan. When I got a news alert in a text while on the city bus (see? I get news alerts, people) telling me he had passed, and just a few weeks after his final performance, I knew I had to honor him.
I was never really a metal head, but Ozzy ruled. Even if I didn’t like him, I was in a scene where everyone else did. I was very much in the know about Ozzy. If nothing else, I liked him solo more than I liked Black Sabbath.
Randy Rhoads is why I’m an Ozzy fan, and I still listen to him after Randy’s tragic death in 1982 from a plane crash. Randy’s career was just getting started with a bright future in front of him.
So, did Ozzay really bite the head off a bat? I have been hearing different versions of this story for years. But yes, it appears that he actually did. Reportedly, it wasn’t a stunt.
Ozzy used to throw out real animal parts during a tour in the early 80s. Fans learned about this, so they were prepared when they went to his shows. Somewhere in Iowa, a 17-year-old Ozzy fan threw a bat on stage. Ozzy thought it was fake and bit its head off. In one version, he said he discovered it was real when it was in his mouth and he tasted “warm, gloopy liquid,” and the head twitched. He claimed it was a live bat.
In a different version, he said it was dead. The kid who brought the bat also said it was dead.
Ozzy also told two different stories about biting the heads off doves at a meeting with CBS executives. In one version, he brought three live doves, and being drunk (Oz had substance issues), he bit the heads off all three of the LIVE doves.
In a second version, he brought one to release at the end of the meeting, but it died, so waste not, want not….he made use of it by biting its head off. I don’t know what actually happened. I wasn’t there.
Ozzy had just done his final performance a few weeks ago at a concert billed as “Back To The Beginning: Ozzy’s Final Bow,” in Birmingham, England, in front of 42,000. He sang from a custom-built throne as he had been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for the past five years, and walking was extremely difficult for him. (snip-MORE)
“This is supposed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip included in the Biography television documentary above. He then gives the finger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out to have been much more to come for the former frontman of Black Sabbath, the band that opened the floodgates — or perhaps hellgates — of heavy metal. After an impoverished childhood spent playing in the bomb sites of postwar Birmingham, Osbourne hopped from job to job, including one failed stint at a slaughterhouse and another as a criminal. He then turned singer, receiving a PA system from his father and forming a blues group with a few local musicians. People pay good money to see scary movies, they one day reckoned, so why not make scary music?
The time was the late nineteen-sixties, when listeners approached record albums as quasi-cinematic experiences. Taking their name from Mario Bava’s anthology horror film, which had come out a few years before, Black Sabbath delivered on expectations many weren’t even aware they had. Today, anyone can put on an early Black Sabbath album and identify the music as heavy metal, not a world apart from any of its newer variants. (snip-MORE)
Scottie's Playtime 