KISS 1981: Same band, right direction, wrong time, Gene’s nipple.

A Light amongst the Dark.

he most maligned album in the KISS catalog, (Music From) The Elder – is also their best by a mile! The ninth KISS studio album shifts gears so ferociously that the gearbox falls out and everyone goes through the windshield.

Constructed with a solid foundation of classically heavy riffs, augmented magnificently by orchestral flourishes and dramatic passages, with songs that are lyrical and musical journeys about self-realization and honor, and with crystalline production from Bob Ezrin (coming off producing Pink Floyd’s The Wall, 1979), The Elder is a masterwork of meticulous design, by Paul Stanley (guitars, vocals), Gene Simmons (bass guitar, vocals), Eric Carr (drums, backing vocals) and minimally Ace Frehley (guitars, vocals).

We follow a chosen Boy, overseen by mysterious guardians called The Elder, on a sword and sorcery  journey to defeat an evil force rising to destroy the Earth. Um… Okay, everybody out of the pool! And get the hookers out the back door. Stop that pawdying and take off that dance belt. KISS gets medieval on our asses. In a world where magic and integrity prevail, where the only big knockers are on the castle doors…

The steel-tinged guitar fury of The Oath opens the album. “Like the blade of a sword I am forged in flame…” (In some markets, the journey opens with Fanfare. Either way, the continuity makes sense.) Our first reaction is that KISS has unapologetically returned to their hard rock roots after the tinfoil faux-metal of Unmasked. Paul Stanley’s voice alternates between his power tenor and falsetto, awash in reverb and delay, in character as the chosen Boy, vowing to ride into battle and fight for all that is good. Is he serious? Like the blade of a sword he is! During this song, for the first time, we hear the ramming double-kick of Eric Carr (recently replacing Peter Criss, having only played live with the band on an international tour supporting Unmasked). And his drumming on the whole album is simply stupendous! The new boy done good! Stanley’s lyrics of finding ancient thrones and being a servant to unknown allies takes us by surprise.  But not as much of a surprise as  —

Fanfare. The American Symphony Orchestra blows away our cockles with a thunderous overture. The majestic sweep is continued in —

Just A Boy. In the symphonic chorus and glittering organ, we envision viking ships and broadswords, and scantily-clad maidens with big knockers… As loathe as I am to use the term “soaring,” there’s no other way to describe the lilt of this paean, “Ooh, I’m no hero / Though I wish I could be…”

Dark Light. “You can be attacked and you won’t know what it is…” Lead guitarist Ace Frehley – spaceman – ironically brings the haughty concept album back down to Earth with his dirty riffing and characteristic home-schooled voice, throwing in a blistering solo.

And then… it’s the Bat-Demon’s turn at bat. But – surprise! – the two Gene Simmons offerings that round out Side 1 of The Elder (Only You and Under The Rose) are mid-tempo songs about finding yourself. “Only you have the answers / But the questions you have to find…” Though they exhibit ominousness and dangerous portent, and do truck into heavier territory as they progress (the latter utilizing St. Robert’s Choir), we find that Simmons is not even singing in his demon-esque growl, but using a smoother, almost “trained” timbre. I personally loved this direction, this thoughtfulness and reigning in of the animalistic, but I can see how it would make diehards spill their KISS Kocktails.

Side 2 opens with more shock and awe, as Simmons continues the country club vocals, to great effect (we hear this crazy madman can actually sing) on the moving ballad, A World Without Heroes, where the main riff is played on a xylophone! “A world without heroes / Is like a world without sun / You can’t look up to anyone / Without heroes…” A meta-critique on Gene’s own role in the food chain?

Mr. Blackwell. The bat-demon unfolds his leathery wings and emerges at last. “I am a sinner who just loves to sin / I am a fighter who just loves to win…” The villain of the piece. With Frehley’s disdain for this album, he reportedly only played on the two songs he composed, Dark Light and Escape From The Island. Stanley performed much of the lead guitar duties very tastefully. A feature of Blackwell is the distorted wah-solo – and it’s anyone’s guess who performed it.

Escape From The Island. In this instrumental, Frehley cooks, with Carr on tribal drums. It is for us to envision exactly where the story is going, who is escaping what island, from whom or what, and for what reason…

Odyssey. “Once upon not yet / Long ago someday…” A song written by Tony Powers, themed around his own mini rock opera, Paul Stanley appropriates and sings it in a register lower than his characteristic banshee yowls, throwing us for another loop. Ezrin’s epic orchestrations accompany Stanley, who then slides into a moving guitar solo, that makes me weep, obviously recorded “On a mountain high somewhere / Where only heroes dare…”

The Elder comes to a close with Simmons and Stanley trading off vocals in the raunchy rocker “I” that sets up the story to continue into the actual battle. (?) We’ll never know. “Well I’ve got to be the one / I gotta do what must be done.”

For the first time in KISS’s career, everything slots into place majestically. Not a note out of place, not a song out of sync. What happened then?

Wrong band, wrong time.

Elder came on the heels of the KISS disco superfreaks, Dynasty and Unmasked; people believed KISS had committed to that boppy road. If they were to deviate at all, it would be back into the oncoming truck of heavy metal. But no one could foresee how The Elder‘s mature direction would disturb fans so deeply. Harried talk of an Elder movie would be fruitless; even an Elder tour was cancelled due to poor album sales. Although it has probably sold more than 500,000 units to this point, at the time of its release, it was the only KISS album not certified Gold or Platinum.

After ticket sales plummet, KISS are forced to play the same dive bar I played last week.

And the makeup – that which they built their infamy on – was also starting its slide into irrelevancy, as felt in the World Without Heroes video. Simmons never sticks his trademark tongue out once, because it’s a somber, poignant piece; the evil tongue is a feature of the bat-demon persona and would be out of place here; also incongruous, at the end of this sad song, we see a single tear issuing from the demon’s eye! – which jolts us to the realization that even the characteristic makeup itself might be out of place here. Might this have been the juncture to AMEND the makeup to suit the wholly DIFFERENT characters they were portraying, or maybe – heaven forfend! – might this have been the time to REMOVE? Who knows? All KISS-tory is hindsight…

How could anyone have predicted the public would go medieval on KISS?

Maligning The Elder has become such habit, nobody bothers or dares to challenge its derogation. The sad thing is that the album’s composers – Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley – deny its quality and agree with their detractors (only because they suffer from that Howard Stern Syndrome of equating lack of sales with lack of worth). And the saddest cut of all is that they are dismissive towards people who value the album. What is the matter with humanity, when such an incredible, poignant, epic journey into the imagination has to endure such disparagement?

Drummer Carr once said he was expecting to come into KISS and play hard rock – and was suddenly faced with the pomp-rock of The Elder. And his new “character” makeup – the Fox – through no fault of his, seemed obtuse. (We start to comprehend Stanley’s point about the makeup having outlived its usefulness: “First we had a fox, then an Egyptian; I mean, what’s next, Giraffe Boy?”) Being the newbie, Carr was in no position to complain – not that he would have, being the nice guy and cooperative workhorse he was. But guitarist Frehley had no such compunctions. He openly slammed this album, and only recorded his parts by having the masters shipped to him, because he couldn’t be bothered leaving his house, his beer and his card games. He listened to the finished CD once, then smashed it against the wall. He even missed a scheduled TV appearance, forcing KISS to perform as a three-piece. (Playing Spaceman’s Advocate: Post 2010’s Sober Frehley states he had no problem with musical direction, and that he contributed much more guitarwork – albeit via sending his recorded tracks, rather than turning up and doing them – and claims much of his work was “removed” from the final product. This, I presume, would make anyone mad enough to throw it against the wall.)

Producer/songwriter/arranger Ezrin (who worked with KISS on their 1976 monument, Destroyer), also dismisses the album as worthless, his excuse being he was doing lots of cocaine at the time. That idiotic excuse might be tenable if Elder was a hot mess, but it is BRILLIANT, COHESIVE SONGWRITING AND PERFORMANCE! Was he any more or less stoned with Floyd during The Wall? Matter of fact, most people blame that album’s excellence – on drugs!

(Music From) The Elder – gatefold sleeve: The Lord Of The Rings meets The Dark Is Rising meets Conan The Barbarian meets Narnia…

Y’know, for all the grief KISS gets for “following trends” (i.e. churning out Dynasty and Unmasked in the slipstream of disco, releasing the epic concept album Elder after success of Floyd’s The Wall, forging a grunge album in the mid-90s to jump on Seattle) … nobody gives them the credit they deserve for being MUSICAL CHAMELEONS!

Do none of their detractors – fans and critics alike – realize how DIVERSE they are? Under the noses of the music industry, they Adapt, Improvise, Overcome trends by assimilating them and then discharging them back at the masses with the KISS mark of the beast! Makeup’s in – DO IT! Makeup’s out – UNMASK! Aquanet’s in – USE IT! Pop sells – PLAY IT! Stanley and Simmons never even give themselves enough credit for being so plastic, so malleable and success-oriented.

It used to be forbidden to even mention The Elder in the KISS camp; at least KISS occasionally throw The Oath into their set nowadays just for kicks. And time has balmed the hatred somewhat, as more and more fans embrace The Elder as the masterwork it is, including the band. Yet we will never forget that dark time when the world asked, “Where is the Bat-Demon?” “Where is the thunderous pawdying? “Where are the big knockers?”

END

“Who is this ‘Ziggy’ you keep referring to?”

Moonage Daydreams of Stardust.

…Your poison doesn’t hurt me, no
Tender wine disguised in a milk-fat fair kiddie show.
I’m here to celebrate the one below
The last I heard from good God above
Was the slap on my ass by a lipstick-kissed elbow glove…”
– “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon,” Shudder To Think.

A true songwriter would give his left testicle to smackdown lyrics as creamy. And VELVET GOLDMINE – a diabolical, Bowie-esque, Wilde-ian fantasm – veritably pulsates with this species of lascivious mind-painting.

Poffy Stardust and the Vegetables from Venus

Not for the musically squeamish or 70s-phobes, the more familiar you are with David Bowie and Roxy Music, and the glam slam they were largely a part of and responsible for, the more tongue you will afford VELVET GOLDMINE. Being alive and licking during the 1970s is the best symptom for maximum sensory affinity; failing that, if your bag is Iggy Pop, T-Rex, Brian Eno, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (matter of fact, any glam-stroked band, from The Sweet, to Slade, Kiss, or Alice Cooper) GOLDMINE will slide into your Velvet just fine.

Written by James Lyons and Todd Haynes and directed like a wet dream gone horribly right by Haynes, starring the cyanide-intense Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as the Bowie analog, Brian Slade) and dangerously sensual Ewan McGregor (as Iggy analog, Curt Wild), GOLDMINE is a celebration of a period that was surface Pop over layered Tart, expressed through raucous colors and pungent pan-sexuality in the form of the musical idiom we now call glam rock; a story of teen alienation and decibeled angst, of clutching belief in a lifestyle that seemed like a destination but ended up merely part of a longer journey. The underlying message in GOLDMINE was espoused by Bowie himself in his prophetic Changes: “Ooh, look out, you rock n’ rollers! Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older!”

GOLDMINE’s success is in its evocation of the period – glam-struck London of the early 1970s – and its poignancy depicting the alienation of an insecure rock fan as he tries to be as Out There as the In Crowd. Around these backdrops, the larger story of the superstar elevated to messiah is woven.

Spearheading the androgynous attack on social mores is enigmatic Brian Slade aka Maxwell Demon, who fakes an onstage assassination at the height of his popularity. We follow reporter, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), in a CITIZEN KANE-like hunt for Slade’s whereabouts a decade after his decline.

They call him the Diamond Frog.

The young Arthur (also played very convincingly by Bale) is the outcast teen who cannot assimilate into the glamster crowd he so desperately feels kinship with; finding no respite at his parents’ home either, he turns to the glitter of glam for comfort. At one point, young Arthur, while quietly watching a Slade television interview with his parents, fantasizes that he jumps up, points to Slade and shouts at his parents, “That’s me, that! That’s me!” The reality is: no matter how loud he were to shout, his parents will never hear him. From his room postered with rock idols from ceiling to floor; to the way he turntables The Ballad of Maxwell Demon album and excitedly commences reading the record jacket, to the manner in which he felt kinship yet alienation with his own kind, down to his parents being utterly unable to communicate with him, *I* felt like jumping up and yelling at the GOLDMINE screen, “That’s me, that!”

Eddie Izzard, as audacious manager, Jerry Devine, makes Brian Slade a household name and allies him with American superstar, Curt Wild, who becomes Slade’s lover, to the chagrin of Slade’s wife, Mandy (Toni Collette).

In more subtle and striking ways than can be recounted here, VELVET GOLDMINE is a homage to CITIZEN KANE (from its back and forth chronological structure; to Arthur interviewing Slade’s ex-wife in a bar and one of Slade’s acquaintances in a wheelchair), Oscar Wilde (living the lifestyle and quoting him passim, “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second duty is no one yet has found out.” “Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner”), and David Bowie (whose influence extends into the very fibers of the glam mythos itself, the character of Brian Slade alluding to Bowie by his very existence, encapsulating Ziggy Stardust, The Man Who Sold the World, Diamond Dogs, Jean Genie, and even a sly dig at Bowie’s Let’s Dance era – with the name of the film itself being the title of a Bowie B-side). Wisely making the film an insular universe separate from our reality, none of those influences is mentioned explicitly – which makes the innuendoes more interesting to identify and will make the discoveries of their references all the more fascinating to young retro-glamsters.

Even Slade’s Maxwell Demon persona is a reference to physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s thought-experiment creature, which examined scenarios regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And there is a further depth, which the film-makers may or may not have been aiming for: the Second Law deals with entropy – a steady state which is attained when all flow of energy has ceased. Entropy is the “world acting spontaneously to minimize potentials” – a brightly burning star like Maxwell Demon must ultimately burn out.

Once upon a future past…

GOLDMINE sears with the genius of its allusions, its opening sequences a joyous primal scream to thwart the demons of conventionality. But – like the inevitable Second Law – its energy is unsustainable. Worse – it makes a bad excuse for its entropy.

It seems more than a tad disrespectful for the film-makers to indirectly laud icons for their impact on the music industry and then make the filmic counterparts of those icons suffer formulaic dramatic arcs of washed-up, burnt-out fates, rather than allow the counterparts the popularity and longevity that the real-life icons enjoy to this day.

Brian Slade is undone by his excesses, and made to endure a Jilted Wife scene straight out of The Actor’s Studio, wherein his pan-sexual spouse suddenly turns on a plot convenience into Mrs. Conservative, simply to comply with the MPAA Hays Code that no excessive behavior shall go unreconciled. She shrikes at him, “You know what your problem is? You get what you want and do what you will.”

Not really a problem, per se. Which proves conclusively that whenever someone deigns to tell you your problems, the most sensible option is to ignore them.

Love everyone. In various positions.

These pitfalls of rock superstardom were wholly unnecessary, only pandering to “normal” people who believe erroneously that success is a harsh mistress. Or maybe just a bitch. A prime example of excess engendering success and longevity and industry clout is the man without whom this movie could never have been made – David Bowie.

Yes, we must all eventually relinquish the “dreams of youth” – but in the rock idiom that does NOT mean relinquishing money and chicks and drugs and pan-sexuality, rather the irresponsibility that those aspects generate. The zenith of success is reconciling all the so-called “excess” elements with your business interests. Once you ensure your income blacks out your expenses, you become a Business Model, a product. Like David Bowie. Like Iggy Pop. Like Roxy Music. Whether you neglect your spouse or spend your nights snorting coke from the butt of a black man in a Mozart wig is irrelevant.

In order to insert these negative messages, the film becomes overlong. (Damn you, MPAA!) Yet VELVET GOLDMINE somehow redeems its negativity by having Arthur discover that Slade’s secret was not that he relinquished his success at all – just his space-messiah persona – swapping his serpentine sensuality for a more sterile, adult-oriented Business Model. In its final scenes, we find the film has been paying attention to its real life analogs and tips its hat one last time to David Bowie, the Grand Master of Reinvention.

END