When I was 10 years old, my Pop told me that KISS didn’t care about me.
As a proud charter member of the KISS Army, signed in blood right after the Destroyer LP arrived at Harmony Hut at Eastpoint Mall and during that Alive II era with the press-on tattoos inside the sleeve, this was not what I wanted to hear.
I was made for lovin’ KISS.
These comic book ghouls who sang of the God of thunder and rocking and rolling all night long – and partying every day – had captured my prepubescent heart (if not quite my Love Gun just yet at that point) with a vigor my parents could only possibly comprehend because they survived The Beatles and Elvis.
I knew a thing or two about them and I wanted the records and the 8-tracks. I wanted the posters. I wanted the makeup, the big boots, the long hair, the magazines. At Halloween, I wanted to be Peter Criss, and immersed for three straight candy runs in 1976-77-78 and makeup that didn’t really rub off until Thanksgiving.
I really thought I was Doctor Love! And had the cure you’re thinking of…
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I wanted whatever they were selling because, more than any band I can remember from my childhood, KISS wasn’t simply selling music. They were selling admission to another shiny, loud, colorful universe and one that my coolest Colgate friends all shared.
Some of you disillusioned folks were into Star Wars back in ’78 but the people who were my people were into Ace Frehley, or maybe the Houston Astros.
And when Paul sang about his seven-inch leather heels and asked if I loved him, I sang right along: “Do you love me…really love me?”
Again, I was 10, and this is 1978 before the Orioles could even birth the real magic I was looking for the following summer, when I had disco fever even before Gene and Paul saw the dollars signs in the hologram stickers.
And my Pop, who had stood in soup lines in 1929 as a boy in Scranton already had lived enough life to know how the world really worked, would look at all of this and bluntly tell me:
“Kid, KISS doesn’t care about you…”
I distinctly remember him laying one of his few “life lesson” speeches on me as he put this hideous pink paper mache’ version of the Kiss jacket, ordered directly from the KISS catalog, in the back of the closet. I wore it once to be laughed at by Rodney Baker, but that was the end.
8I mean look at this freaking thing…it was made of Olefin. (Don’t look that up!)
When this “disco” jacket (that would later channel a get-up from the collection of my friend and PBA Hall of Famer Danny Wiseman) arrived, I immediately moved onto Farrah Fawcett, and KISS jumped the shark the same summer that Fonzie did and by the time I got to Holabird Junior High in September 1979, and almost 11 years old entering 7th grade, the whole world moved more toward Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Van Halen, AC/DC and whatever 98 Rock was about to play us.
Priest. Maiden. Sister. And even Ratt and Poison were to come.
All brought on by Gene and Paul and the Aucoin marketing machine that made all of us want to shout it out loud. And then later in the life the whole Pacifica Belt Buckle thing happened but that, too, was brought on by the KISS brand being larger than anything rock music has seen this side of the Fab Four, or perhaps this girl named Taylor Swift.
My then-58-year-old Pop warned me bluntly: KISS didn’t care about me and that unconscionably awful pink disco jacket proved the point. And if that didn’t seal the deal, the Dynasty album and those four turd solo records and throwing Peter Criss (my favorite KISSer always as a kid) out of the band ended my pre-puberty KISStory.
As I turn 58 in less than a month, I can concede now what I did then: my Pop had a very fair point and pointed to the evidence in the closet. If KISS loved me – really loved me – they’d have sent me a jacket I could’ve worn on Delvale Avenue without getting beaten up in 1979!
8MTV was dawning and KISS was dead to me once Rush and Styx and The Cars arrived.
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But then, five years later, the phone rang in my kitchen on Bank Street and Paul Stanley was calling from Allentown to talk about the Animalize tour and how Bruce Kulick was coming to save the band from Mark St. John, Vinny Vincent and the ghost of Ace Frehley in November 1984. As a seasoned journalist with a whopping six bylines to my resume, I roamed backstage at the Baltimore Civic Center (where I knew the ushers and guards from the Skipjacks season at the same dressing room doors) and watched the show from the pit as a newly-minted 15-year old music reporter from The News American, then Paul remembered me five years later and invited me to his suite at the Dulles Hyatt for a dinner and 1 a.m. chat about why they would never put the makeup back on or have Ace and Peter back in the band.
“People change. Comic books don’t.”
That is what Paul Stanley told me on my tape recorder that night in July 1990.
8The next day, I called my Pop to tell him that KISS wound up making a fool out of him and his Pollyanna wisdom because Paul Stanley cared enough to buy me a chicken dinner and fend off groupies banging on his hotel door. He cared more about me at that moment than some of the words of his songs would let on, and I let him know that to start this interview:
The real beginning of my KISStory is an attic on Tyndale Road in Lauraville near Koco’s Pub with my cousin Nelson Escandela.
More like the coolest older brother ever to me at that tender age of 7, Nelson was already 12 and had KISS Alive! and somewhere around the holidays in 1976 he gave me his old copy after obtaining a new one. So, mine was scratched and second hand. Didn’t matter. I stared at that thing. I studied it. I read the words. I studied the photographs, the autographs, the drawings. I wanted to know what every name like Pearl and Gibson meant and where all of this noise came from.
Then Destroyer arrived and rocked my little Dundalk world.
8I didn’t know what a music critic was. I certainly didn’t know that someday newspapers would pay me to interview musicians. I didn’t know there were publicists or record companies or backstage passes or tour managers or soundchecks.
I just knew there were these four guys with painted faces who looked like superheroes and sounded like the kind of trouble I wanted to be in.
And, because they made me feel alright on a Saturday night every time I dropped the needle, I loved them.
There is one regret in all of this, as I admitted to my lifer pal Ron West at Costas Inn in Dundalk last week as I held his December 20, 1977, Capital Centre ticket stub from the night of Peter Criss’s birthday: I never saw that KISS.
I was too young.
I never got the original four in their prime in Largo when they seemed 10 feet tall and immortal, with bombs exploding and Gene spitting blood and Ace’s guitar smoking and Paul commanding the room and Peter sitting behind that enormous drum kit.
For a kid, their makeup was as real as the wrestling results I saw down at the Civic Center every month. No one knew what Paul, Gene, Ace and Peter looked like without their makeup!
8So for a Colgate boy, that wasn’t a concert; it was Marvel Comics with Marshall stacks. And something that Eddie Murray and Bert Jones couldn’t give me at that point in my life, even though they were also a part of my childhood family of superheroes.
By the time I finally got to see KISS, I had somehow gotten old enough to interview Paul Stanley first.
I was almost 16 years old…
The clipping is sitting in front of me now, which is one of the reasons I’m doing these 28 stories. The memory sometimes gets foggy but the paper is stubborn and the old photos (and the negatives) really show me how time moves life five decades later.
There is my byline in The News American from November 23, 1984. There are Gene Simmons, Eric Carr, Paul Stanley and Mark St. John in a photograph with absolutely no makeup on their faces. And there is teenage me explaining to Baltimore that KISS had traded the comic-book look for what we were calling the “natural look.”
Imagine that: KISS. Natural.
8I interviewed Stanley on the phone and then went to the Baltimore Civic Center on Nov. 27, 1984 for my first KISS show.
And because life has a sense of humor, my first KISS concert turned out to be one of the strangest nights in the band’s history. Mark St. John was sick. Bruce Kulick had been filling in. Kulick started the concert. St. John came out and played five songs. Kulick returned. At the end, five guys took the bow.
I had no idea I was watching KISStory.
I just thought I was watching KISS.
That’s another thing these old tickets and clips teach you.
Sometimes you don’t know you’re at an historic night until 40 years later.
8Then came Hammerjacks – thrice, all under the entrance of my eternal backstage pass that Louie spelled my name wrong on when he issued it to me. That never stopped me getting in the backdoor with a simple nod and wave in the back alley.
My brain had managed to roll several nights into one giant cloud of hairspray, beer, amplifiers and backstage hallways. Now I’m pulling the calendar apart.
Paul Stanley played there solo in 1989. I attended the soundcheck.
Ace Frehley also came through in 1990. I remember chatting him up in the little dressing room upstairs after I did a preview phoner with him to advance the show.
You can listen to my chat with Ace here:
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And KISS somehow squeezed itself into Hammerjacks in 1992. I watched that one from the roof because that was the only place there was room to fit as the picture above from the legendary Bud Becker will attest.
Three different nights. Three different epic versions of KISS in one of the most epic rock clubs in hairspray history.
And somewhere in there is one of my favorite missing artifacts: a little Hammerjacks table calendar tent that Ace signed for me in silver ink. I know it existed. Somewhere, like a lot of these artifacts I’m unearthing and remembering in various forms.
I know I had it; I just have absolutely no idea where it is.
Welcome to the next 14 weeks of my life…and this crazy 28th Anniversary celebration of musical memories and #AlmostFamousNes encounters with the heart of rock and roll.
The interviews are incredible four decades later because they weaved through KISStory with some nuggets.
Before Ace’s 1990 Hammerjacks show, I sat with him and talked about his new band, his health, getting sober and the possibility that someday the original KISS might actually get back together. This was six years before the reunion.
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Ace told me the only way he’d do it was the right way: equal control, the makeup and that enormous old show. He also told me something that makes me laugh now. The man whose face had been placed on virtually every object legally capable of receiving ink thought KISS had gone too far with the merchandising.
He told me they’d cheapened the band.
This from a group that could probably have sold officially licensed KISS windshield-washer fluid if Bill Aucoin had thought of it. Truthfully, I have only seen KISS once in modern times because they lost me with the caskets and the conventions and the lip syncing.
Ace told me in 1990 that they simply got too big to know what was happening around them.
And sitting here in 2026, knowing Ace died last October, hearing that young man’s voice on my old tape hits me completely differently now. He’s not Space Ace on a poster anymore. He’s a guy sitting with a 20-year-old newspaper reporter in Baltimore, talking about mistakes, friendship, sobriety and maybe going home again.
Then there was Paul. As memorable as any interview I’ve done before or since.
Hot in the Shade. Patriot Center. Summer of 1990. We were slated to chat backstage before the show.
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He didn’t want to talk before the show because they were doing all of the VIP stuff and didn’t think he’d have enough time. He said he wanted to give me full focus, a proper interview.
“Come by the hotel afterward” he told me on the pay phone outside the Patriot Center that afternoon.
Excuse me?
Paul Stanley just invited me to his hotel room after the concert.
So I went…
8Top of the Dulles Hyatt. Paul in a white bathrobe, fresh and spry after the show. He ordered chicken, potatoes and broccoli from room service. I had a Diet Pepsi. We sat there eating while my cassette recorder rolled and young women were pounding on his hotel room door trying to get in.
There are moments in your life when you don’t need anyone to explain that you’ve chosen a pretty interesting profession.
That was one of mine.
I was trying to be cool, like I belonged. And honestly, I was four years into talking to famous people but this was still by any stretch extremely surreal – and still remains as such.
Twenty-one-year-old me wanted to talk about Ace and Peter and the makeup and whether KISS could ever become KISS again.
Paul wasn’t interested.
Putting the same four human beings back into the same room, he told me, wouldn’t magically recreate the band they had been 15 years earlier. People grow in different directions. Things change.
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And then he said something I hear very differently all these decades later:
“People change. Comic books don’t.”
Six years later, he put the makeup back on.
At 21, I might have called that a contradiction. At 57, I call that life. Plus, as a fan, it’s what I wanted anyway.
Because people change and bills needs to be paid.
They reconsider. They forgive. They remember differently. (Thank God for these tapes and clips!)
8Sometimes the thing you swore you’d never do becomes exactly the thing you need to do.
And sometimes you discover that the past isn’t someplace you can return to at all. You can only visit it but never truly go home.
In 1996, Kevin Eck and I went to Madison Square Garden very early in the reunion and there they were.
The four faces. The four costumes. The old songs.
The smoke, the bombs, the blood, the fire, the pyro.
I wanted the best and I got the best.
The thing I had missed as a child had somehow come back around for me as an adult.
8Those first four hometown MSG shows sold out almost immediately. For everybody in that building who had spent 20 years waiting, it was less a concert than a séance.
Later that fall after the Ravens played the Patriots at Memorial Stadium, Steve Everitt, the Ravens’ center who loved KISS, put a limo together to drive us to the show at the Capital Centre. His back was a mess, as you’d expect from a man who made his living having enormous defensive linemen drive him into the earth.
Sports radio dude by day. KISS Army revisited by night.
The Ravens lost 46-38. KISS won. That was October 6, 1996.
There would be a few more KISSes for me, including my final “kiss” appropriately in Hershey in 2019. By my count, I saw KISS eight times.
I saw the makeup show when KISS played the at the Baltimore Arena in April 1997 with baseball people in tow on the day the Orioles’ home opener literally got blown off the schedule. I went with Kansas City Royals pitchers Jeff Montgomery and Mark Gubicza, who got their faces spray painted as Gene and Paul before the show. Somewhere there is evidence but none of us had cellphones then and cameras weren’t allowed into the venues. Monty always likes to tell that story when we get together.
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I went again in 1998 when they came back to D.C. to play the “new” MCI Center.
I saw KISS playing the Super Bowl pregame in Miami in 1999 at Joe Robbie Stadium while I was there covering football but I didn’t see them again until the end of the road. I’ve had some encounters over the years but never sought out another KISS concert once Ace and Peter moved on and the band became a financial endeavor cult more than a reason to go to a show.
I’ve always thought about reaching out to Paul Stanley to have him on my modern podcast and show. That would be a real thrill!
But, clearly, I’ve had more than my encounters including that night backstage when I was 16 at the Civic Center amidst what must’ve been total chaos for the band in the 1984.
I remember the night Gene Simmons was spotted at the bar at Night Shift in Dundalk.
Drummer Eric Singer sat three rows behind me the freezing upper deck in Cleveland during Game 5 of the 1995 World Series, which was the night before Art Modell moved the Browns to Baltimore.
And Bruce Kulick, who signed my picture with Mark St. John backstage at the Baltimore Civic Center in November 1984 when he took the stage for the first time as a member of KISS, was super cool at Dodger Stadium in 2015 on our #GiveASpit MLB 30 ballparks in 30 days tour, where I grabbed a picture with him before he performed the national anthem at Chavez Ravine.
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And sometime in Fells Point in 1996, three grown men who should have known better dressed up as KISS for Halloween and wound up singing “Beth” and “Hard Luck Woman” with Ed Lauer at Ledbetters on Thames.
There are pictures. I’ll find them before this whole music countdown ends…
I took Jenn to see KISS at Hershey in 2019, near what we believed was the end of the road.
And this is where being a fan and being a critic often collided when the bar became too low to ignore.
I didn’t love it. It was cheesy as hell. But I shouted it out loud, anyway…
I loved the idea of it. I loved being there with Jenn, who just wanted to see KISS before they stopped doing it. I loved the history. I loved hearing those songs. We paid $10 to get in. It was worth it!
But it felt manufactured to me. Too much lip-syncing. Too much theater where I wanted a concert. I’ve said that publicly since. I skipped that last Baltimore show, even though everyone loved it.
8That’s important to these stories, too. Sometimes even my heroes – on and off the field – have made me stay away.
Hell, the Orioles and Ravens do it every day with their arrogance, actions and behavior. I don’t give them my money. But I do freely spend money on concerts all the time because I feel valued – and the value, of being there.
And certainly I don’t want to spend the next 28 chapters embalming my youth.
I want to celebrate it!
I never hear a KISS song without turning it up and singing along. And that feels really good, doesn’t it?
I still chase great music all over the world because when it’s real, nothing else makes me feel quite the same way. But something changes when the people who made the soundtrack of your childhood begin to age out of the picture and become something you don’t care to witness, endorse or sanction.
Ace is dead now.
8The original four will never stand on a stage together again.
Hammerjacks is gone. That old Capital Centre is gone. The News American and The Evening Sun are gone.
My Pop is gone. My cousin Nelson has been in Venezuela since 1981. I have only seen him twice in almost 50 years.
And somehow I am still here with a scratched copy of KISS Alive!, newspaper clippings with my teenage byline, old cassette tapes, photographs, ticket stubs and stories that get a little less reliable every year until an artifact comes along and says:
“No, Nes. It happened like this….”
Paul Stanley told me something else that night in 1990.
“We win by surviving.”
8I couldn’t possibly have understood that sentence when I was 21.
I do now.
Maybe my Pop was right all those years ago.
KISS probably didn’t care about me. (That jacket, whew…Ace was right because the band could’ve never known how disappointed I was when I received that embarrassing garment.)
They couldn’t. They didn’t know the little kid in Nelson’s attic on Tyndale Road staring at Alive! and dreaming about whatever existed outside Dundalk.
That wasn’t the deal.
The deal was that somehow those records made that kid curious enough to go looking.
8First for another album.
Then for a concert.
Then for a backstage pass.
Then for the story.
And eventually, unbelievably, for Paul Stanley’s hotel room. And I was barely 21…
His parting gift was signing my CD cover for “Hot In The Shade.”
The weird part is that I never wrote a story on KISS off that interview because my editor had no interest in running a story after they already played – and in Fairfax, Virginia no less.
8So this Baltimore Positive format and this modern era is the place where you can hear a 21-year old version of me play out my wildest childhood fantasy and ask Paul Stanley when he was going to put the makeup back on and why not please the little boy in me.
And I guess what I didn’t realize is that I’d have the rest of my life to satiate that little boy anytime by dropping the needle on “Strutter” – anytime, anywhere – and cranking that shit up! And the video of that Capital Centre show that my pal “Ace” scored tickets to in 1977 is always a click away.
This is just a little KISS, to get the story started about the 28 musical acts that formed my life and story.
God gave rock and roll to you…
Next up: my Sob Rock story with No. 27 John Mayer
