From the very beginning, Kiss were larger than life.
The very idea of the band was to make people feel the way a young Gene Simmons felt when he came home from the movie theatre after having just watched a James Bond movie, switched on the TV, and found The Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan. To combine all those feelings into one kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll band and present people not with a bunch of New Yorkers playing guitar, but with genuine, bona fide heroes.
In a way, Simmons, Stanley, Frehley and Criss were just saying the quiet part out loud. No matter who it is, we’ve always placed our rock heroes on a pedestal and worshipped them as someone bigger than us. Whether that’s Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Björk, Kele Okereke, Janelle Monáe or anyone in between, those aren’t regular people in our minds. They don’t have bills to pay or back pain or a favourite breakfast cereal; they might as well be aliens.
Then you get Kiss, where they might as well be aliens because, well, have you looked at them? Seeing them in their early days must have been a genuine trip. A group of spandex-clad, face-painted nightmares who should be fighting the Fantastic Four in a comic panel, except they’re three feet in front of you, spitting blood into the crowd while shredding through a guitar solo. That kind of escapism and novelty was exactly what the band were trying to create from the start.
So, it stands to reason that at some point, they’d start writing songs about that very desire. After all, one can only write so many songs about the desire to ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ (and party ev-er-y day) before you start wanting to branch out. In the early 1980s, the band were trying to do just that, having hit something of a wall creatively in the late 1970s, which was beginning to affect their record sales. Something had to change.
What song did Kiss write in tribute to their heroes?
Said change came from hiring producer Bob Ezrin to help make their upcoming record. On the surface, this was a reunion, as he’d manned the boards for Kiss’ breakout album Destroyer. However, he wasn’t being brought in to make a back-to-basics rock album. He was being brought in to capture the spirit of the last album he’d worked on, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That’s right, Kiss’ big idea to bring them into the 1980s and make them relevant again was to make a prog-indebted rock opera.
The resulting album, Music from “The Elder”, is comfortably the worst album the band ever made and in with a shout of being one of the worst rock albums of all time. A nonsensical, cod-fantasy waste of time which has neither the creativity to be interestingly bad nor the camp to be hilariously bad/good. It’s boring, and alarm bells should have been raised by the first single, ‘A World Without Heroes’.
Simmons reflected on the song’s creation in an interview with Guitar World, saying the song had begun life as a sappy Paul Stanley ballad with a decent chord sequence. Simmons took those chords and combined them with a note that friend of the band, Lou Reed, had made. Simmons said, “Lou had a scrap of paper with ‘a world without heroes’ written on it”.
He continued, “I asked what it was, and he said it was just an idea he had about how awful the world would be if we didn’t have heroes like John Wayne, Superman or King Kong. That gave me the idea for the lyrics: ‘A world without heroes, is like a world without sun, you can’t look up to anyone, in a world without heroes’.” A fascinating idea, but probably one that should have stayed with a writer like Lou Reed and not the brains behind ‘Beth’.
