Kiss has always been a strange anomaly in the world of rock and roll. Not all of their songs are fine works of poetry, and a lot of them require the audience to shut their brain off a little bit, but the empire they created cannot be overstated every time they went onstage. Then again, Paul Stanley could remember a few times when artists felt too good to work with them.
Because when looking at the band’s stage setup, it’s easy to forgive someone if they thought it was more of a circus act than a rock and roll show. The biggest names in music usually let the music do the talking whenever they went onstage, but even if Jimmy Page had a taste for theatrics in Led Zeppelin, what Stanley and Gene Simmons were doing felt like it was ripped straight out of a comic book whenever they got up to their stage antics like spitting blood and breathing fire.
At the same time, that might have also been why the band was considered toxic for any headlining act. The whole point of any Kiss show was to give the audience the time of their lives, but when the bombs had gone off and all the cannons had been let loose, there was hardly any reason for anyone to stay for people like Blue Öyster Cult when they came out afterwards.
But there’s also the argument that the best artists in the world don’t need theatrics to make their music sound good. Granted, Kiss have always said that they were far from the greatest musicians in the world, and it was going to take a lot of convincing for someone to think the lyrics to ‘Christine Sixteen’ are anything too deep, but in Steven Tyler’s eyes, there wasn’t anything Kiss could do that Aerosmith didn’t improve upon.
Sure, Kiss had more showmanship whenever they went up onstage, but Tyler was a wild animal whenever he put on a performance. Outside of dancing his way across every single platform, Tyler was a force of nature that could always deliver whenever he sang, and while his brief spats with Kiss were documented in the 1970s, it didn’t exactly smooth over when they attempted to tour together in the modern age.
When talking about the mechanics of touring together, Stanley remembered Tyler not treating them well and often seeing them as lesser musicians half the time, saying, “We did a co-headlining tour and everything was 50-50, but Steven insisted that they close the show. He certainly had a chip on his shoulder back then. There is some sort of – ambivalence or looking down his nose a bit towards Kiss. So seeing him go on after us to play to an underwhelmed audience didn’t feel too bad.”
But that didn’t mean that the rest of the band held the same animosity towards their New York counterparts. Joe Perry often talked about getting along fine with his tourmates most of the time, and even convinced Simmons to let him borrow a pair of his ‘Demon’ boots when he made a surprise cameo onstage with them to play the song ‘Strutter’.
Even if there was a little bit of thin ice going on between both frontmen, it’s not like Tyler had to worry about being shown up by any stretch of the imagination. He would always be one of the most powerful vocal demons to even touch a stage, and chances are people were going to get as excited hearing him sing the final note in ‘Dream On’ as they would watching Stanley smash his guitar at the end of Kiss’s set.
