I watched this documentary (streaming on the great Night Flight app on the Roku) because it looked like perfect late-night, can’t-sleep viewing on a late night when I couldn’t sleep. Listening to Kiss fanatics talk about their favorite band seemed like exactly what I needed. If I dozed off in the middle of it and dreamed about rollerskating with Peter Criss or something, fine by me. Sometimes you have low expectations and sometimes you have no expectations, which is exactly where I stood with this one. I figured I’d probably last about twenty minutes tops. Snooze City.
But then a funny thing happened. The movie turned out to be good. It kept me awake and watching. Insomnia defeated me, but it had help.
This is a film that’s only partly about Kiss. It’s not a puff-piece about how Kiss are the greatest thing in the world. It’s low-budget and independent. No one in the band is anywhere near it except for in archival footage. More than anything, it’s a perfectly sober film about fandom, people who devote everything they’ve got into loving something that can never love them back, and how it can sometimes be a game that everyone loses. The Kiss Army are the perfect centerpiece for it.
Director Jim Heneghan started shooting it in 1994 when the mainstream press were long-finished with Kiss. If you were the average MTV-watching, “alternative” rock radio-listening adolescent the only time that Kiss blipped on your radar at all was when someone in Nirvana or The Lemonheads got quoted mentioning them as an early influence (the 90s alt-rock generation of bands were all exactly the right age to have been about ten years old when Kiss, a band perfect for ten-year-olds, were on top of the world). Meanwhile, Kiss still had a massive following who flocked to grassroots, fan-organized conventions. Parents were buying Kiss-logo baby clothes for their toddlers. Tribute bands who wore the make-up and costumes, had the moves down and figured out how to re-stage the old spectacle in small clubs could make a living from it.
And, watching this film, you get the sense that they ALL felt like underdogs keeping a dying flame alive.
Then, finally, in 1996, the big reunion tour was announced and everything changed. It was good in some ways and not so good in some other, more quiet ways. Here’s a movie about it. Heneghan follows the story for about five more years.
Within it, he tells three stories:
1) The hilarious rivalry between Kiss tribute bands. There’s a whole Christopher Guest movie in that one. Once upon a time, a band called Strutter was at the top of the heap, but the guys in the band felt that their founder (the group’s Gene Simmons stand-in on stage) was hoggin’ up the money so they ditched him and formed their own Kiss tribute, Hotter Than Hell. Mr. Strutter picked up the pieces and hired some new guys and the result was two nationally touring, proficient Kiss imitator bands who hated each other and jumped at the chance to insult the other on camera. One will drive you wild, one will drive you crazy.
2) Then there’s “The Kiss Family”, a couple made up of working-class, regular folk who probably aren’t big Tolstoy readers and who sometimes paint up themselves and their kid in Kiss make-up. They slather their 4-year-old son in Paul Stanley-style face paint and once took a photo of it for a plaque to be given to The Star Child himself at a personal appearance. Somehow, the family thought that this would lead to a friendship with Stanley. I don’t want to spoil what happens next, but let’s just say that “The Kiss Family” doesn’t have any great stories about Thanksgivings with the singer of “Let’s Put the X in Sex”.
3) Last but not least is the ballad of Bill Baker, Ace Frehley fan extraordinaire. Despite his apartment festooned in Frehley memorabilia, Baker comes off as one of the more likable insane people here. Frehley always was the cult favorite of the group, the quiet guy on stage playing good sloppy lead guitar, with smoke machine attached, while Stanley and Gene Simmons mugged for the crowd. That Frehley made, by far, the best album of the infamous 1978 solo LP quartet was perfect. It cemented his place as the group’s reserved powerhouse.
A sensitive guy like Baker could relate. Baker here is a flame-keeper who goes on stage to play the songs, but he doesn’t wear make-up or deal in the pyrotechnics. Along with guitar chops and the ever-present long hair, all that he brings is a big, earnest heart. This eventually earned him a friendship with the near-bankrupt Frehley. According to Baker, anytime Frehley passed through town on his club tours, the two got in touch and pow-wowed about music and their personal lives.
When the reunion happened and Ace was in the money again, all of that changed. Baker could no longer even get Frehley on the phone. No more meet-ups. No more conversations. No more invites. Just a cold and silent short shrift. A Kiss-off.
By the end of the film, a few staunch Kiss disciples that we watched from the beginning have abandoned the band.
Interestingly two of them, who, best we can tell here, don’t know each other at all, defected from the Kiss Army and sold their collections to become…
huge…
ELVIS fans!
I guess it makes sense. Like Kiss, Elvis is rooted in the past. A major player once upon a time, now an antique unceremoniously sent out to pasture. An icon now out-of-step. A superstar turned underdog (in terms of critical favor and interest, at least). There’s plenty of room for Elvis to not be just a singer that you like, but for him to be a cause that you’ve been put on this Earth to love and promote and appreciate.
Plus, there’s plenty of merchandise to collect.
Perhaps, more importantly, though, Elvis is long dead and there’s not a chance that he’ll ever, ever break your heart.