I have owned Destroyer by KISS, originally released on March 15, 1976, on virtually every available format. I bought the record as a nine-year-old for a then-exorbitant four dollars from Musical Maze on East 84th Street and Third Avenue while my mother looked on in horror. To this day, I still own that vinyl LP, and also have it tucked away in my front-hall closet on cassette. I fleetingly possessed it as an eight-track, prized one New Year’s Eve day from a junk shop in the snowy Berkshires in the mid-`80s, but that fetching artifact vanished some time ago. I have multiple iterations of it on compact disc, including the German edition with altered logo (the Germans take exception to Ace Frehley’s original design, which uncomfortably replicates the insignia of the Nazi party’s SS for the last two letters of the band’s moniker), which I bought in Munich in the late `90s. I also have the 35th anniversary edition with different cover art. Did I need the new 45th anniversary edition that my brother-in-law Chris just gave me as a “Secret Santa” gift? Not at all. Am I happy to welcome it to the pile? You bet. While I am ultimately a conscientious objector in the KISS Army, much to the chagrin of many of my fellow music-snobs, it is irretrievably in my blood for good.
To paraphrase (and trim, reassess and slightly copy-edit) what I wrote back in 2005, it must’ve seemed like a massive leap, at the time, from the comparatively unpolished, garagey sounds of the band’s first three studio albums and the wide-screen wallop of Alive to the stylized über-production of Destroyer. I believe the band maintains that they even lost fans over it. But 45 years later, the album still sounds like nothing else on earth. From the echoey expanse of the production to the wide arsenal of heretofore taboo instrumentation (pianos all over the place, pipe organs, female backing vocals, angelic choirs, strings, oboes, French horns, woodwinds and … is that a calliope buried in the mix of “Flaming Youth”?), it’s an endearingly ridiculous affair. Original pressings even came appended with a mysterious coda track, a not-entirely-subtle nod to the fabled “inner groove” of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, featuring an indecipherable declaration about partying by Paul Stanley under roaring crowd noises and the chorale reprise of “Great Expectations.” What an opus!
While music snobs the world over would doubtlessly snort derisively, it’s the songs on Destroyer that really make the album a classic. Arguably their finest selections are all here, notably the tragicomic sprawl of “Detroit Rock City,” the campily sinister “God of Thunder” (penned incongruous by Starchild Paul and not Demon Gene), the genuinely anthemic “Shout It Out Loud” (which I’ve always preferred over “Rock and Roll All Night”) and, of course, the power-ballad-minus-the-power treacle of “Beth.” Maybe not something for everyone, but it’s a pretty wide array of offerings all the same.
Fresh off producing career-defining albums by Lou Reed and Alice Cooper, storied knob-twidder Bob Ezrin is probably the man most responsible for Destroyer being the landmark album it is. Not unlike the cinematic treatment he’d later project onto Pink Floyd’s The Wall (a magnum opus that makes Destroyer sound like Philosophy of The World by The Shaggs in comparison), Ezrin injected some much-needed elbow room into KISS’s sonic blitz. While tracks were laid down at Electric Lady on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village and the Record Plant in Hell’s Kitchen, it almost sounds like the songs were captured in the cavernous confines of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. Ace’s guitars wail mournfully from far-off corners of the great chamber. Peter’s drumming reverberates up from some dank undercroft. Rafter-shaking piano keys augment every pluck of Gene’s bass. Children’s voices like demonic cherubim with flapping-leather bat wings giggle all over “God of Thunder.” It’s like a sonic Hieronymus Bosch painting.
I actually dialed the original album up, recently, on my iPod while attempting to do some Christmas shopping in midtown, last week, and the track that continues to strike me is the entirely ludicrous “Great Expectations.” Over-inflated with so much excessive pomp and circumstance, it’s genuinely hard to believe it was recorded with a straight face. A masterclass in self-mythologizing (written by Gene, naturally), “Great Expectations” (sorry, Dickens) painstakingly details the dewey aspirations of every self-(dis)respecting groupie. Ezrin forgives Simmons’ laughably pretentious preening (I’m sure Bob was paid handsomely enough to overlook the band’s ego problems) and fortifies proceedings with lilting pianos, drama-drenched surges of guitar and wheels in some innocent church choir of castratos to warble the choruses. Such priapic hubris wouldn’t rear its ….er… head again until the clumsily unforgivable “Charisma” on the zealously-maligned Dynasty album three years later. But bolstered by Ezrin’s production magic, “Great Expectations” comes across like a goddamn hymn.
Swaddling all this heroic stupidity, of course, is the timeless (yeah, I said it) portrait of the band, rendered by painter Ken Kelly. For many years, I engaged in furious debates with my friends about what’s transpiring on that album cover. Are KISS running from something? Are they dancing? Are they celebrating in the wake of their unbridled display of RÖCK FURY they obviously just unleashed on the smoldering remains of the city behind them? What’s with the gestures? Paul looks like he’s doing the “Hokey Pokey.” Is Peter steering an imaginary tractor? Gene’s shadowboxing, but what’s up with Ace? One finger points feyly at the viewer, whereas the other hand holds up four fingers. A signifier of the fourth studio album? The four members? Fingers extended to catch a descending pop fly? Who can say?
My dogged appreciation for KISS has nearly derailed several friendships with esteemed individuals who assume my musical tastes would preclude an endorsement of the band’s shamelessly juvenile shtick (especially when I’ve taken other sacred cows like Patti Smith venomously to task). I get it. And I’ll openly concede that the instances wherein all four of the original members of KISS have revealed themselves to be less-than-entirely admirable individuals are too numerous to count (although I zealously applaud Gene Simmons’ recent, unexpected statements about anti-vaxxers). They’re shamelessly populist, avaricious opportunists determined to milk their lucrative gimmick for every cent it can possibly still provide, at this last stage of proceedings, and their ongoing ruse of dressing Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer up like Peter and Ace is an affront I practically equate with unsettled war crimes.
That all goes without saying, but KISS, to me, was the first band that appealed directly to my burgeoning sensibilities, seamlessly bridging the gap between sci-fi, monster movies and comic books and my nascent fixation with music. They were my gateway drug. As inarguably silly they were and remain, I will absolutely never renounce them.
Deal with it.
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