Kuarantine, the celebration of all things from KISS’ non-makeup era, has cut studio versions of several classic KISS tunes including “No No No,” “Silver Spoon,” “Heart Of Chrome,” “Love’s A Deadly Weapon” and “Good Girl Gone Bad.”
On Thursday, the band dropped their take on an underrated classic from 1987’s “Crazy Nights” album, “Turn On The Night.” Directed by guitarist Charlie Parra del Riego, “Turn On The Night” was originally the third single from what some regard as one of KISS’ strongest albums from their non-makeup era.
One fun fact from “Turn On The Night” is that it was produced by Ron Nevison. The famed producer also did work for Led Zeppelin, Meat Loaf, Ozzy Osbourne, Heart, Chicago, Damn Yankees and Survivor, among several others. “When Seconds Count” by Survivor actually features an identical guitar riff that appears in “Turn On The Night,” which makes sense given that Nevison worked on both records.
Frontman Chris Jericho previously talked about the difference in singing KISS tunes fronted by Simmons as opposed to Paul Stanley. “‘Good Girl Gone Bad’ or ‘Love’s A Deadly Weapon’ or ‘No No No,’ they’re very hard to sing,” he told Youngstown Studio last year. “The Gene songs are very proggy almost at times. Gene’s range is also very high. So his songs are harder to sing, even though Paul’s range and technique (might be) better. Gene’s is just as good but in a totally different way. So I really have to lock into that.”
He also talked about what KISS co-founders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley think of Kuarantine. “Paul loves all the Paul songs,” Jericho said. “Anytime I send him a Gene (song) he’ll send a puke emoji or something like that. I think for ‘Love’s A Deadly Weapon,’ he wrote, ‘Bad Van Halen.’ I’m like, ‘It’s your song!’”
He continued: “We’ve done ‘Heart Of Chrome’ from ‘Revenge’ and ‘Silver Spoon’ from ‘Hot In The Shade.’ And ‘Silver Spoon’ got to No. 21 on the charts, and Paul really loved both of those. He was very complimentary. With Gene we’ve done ‘No, No, No’ and ‘Love’s A Deadly Weapon,’ but we just did ‘Good Girl Gone Bad,’ and that one went to No. 10 on the charts. Gene is very appreciative — they both are. I think it’s cool for them to know that you can release these songs to the radio and people will listen to them. Getting a top 10 song isn’t easy, and to do it with an obscure KISS song from 37 years ago, that’s not easy. But the reason why it works is that these songs are very good songs.”
