KISS singer/guitarist Paul Stanley recently appeared with Justin Richmond on the Broken Record podcast. The frontman was asked to rank his Top 5 KISS albums, and Stanley had what some might consider a few surprising choices.
The top of his list, however, included two KISS classics: “KISS Alive!” and “Destroyer.” On “KISS Alive!” Stanley said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “For different reasons, the first has to be ‘Kiss Alive!’. Because ‘Kiss Alive!’ really captured the essence of the live experience. Now, that couldn’t have happened without us going in the studio and enhancing it and surrounding you with people… Live albums were boring for four hours. You didn’t even know they were live until the end of the song where you heard some clapping. But for KISS, we wanted an album that immersed you, immersion in the experience, which means being surrounded by people, which means bombs going off that are deafening, which means fixing any mistakes or a broken string. Snobs or purists may have looked down their nose at that idea, but the truth is that album is still considered, if not the greatest, one of the greatest, and in a lot of circles greatest live album ever. Not because everything was live, but because it captured the live experience.”
Talking about “Destroyer,” Stanley said that the learning experience under producer Bob Ezrin was vital for the band’s evolution and overall career. “‘Destroyer’, even though it didn’t sound much like its predecessors, but working with Bob Ezrin was such a education, such a schooling, discipline and upping the writing and putting aside at least temporarily all the songs about sleeping with this one or this group of your parties, and it raised the bar,” Stanley said. “So many of those songs wound up in our show up until the very end — ‘Detroit Rock City’, ‘God Of Thunder’, ‘Beth’, ‘Shout It Out Loud’.”
His third pick probably got a few double takes from KISS fanatics, however, as he went with 2009’s “Sonic Boom.” Stanley argued that had the record come out in the band’s initial heyday, it would likely be regarded as a classic. “‘Sonic Boom’ was a great album by a band that recognized its roots and recognized where it came from and picked up the slack and kept moving forward,” Stanley said.
“I love that album, and I love the spirit that went into it, where everybody knew what they wanted to do, and at our best. And most people’s best, I think, comes from trying to make the team or the band or whatever you’re involved in better, and that will make you look better than just trying to make you look better. And the team spirit on ‘Sonic Boom’ was really, really palpable. And a great album. Great album. And if ‘Modern Day Delilah’ had been on ‘Rock And Roll Over’, it would be a classic. But songs take decades to gain that kind of patina or to have that life connection of when you heard that song at a certain time in your life. So, as time went on, songs could be great, but they didn’t have the luster of being tied to the past. So whether it was ‘Modern Day Delilah’ or ‘Hell Or Hallelujah’ (from 2012’s “Monster) … I just found myself going, ‘That’s as good as it gets.’ And it’s a different time now, and people don’t connect to songs as time pieces or a sonic photograph of a certain period. So ‘Sonic Boom’ would be in the top three.”
Pick No. 4 went to “Rock And Roll Over.” Stanley said: “I like that album. It doesn’t sound anywhere near what we sounded like, and that’s after ‘Kiss Alive!’ It was very elusive for us, perhaps because of some of the people we were working with. It just escaped us. We did something with real focus and clarity of what we were doing, so that’s really good.”
He rounded his picks out with another live album, 1996’s “KISS Unplugged.” “I love ‘Kiss Unplugged,’” he said. “That album, I just listened to some of that couple of days ago. The band at that point was just on fire. No effects, no amplifiers, no running around — us with guitars and drums and singing our asses off. And also it gave a chance to showcase the songs, because I’ve always adhered to the idea that a good song can be played on one guitar. If you have to go, ‘Well, wait till you hear the sound effects on this song.’ No. A great song can be stripped away, and it’s fantastic. So to hear ‘Sure Know Something’ or ‘I Still Love You’, you hear those songs and there’s a ‘wow’ factor just because it’s that good. So ‘Kiss Unplugged’, I would put in there… I love the simplicity and the fact that it’s undeniable. I mean, it’s just four guys with their instruments.”
Stanley’s full interview can be viewed below.
