04.02.2023 18:10:02
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-story-behind-kiss-iconic-makeup/
The definitive story behind Kiss' iconic makeup
Tyler Golsen
SAT 4TH FEB 2023 17.00 GMT
The early 1970s was a crowded place among rock and roll bands. After The Beatles blew the doors open in the mid-1960s, scores of young musicians picked up electric instruments as they began to develop songs and styles. As the decade progressed, rock music began to get harder and louder thanks to the influence of The Who and Jimi Hendrix. Hard rock would go on to define the 1970s thanks to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but America would have its own pioneering group of hard rockers as well.
Kiss was still an unknown entity at the start of 1973. After breaking up their previous band, Wicked Lester, Paul Stanley, and Gene Simmons recruited drummer Peter Criss to begin rehearsing as a new group. The trio recruited Ace Frehley in January of 1973, and after a short time discussing previous band names, the members arrived at the name “Kiss”. It was the beginning of what would become America’s most notorious and popular shock rockers.
It didn’t take long for the band to implement gimmicks to stand out among the scores of other hard rock bands in New York. Kiss began experimenting with new approaches: Gene Simmons began teaching himself how to breathe fire, while smoke machines and lasers became an integral part of the band’s show. But the most important development arrived shortly after their first gig at the Popcorn Club in Queens: the group started to wear stage makeup.
“At the same time that we were forming in New York, there was a very big glitter scene, where boys were basically acting like girls and putting on makeup,” Simmons told the fanzine Porkchops & Applesauce in 1996. “Y’know, all the skinny little guys, hairless boys. Well, we were more like football players; all of us were over 6 feet tall, and it just wasn’t convincing! The very first pictures we took when the band first got together, we looked like drag queens. But we knew we wanted to get outlandish.”
“We weren’t a Grateful Dead kind of band that would get onstage and look worse than the roadie delivering our stuff. Which doesn’t negate what the Dead and other bands were doing; it just wasn’t us,” Simmons added. “Getting up onstage was almost a holy place for us, like church, so being onstage looking like a bum wasn’t my idea of respect. That’s where the makeup and dressing up came in. It would have obviously been a lot easier to get up on stage in jeans and T-shirts and go, ‘OK, here we are—we’re the Ramones!’ And that would have been just as valid, but it would not have been honest.”
It’s easy to forget, but the same “glitter scene” that birthed Kiss was also responsible for proto-punk glam acts like the New York Dolls and Snyper – the latter of which featured a pre-fame Joey Ramone on vocals. Kiss took those building blocks to the extreme, donning kabuki-inspired makeup that gave each member a unique persona. By the time Kiss took the stage ten days after their first gig, the makeup was in place, and the characters were established: the Star Child, the Demon, the Cat, and the Space Ace.
Except it wasn’t always that easy. In their earliest days, Stanley couldn’t decide which design he wanted to use. For early gigs and even some early press photos, he took on another guise: The Bandit. The makeup design was suggested by the head of their record label, Casablanca Records, who thought that all the designs should be symmetrical. After a few gigs and photo sessions, Stanley embraced the Star Child as his definitive persona.
Those original designs would remain consistent through the first decade of the band’s career, with some slight alterations. Criss allowed a professional makeup artist to redesign his look for the cover of the band’s first album, resulting in a more elaborate design that was never replicated. When Criss left the band in 1980, it was up to new drummer Eric Carr to conceive a new design.
His original vision for his character was The Hawk, featuring a makeup design that resembled Stanley’s Bandit design. When Carr showed a work-in-progress design to his bandmates, they laughed him out of the room and informed him that he looked like Big Bird from Sesame Street. Eventually, Carr settled on his familiar persona of the Fox, although the cover for Creatures of the Night shows him without the brown-red eye filler that became part of his established design.
After Frehley left the group in 1982, new guitarist Vinnie Vincent was also required to get his own unique makeup design. Vincent’s character was the Ankh Warrior, conceived by Stanley and featuring a large golden cross on his forehead. By 1983’s Lick It Up, it was decided that the band no longer needed the famous makeup designs. The band would continue throughout the next decade without the designs, although guitarist Bruce Kulick had a character in mind had the band decided to return to using the makeup: the Dog.
In 1996, the band’s original lineup decided to reunite, bringing their iconic makeup designs out of retirement. However, when Criss left the band for a second time in 2000, he relinquished the rights to his design. Criss returned for a year between 2002 and 2003, and even though he wore his familiar Cat design, he couldn’t stop the band from giving the design to their new drummer, Eric Singer.
The same thing happened to Frehley, who traded away his Space Ace persona when he left the band in 2002. Guitarist Tommy Thayer now sports the design, going under the persona of the Spaceman to avoid any titular connection with Frehley. Frehley has claimed that he simply loans out the design to the band, but all four original makeup designs are registered to Simmons and Stanley alone.