NON-PUNK ALBUMS THAT ARE PUNK AS FUCK: KISS' HOTTER THAN HELL
Ace, Paul, Gene and Peter never sounded as pissed off on vinyl before or since they recorded and released their second studio album. Here's why.
It’s easy to classify now-classic albums from the punk/new wave/alternative scene as flat-out “punk as fuck”. Pick one, any one or a whole bunch of your favorites — Never Mind The Bollocks, Damaged, Double Nickels On The Dime, Rocket To Russia, Plastic Surgery Disasters, The Modern Dance, even influential proto-punk pre-Ramones platters like Fun House, Kick Out The Jams, and White Light/White Heat.
But punk is just as much an attitude as it is a musical approach. Having punk attitude in your music doesn’t mean relying on distorted guitars, sneered vocals, or (sorry, Fear; sorry, GG Allin) how many times you can say “fuck” in a two-minute song. Many a punk band has proven that to be true, be it with the Clash’s musical excursions from London Calling onward to Against Me!’s folk-inspired slant. As the late and legendary D. Boon of the Minutemen put it, “Punk is whatever we make it to be.” Put forth for discussion in this series - first based on a “listicle” I wrote for a different blog site years back - are a bunch of albums that, while not punk in musical genre, have that same uncompromising viewpoint behind their musical approaches.
We obviously have to block out a metric fuckton of recent memory to deal with today’s entry before we can go any further.
Let’s forget that their retirement from the live stage was something partially meant to hype a “virtual” concert series featuring avatars of the band (meaning the lineup that was touring for the past twenty years) that isn’t going to see full public daylight until 2027. Let’s forget that the primary lead singer’s voice has been shot to hell from his channeling Steve Marriot circa Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore, forcing his fellow co-founder and their two hired guns to do everything from tune their guitars down as far as C standard to cover increasing live inefficacies, to reportedly using click tracks and pre-recorded lead vocals since 2019. Let’s forget that Paul and Gene have had a has-been from a third-string hair band that Gene had been producing for Geffen Records (and later hired to be his coffee boy) cosplay as Ace Frehley for the past twenty years. Let’s forget that they haven’t made a completely listenable album – one where you’re not skipping as many tracks as you’re playing - since at least 1992’s Revenge or even 1985’s Asylum. Hell, let’s forget that they haven’t made a studio album at all since 2012, giving every lame excuse they can think of for not doing so (illegal downloading, streaming, fans won’t care about the new songs, blah blah blah) rather than admitting that the last two studio albums, Sonic Boom and Monster, were weak as fuck – while another former founding member has issued five fucking studio albums in a row of better quality (two of them featuring guest spots from his former bandmates - Paul here and Gene here - and another featuring a guest spot from one of his successors) in the same time period, and has a sixth studio album in the can and ready to drop next month. (Why those last two albums of theirs were so shitty is a topic for another article.)
No, let’s forget the joke that many – especially many of their fans – feel that Kiss made of themselves since their original “farewell tour” concluded in 2002. Let’s just hop in the TARDIS and go back to early 1974, when Kiss were a new band from New York on a new upstart label started by the former head of Buddah Records.
I will wholeheartedly admit two things: yes, I was a Kiss fan back in the late 70s. If you gave even an ounce of fuck about real rock and roll of the time – and not your older brothers’ or cousins’ Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin eight-tracks that smelled of cheap beer and ditchweed – then Kiss were one of the inescapable bands back in the day, just like Cheap Trick, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, etc. Maybe you were repelled by them. Maybe you had a clue when you saw them in one of their pre-fame TV appearances (The Mike Douglas Show, Midnight Special, Dick Clark’s In Concert). Maybe you got hooked when they dropped their first live album, the classic Alive! (a live album so crucial, the Book Of Rock Lists’ mid-90’s edition gave as the reason for its inclusion on a list of crucial live albums the succinct “It’s great. Fuck you.”) Maybe you were a kid watching the Paul Lynde Halloween Special not realizing you were going to get introduced to a serious dose of hard glam rock. Maybe you were one of those “haters” that actually had a copy of Alive! or Destroyer hidden away in your record collection, far away from the Grateful Dead, Boston, or Emerson Lake and Palmer albums that you owned and proudly displayed partly out of peer pressure (not that there’s anything wrong with having say, Skullfuck, Boston’s self-titled debut, and Brain Salad Surgery in your record library). No matter your opinion, you couldn’t ignore them. Neither could your parents and relatives – and hopefully, your parents were at least as tolerant or open-minded as mine were about my musical tastes and didn’t fall for silly rumors sparked by a Baptist preacher’s distaste for the fact that one of America’s most popular musical acts of the time was led by two Jewish dudes from New York (one of whom was born in Israel).
The other thing I will admit is that Ace Frehley – the same aforementioned gentleman who made three times as many albums as his former band did since 2009, and none of them crappy – was one of those guys, along with The Beatles, Pete Townshend, Marc Bolan, Rick Nielsen, and any other guitar player I heard in the first ten years of my life, that hinted that I should play guitar. Granted, it was Steve Jones who made me pick up the guitar for good after plugging in his white Les Paul, plugging it into his Fender Twin, and stating, “Hey, kid! Check this shit out!” before ripping into the opening chords of “Anarchy In The U.K.”. But Ace was one of the pied pipers – err, string-benders, as he was for a lot of guitar players in my generation.
And yeah, speaking of mentioning Ace Frehley and Steve Jones in the same paragraph as it were the most natural thing in the world to do (and for me, it is): Some of you may feel that including any early Kiss record in a list of non-punk albums that are punk as fuck is too close to comfort for some, and maybe even low-hanging fruit. Yes, visually and sonically they fit in with the glitter era that they started in. But they were also coming up in the same scene in New York that the New York Dolls, the Dictators, and the Ramones were sprouting from. When Kiss signed their first record deal with Casablanca in late 1973, the Dolls’ first album for Mercury was already in the shops and attracting a small but rapidly influenced audience, the Dictators were about to sign with Epic for their first album, and the Ramones were already starting to play CBGB’s before that place became punk mecca. Paul Stanley has even clearly recalled seeing Joey Ramone being in attendance at early Kiss shows, even though at the time Joey was still just Jeff Hyman, former frontman of NYC glam band Sniper under the stage name Jeff Starship. (Seriously, how could anyone miss or forget that lanky frame of Joey’s, even back then?) To make things further too close for comfort, some rock writers were lumping Kiss in with the punk scene around the same time the Ramones were putting out their first albums and the Sex Pistols were getting just as much media attention as Kiss.
And while I have been rambling for the past couple of paragraphs, the TARDIS has just materialized in Los Angeles in the summer of 1974, where our story begins.
Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss had started 1974 with their first, self-titled album about to come out on Casablanca Records, the label founded by former Buddah Records label head Neil Bogart. Bogart had left Buddah, took a few co-workers with him, bullshitted his way into a pressing-and-distribution deal for his new label with Warner Bros./Reprise. It wouldn’t be the first time Bogart had started a label and had an upstart rock act as his first signing – less than a decade earlier, he had signed Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band to Buddah, resulting in the now-legendary debut Safe As Milk. But after the first few months of handling Casablanca and Kiss, Warner were having second thoughts. Early on, they shoehorned T. Rex, then a signing to Warner’s sublabel Reprise, onto Casablanca – because someone at Warners didn’t believe much at the time in T. Rex or Casablanca Records, let alone Kiss. Warner execs pressured Bogart to pressure Kiss into ditching their makeup. Knowing that Kiss wouldn’t budge, Bogart stood by his artists and refused Warner’s request. Eventually, Neil got fed up, and bought out his Warners contract, causing Casablanca Records to become independent. And that’s where our story really begins.
Casablanca, now an independent label that would increasingly become cash-strapped as the months led on, had already started to relocate to Los Angeles from New York. Their staff producers, Richie Wise (a former member of the band Dust along with – it’s a small world alert – Marky Ramone) and Kenny Kerner, had been part of the relocation. Kiss, in the middle of a seemingly endless and random cross-country run of club dates and opening gigs, were thus sent by their label to Los Angeles to meet with Kerner and Wise at the Village Recorder, then a brand new studio, to record the follow-up to their debut album – and hopefully get some extra cash into Casablanca’s coffers.
The whole period at the time was a bit dark for both the band and the label. Neil Bogart was begging, borrowing, and damn near stealing to get money into his operation. (The book And Party Every Day recounts that around this time, Bogart had hit upon, amongst other financing ideas, going to Las Vegas casinos, getting cash credit from them, and taking that cash back to Casablanca to pay salaries and bills.) Kiss’ stage act – even at its early barebones/low-budget state, complete with a lighted logo sign, flashpots, Ace’s smoking guitar, Peter’s “flying” drum riser (sometimes actually a pallet on a hidden forklift!), and Gene’s firebreathing – was getting them kicked off of more opening slots than they were getting. Suffice it to say that it’s sometimes not a good idea to blow the headliners off of their own stage… at least in the eyes of the headliners, anyway.
Los Angeles at the time was a rather alien city to the four members of Kiss – as Kiss were probably alien to anyone in L.A. that had heard of them at the time. Mind you, it would be a year and a half before Kiss was biblically, boldface-lettered KISS. (No, I am not downloading the “Die Nasty” font just to write Kiss in their trademark typescript. I don’t think Substack would accept it anyway.) They would have preferred to record in New York, but their label and producers had relocated and the studio where they had recorded their first album was owned by Buddha, who had probably shadowbanned Bogart and company by then anyway. They move their gear into the Village Recorder, and on the first day, someone walked in claiming to be part of Kiss’ entourage and left the studio with Paul’s guitar – the custom Flying V that he can be seen playing on Mike Douglas and In Concert – and some of the band’s other gear, forcing him and Gene to rely on off-the-rack (and later, endorsement-deal-supplied) Gibsons for the rest of 1974 and all of 1975.
Part of Neil Bogart’s wheeling and dealing to keep his label viable included making a deal with Ampex to manufacture eight-track and cassette editions of Casablanca releases since the company didn’t have access to an in-house duplicator. (Ampex did this for a lot of labels at the time, as did a company called GRT.) Ampex, in turn, provided Casablanca’s artists with reels of their professional reel-to-reel tape – which would become the bane of many a remix or mastering engineer not even a decade or so down the line.
Add all this up, and you can see the situation everyone was in – especially the band. Their label looked like it might not be around in a year’s time. Their first album was a slow burner whose sales and distribution were hampered by the switch from major label support to damn near hand-to-mouth financing. They were in a new studio, some of their equipment was misappropriated, and their producers – who didn’t exactly have Kiss sounding like they did onstage, either sonically or tempo-wise – were recording their charges on a shitty formulation of recording tape.
Lesser mortals would have said fuck it, broken up the band, and gone back to their non-musical day jobs. Not the boys in Kiss. Gene wasn’t going to go back to teaching. Paul and Ace weren’t about to go back to driving cabs. Peter wasn’t about to go back to playing in lame cover bands. They just got some new gear, went into the studio anyway, and channeled their negativity into the energy that went into their second album, Hotter Than Hell. Let’s face it, these were four street kids from New York’s Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods. They weren’t going to fuck around (at least until after their shows when the groupies would come calling). Things seem dark? Fuck it! Let’s record!
That darkness that the band was in at the time shows in the album’s ten songs. Sex, a common topic in much of Kiss’ discography (“Nothin’ To Lose” on their first album was about a guy convincing his girlfriend to try buttsex, for chrissakes!), isn’t a topic anywhere in evidence on Hotter Than Hell – but an inability to get any decent action because either the girl’s being a bit loose (“Got To Choose”), or because she’s a skanky little scrunt (“Parasite”), or because the woman the narrator is hitting on is happily married and doesn’t want to break her vows (the title track), or because the narrator’s partner is either a narcissist (“All The Way”), a psycho bitch (“Strange Ways”) or… hang on, we’ll get into the actual storyline of “Goin’ Blind” a little later on.
The only seemingly upbeat moments lyrically on the album are “Let Me Go, Rock and Roll” (the album’s only single, and an early attempt at writing an anthem per Neil Bogart’s encouragement to write something along the lines of Sly And The Family Stone’s “I Want To Take You Higher”), the rare Paul Stanley/Ace Frehley songwriting collaboration “Comin’ Home” (something only a couple of budding rock stars with honeys waiting for them back home could write, and a track that Kiss would revive for their acoustic shows that led to their MTV Unplugged TV special and soundtrack album and thus to the 1998 reunion of the original lineup), and “Mainline”. Otherwise, it’s dark cloud city for our kabuki-faced heroes here: Fuck! We’re in a strange town, having trouble getting laid or paid, getting hassled for being ourselves, getting our hearts broken every time we turn around … yep, this is the same thing bands like Black Flag would be writing about in less than ten years time!
And speaking of Black Flag, ten years after Hotter Than Hell was recorded and rush-released, that band’s own second album, My War, would have a production just as murky-sounding as Hotter Than Hell. Every time I listen to either album, be it on vinyl, CD, or Apple Music in lossless streaming audio, I can’t help but compare the production of both albums to each other.
Granted, Kiss – at least the classic era that took place between 1974 and 1978 – would be a pre-punk influence on many a punk rock musician. That’s not indisputable. The six studio albums that the band dropped in that five-year-time span, along with the two live documents that bookended each part of that trilogy, are impeccable (save for that crap cover of Bobby Rydell’s “Kissin’ Time” that Bogart conned Kiss into doing as part of a publicity drive around a kissing contest, which needs to be removed from its forced position on all future pressings of the first album and relegated to a bonus track with a two-minute pregap on the CD edition, pronto minus infinity). But this would be the last album where Kiss would sound so down in the dirt, so pissed off, so desperate. By the time of their next album, Dressed To Kill – rush-recorded back in New York with Wise and Kerner gone and Bogart and the band trying to produce themselves when Hotter Than Hell had already fallen off the charts after a few months – would be back on mostly positive topics and have a brighter production.
Cycling back to “Goin’ Blind” to close things out. Many of you gentle readers will already know that both Dinosaur Jr. and the Melvins have covered this fine Gene Simmons sung and co-written composition – the latter on their own Kurt Cobain-produced major label debut Houdini, and Dinosaur Jr. doing so for the Kiss-endorsed tribute album Kiss My Ass. (The Dino version, with a beautifully baroque string quartet replicating Paul and Ace’s guitar harmonies and J. Mascis making like Michael Giles on the title track of In The Wake Of Poseidon behind the drum kit, is my favorite of the two. But, the Melvins got to play the song live with Gene himself once. Which is pretty fucking cool in and of itself.) But what of the storyline of the song itself?
On first listen, it sounds like the song’s narrator is addressing an underage mistress (or would-be mistress) from his deathbed. That view was no doubt compounded by the fact that the song’s co-writer, Stephen Coronel, who was the lead guitarist in Paul and Gene’s pre-Kiss band Wicked Lester and also co-wrote “She” with Gene, was arrested and jailed in 2014 on charges of possessing child pornography (He was released on parole in 2019, his current whereabouts are unknown). However, Gene pretty much solved the mystery by reviving the original second verse of the song for MTV Unplugged (and later, their symphonic live album Alive IV), replacing the studio version’s “Little lady, can’t you see…” with the original lyric of “Little Lady from the land beneath the sea…”. Which means that the song’s narrator was a sea captain addressing a mermaid, not some pervert trying to get into some high school girl’s pants. Get your head out of the fucking gutter before you wind up like Stephen Coronel (or ex-Manowar guitarist Karl Logan), folks!