"I just remember being in a loft in downtown New York, and looking in the mirror and just starting to draw. "Nobody else was involved," Gene recalled to P&A.
It would have obviously been a lot easier to get up onstage in jeans and T-shirts and go, 'Okay, here we are-we're the Ramones!' And that would have been just as valid, but it would not have been honest."Ĭonsidering how iconic the KISS characters have become-inspiring lucrative lines of action figures, lunchboxes, Halloween costumes, even Hello Kitty fashions and coffins-it's amazing that there was no real master plan, marketing team, or celebrity stylist behind the band members' character designs. That's where the makeup and dressing up came in. 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. Which doesn't negate what the Dead and other bands were doing it just wasn't us. We weren't a Grateful Dead kind of band that would get onstage and look worse than the roadie delivering our stuff. 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. "Y'know, all the skinny little guys, hairless boys. "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," Gene Simmons recalled during an interview with '90s fanzine Porkchops & Applesauce, conducted shortly before the original KISS lineup kissed and made up in 1996. While the group's characters-Paul Stanley's Starchild, Peter Criss's Catman, Ace Frehley's Spaceman, and Gene Simmons's Demon-weren't yet fully formed when KISS took the stage that fateful night in Queens (their legendary platform-footed characters would make their true debut 10 days later, at the Daisy club in Amityville, New York), the KISS guys already knew that they wanted to put their own, much more macho spin on the early 1970s' prevailing glam-rock style.
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