Oh, this is just stupid. I’ve written this review five times so far and every time I just get sucked into some kind of I’m-too-smart-for-KISS, I’ve-got-Good-Taste semi-ironic objectivism. What gives? How stupid am I? (Don’t answer that) Okay, here’s the deal: I’ll pick up a big pile of books by Greil Marcus and Hanif Kureishi, clippings about Steve Albini and Sun Ra and The Rock Snob’s Dictionary Pts 1, 2 and 3… and I’m going to throw them all out the window, preferably flaming. I’m going to stop trying to find meaning in noodly indie and post-rock (post? When did it die!) and stop mistaking understatement and melancholia for brilliance. The simple reason for this moment of arguably clinical madness? On Thursday night at Rod Laver Arena, I Went, I Saw, I Bought The T-Shirt. You could say I got religion.
KISS’ third farewell tour in about as many years had everything that rock‘n’roll is apparently not supposed to have these days: klieg lights, glitter cannons, flashpots, neon-lit stairways to heaven – but it was as natural and as brilliant as Jack White’s pretending to be a boondocks technophobe is phoney and crass. When that familiar voice boomed, “Alright Melbourne, you wanted the best…” and the crowd yelled along, “…you got the best, the hottest band in the world, KIIIIISSS!” you felt a combination of the thrill of opening exactly the Christmas present you’d asked Santa for in secret code and that terror in the base of your throat when your Library teacher yelled “you’re all not going until somebody owns up!” Yes, seeing KISS is scary, but not because of KISS themselves – Gene Simmons’ “demon” is about as frightening as the jolly Prep School tutor he once was – but because of the very real possibility that you’ll lose your mind and never be the same again. But that’s a good thing, right? Right! Look only at the two systems analysts in ironed Westco jeans, nice shirts, wire-rimmed glasses… and KISS make-up, or the five-year-old boy who knows all the words to Lick It Up, or the young Indian man with the fringed leather jacket and Paul Stanley fromullet – these disparate people have found something they can believe in and somewhere they can belong, no questions asked. Seeing Gene and Paul trotting around the stage in their silly high boots and meticulously Bedazzled spandex is not as ridiculous or embarrassing as the cynics and naysayers would have you believe. In fact, it is incredibly moving; they’re like proud old race-horses who won’t get off the track – and if you’d wish them put down, you’d have to have a hole where your heart should be, a hole lined in cheap Omsk lead. And when an excitable Skeeter type in the ’96 tour t-shirt and Michelle’n’Ferret jeans yells, “get Ace outta rehab ya fuckin’ cunts!” and everyone nods sagely, it’s because they wish the former lead guitarist well – but Tommy Thayer’s doing a great job too, for sure. And when Paul asks us to join in welcoming the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, “KISS Symphony, mini-style, but big”, in a true moment of rock Zen, and Skeeter yells, “blow the fuckin’ roof off the joint, ya fuckin’ cunts!” it’s the warmest welcome the MSO’ve ever received. And when they play God Gave Rock And Roll To You II and blow the confetti cannons and you play air drums to Kenny Loggins on air bass, Skeeter on lead guitar, Con The Fruiterer on rhythm and everyone in the house on vocals, it’s a spiritual experience. Your shonky half-full Bic lighter is less likely to singe your thumb-tip as it is to shoot a gym-class rope straight to heaven. Two-and-a-bit-hours later, it’s all over too soon.
It’s not the fumes from Greil and Albini’s smouldering papery corpses that makes me say all this, before you assume as much. Rock‘n’roll, as Joan Jett scolded Rolling Stone a year back, is still something that’s sacred to some people, hard as that may be to imagine in today’s dire landscape. It is hard to believe – when was the last time you felt accepted at some interminable indie gig? The only sense of togetherness you felt was probably borne out of the fact that four of you were wearing the same clapped-out Converses. Rock‘n’roll is about incredible risks and the possibility that, in offering your grand creations to the world, you’ll look like a total dickhead. Where’s the risk, where’s the spirit in staring at your shoes and strumming an A-chord? Stomping around dressed like a space-goon while your barrel chest strains the front of your pants as you holler “Watch out! ‘Cause I’m a war machine” and gurgle fake blood that streaks over the greasepaint that’s covering your wrinkles? That is rock‘n’roll. God Bless KISS and all the wonderful people who’ve found, in them, something to believe in. As one dear KISS army recruit said in the paper on the weekend, they make you feel special. Which, in the end, is the most daring thing any rock band could ever do.