What's going on my fellow rock n' rollers. Don't forget to hit the bell notification icon to be
notified every time i put out a new video on my channel. I’ve talked previously about the
Kiss reunion tour in 1996, but more in relation to fact that it represented the last tour Alice
in Chains would do with frontman Layne Staley. But today i want to talk about how Kiss reunited
with their classic lineup and why it was such a failure. Stay tuned for the full story.
Who would’ve thought it would be rapper Tupac Shakur who would’ve introduced the reunited lineup
of Kiss to the world. It was the 1996 grammy awards and the rapper introduced the band with
Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss who strolled on stage in full Kiss makeup.
And they were there to present the award for best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal.
To some, the appearance and announcement of a reunited Kiss
wasn’t a huge surprise as the writing was on the wall a year prior when In August of 1995,
Ace Frehley and Peter Criss played several Kiss songs during the band’s MTV unplugged appearance.
What followed after the grammy’s appearance was an 18 month llong tour that featured 192 shows.
It was something that seemed unimaginable a few years earlier. So how did Kiss get to this point
and what happened afterwards? While Kiss would rise to fame in the
mid to late 70’s, by the early 80’s the band’s original and classic lineup was falling apart.
The decade was a difficult time for Kiss. By 1982 Peter Criss and Ace Frehley were out of the band
and they were replaced. Soon afterwards, the band lost their makeup for a period of time and Gene
Simmons seemed to have a diminishing role in the group as he pursued other interests like acting,
which I’ve talked about in another video. As a result, guitarist and vocalist Paul Stanley took
a greater role in leading the band and by the late 80’s, early 90’s Kiss was struggling with
their identity as rock n’ roll underwent a massive transformation with the rise of alternative rock.
In addition to that Kiss didn’t have a top ten charting record the whole decade.
By 1991 Kiss dealt with tragedy as drummer Eric Carr was found to have a tumor in his heart. While
he would be declared cancer free towards the later part of 1991, he would die on November 24th due to
several cerebral hemorages. Coincidentally enough he passed away on the same day as Queen frontman
Freddie Mercury. Carr would be replaced eb Alice Cooper’s drummer Eric Singer with some fans
blasting the band for continuing on, something Simmons brushed off telling Classic Rock Magazine
“Some fans thought that we were insensitive,‘How could the band continue, why didn’t you love
him?’ But they weren’t there. They’re not qualified to say" Simmons would remember.
As the band turned their attention to their first record of the 90’s they enlisted producer Bob
Ezrin who also worked on the band’s seminal record 1975's Destroyer. The band hoped to repeat the
same success with a more back to basics approach, something that partially worked. Appropriately
titled Revenge and released in 1992, It was the band’s first album since 1979’s destroyer to chart
in the top 10 even if it didn’t have legs. At the end of the day it sold around 500,000 copies,
which meant it went gold. But relatively speaking the big bands at the time outsold
Kiss many times over. For comparison Nirvana’s Nevermind sold over 11 million copies in the US.
The band would release a stop gap live record titled Alive 3 to tide over fans
until their next release. Kiss would soon enlist the help of Alice in Chains producer Toby Wright
who had worked with the band on their 1994 EP Jar of Flies, which was a number 1 hit.
Wright would recall to Classic Rock “They wanted to follow a little hip trend going on at the
time called grunge music ,“The bottom line was, like all artists, they wanted to sell records.I
remember getting into a big argument with Gene about the direction of the album “He said he
wanted to be like that ‘bald guy, the one that’s on the top of the charts.’ He meant Billy Corgan.
The album would get shelved for several years & It would turn out Kiss got a huge offer to reunite
with the original lineup and the album was shelved according to Wright. The reunited lineup of Kiss
played their first show at Tiger Stadium in 1996 in June of that year. Opening for the band would
be Alice in Chains. And Gene had reservations about opening the tour at such a big venue because
he was worried there wouldn’t be enough interest in the band to sell out the baseball stadium..
He was fortunately wrong as the band sold 50,000 tickets that night in Detroit in just a matters of
hours. The first show went great and Ace Frehley recalled in his book no regrets "The closer it
came to showtime, the more a strange sense of deja vu permeated the air. From the moment we
hit the stage, 40,000 screaming fans stood up, and the excitement continued until the final encore.
When the show was over, we congratulated each other backstage. There was a genuine feeling of
camaraderie in the dressing room.” The tour would go on to be one of the most successful tours of
the group’s career raking in 144 million dollars. With touring out of the way the next thing for
the reunited lineup to do was to record a new album, but that’s where things got problematic.
The shelved album Carnival of Souls finally saw it’s release, months after the reunion tour ended,
but it didn’t feature Peter Criss or Ace Frehley. The album quickly faded from memory. the reunited
lineup turned their attention to their follow up record, which would be their first together
since 1979’s Dynasty,. While Paul and Gene claimed they wanted Ace and Peter to play on the record,
according to the book Kiss Behind the Mask, It would be the album’s producer Bruce
Fairbairn who wanted to bring outside musicians to play on the album as he wasn’t impressed with
Ace ad Peter’s playing in pre-production. In fact Ace and Peter only played on a handful of
songs on what would be their so called reunion record, 1998’s Psycho Circus.
Fairbairn would recruit several musicians to play on the album including drummer Eric Singer
and Tommy Thayer who appeared on most of the album. Thayer apparently helped Ace re-learn
his original guitar parts for the reunion tour and former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick also reportedly
chipped in with guitar and bass work on two tracks. According to Criss who spoke to Eddie
Trunk, the only song to feature contributions from four original members was the song into the void.
Both Ace and Peter were hurt by their lack of involvement in Psycho Circus with Criss
revealing ins his book Makeup to Breakup "Ace and I were both working on songs diligently. But then,
once again, our hopes were shattered, "They were offering us $850,000 each not to play!"
Frehley for his part put the blame on Gene and Paul telling Disc Dive "It was a disappointment
for me. The only song I performed on was the one I wrote ('Into The Void'). Paul and Gene are such
control freaks. And I don't know why I wasn't invited to play on a lot of the other songs,
but I wasn't. But in reality Ace actually played on several other songs despite his quote.
Paul Stanley has his own recollection of events telling Chris Jericho on his Talk is Jericho
podcast how both Ace and Peter wanted to be equal partners something Stanley disagreed with.
In addition to that he stated the following: “When they came back, they were pretty broke.
And we could take ‘pretty’ out of that. And yet it wasn’t too long after things started
to happen again that they started doing the same stuff. And it just became ugly and no fun.
You’ve got guys who are trying to renegotiate deals, and we’re talking to lawyers more than
we’re talking to them, and this idea of, ‘I should have this many songs on the album.’ And honestly,
I’ve been writing songs for fifty years, and I’ve gotten pretty good at what I do.
So it just became ugly and sad" he'd remember. And while psycho circus wasn’t the kiss reunion
album fans were hoping for it wasn’t a bad album. The album peaked at number 3 on the
billboard charts selling over 110,000 copies in it’s first week and received
mostly favourable reviews. But, the band did hit some trouble a week after the record came out.
The song Dreamin' displayed similarities to the Alice Cooper song “I'm Eighteen.’
Cooper’s publisher filed a lawsuit against Kiss and they would settle the dispute out of court.
As the band turned their attention to supporting the album on tour in 1998,
tensions were brewing again. The tour to support psycho circus failed to garner the
public’s attention compared to their previous tour and as a result the ticket sales suffered.
In addition to that squabbles over money escalated with peter and ace.
In 2000 Kiss announced their farewell tour, but it wasn’t the group’s last trek, instead according to
Stanley who told Chris Jericho “The farewell tour was us wanting to put Kiss out of its misery,.
“And for a while, honestly, we lost sight that we didn’t have to stop – we had to get rid of them.”
According to Classic Rock Magazine, Frehley failed to show up for rehearsals,
blaming lyme disease and at one show in California walked backstage only to find Tommy Thayer wearing
his spaceman costume ready to take his place. But for drummer Peter Criss things came to ahead
on Oct 7, 2000 in Charleston, South Carolina. The drummer according to Rolling Stone Magazine had
learned that Guitarist Ace Frehley was getting paid $50,000 a show – a full $10,000 more than
Criss’ own salary. Criss would remember in his memoir “It was the most devastating
blow of my professional life. I was so hurt I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
There were only seven shows remaining in that tour, but Criss that night in South Carolina had
a meltdown on stage and destroyed his drum kit sending a tom tom rolling towards Paul Stanley.
Criss wrote in his book “Everyone stood up and cheered and Paul thought the cheers were for him
until he turned around and saw a huge tom-tom coming down at him,“So he took his guitar,
threw it down on the stage, and walked off.” This would be the last time the classic lineup
performed together on stage. Drummer Eric Singer would finish up the remainder of the
tour with Ace Frehley’s final show with Kiss occurring on April 13th, 2001 in Australia.
While Frehley briefly rejoined the band during the 2002 winter olympics in Salt Lake City
he would be gone after that. When the band hit the road again in 2002,
promoters insisted that three out of four original members appear on the stage,
so Paul and Gene reluctantly invited Criss to rejoin. Following that tour being over
Criss once again left the band. In 2014 Kiss would be inducted
into the rock n’ roll hall of fame and the 4 original members joined each other on stage,
but the band declined to perform that evening. In 2018 as part of the kiss kruise
the band did reunite with Ace Frhelye to perform a handful of songs along with Bruce Kulick.
In 2019 Kiss announced the end of the road tour which was supposed to be the band’s
very last tour. Kicking off in Canada , many fans wondered whether Peter and Ace would be involved,
something manager Doc Mcghee claimed the band would be open to.
The tour was supposed to run until 2021 with their final shows occuring in new york city,
but obviously due to everything that's going on right now, the tour has been postponed part way
through. So that does it for today's video guys thanks for watching. Be sure to hit the like
button and subscribe. And we'll see you again on Rock N' Roll True Stories. Take care.