Book Review: Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion

Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon

James Campion

Backbeat Books, 400 pages

Released on March 15, 1976, Destroyer catapulted Kiss from underground sensation to constant media presence. The recording of Destroyer was as colorful and chaotic as the album itself, and every nuance is covered in James Campion’s book Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon.

Before Destroyer, Kiss attracted mostly male fans with songs about sex, sex, whores and more sex. (OK, so not that different from what they’d do later on.) With the single “Beth”, the band catapulted into mainstream consciousness and have remained there for over 40 years.  When Kiss Alive was released in 1975, it became an unexpected hit, and the recording of the next studio album took on new importance. 

The book covers the band or “The Act’s” (Campion’s term) pre-history and their first three albums for legendary Casablanca Records. Despite their outrageous appearance and a music press that lapped it up, mainstream success eluded them.  You’d think with all the facepaint, leather and platform boots they’d storm through mid-70s America immediately, but the road wasn’t that easy.

Bob Ezrin, the young Canadian producer who helmed Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare, signed on to produce the band’s fourth studio album. Ezrin greeted the band naked except for a bowtie (allegedly), but the recording sessions that followed weren’t always quite as light-hearted. Ezrin schooled the band in music theory and challenged them to expand their creative horizons. A stern taskmaster, he even refused to procure Gene’s hookers for him.

Ezrin ran the sessions like a musical boot camp, taking the demos and working with the band to improve them. Case in point - “Beth” started out as a demo from Criss’ old band, Lips. Originally a song called “Beck” about a nagging wife, Ezrin and the band reworked it into the ballad that saturated the airwaves in 1976.

The song, originally paired as the B side of “Detroit Rock City”, took off when DJ Rosalie Trombly of Windsor-based, Detroit-aimed CKLW started playing it, preferring it to “Detroit Rock City”. Listeners loved it so much Casablanca made it the “A” side, and the ballad became “The Act’s” best-selling single ever, reaching #7 on the Billboard charts.

The Destroyer sessions succeeded in turning the four distinct personas – previously relayed by just costumes and make-up, and breathed fire (excuse the expression) and life into them. The album - and “Beth” were the starting point of the “How Can We Miss Them If They Won’t Go Away?” Kiss empire. The songs weren’t just rowdy party anthems. Under Ezrin’s direction, they took on mythic proportions. 

“Do You Love Me?” established Paul as the Starchild, the group’s romantic lead. Ezrin and the band reworked the Stanley-penned “God of Thunder”, into Gene’s theme song, giving his onstage demon persona the perfect soundtrack. “Flaming Youth” and “Great Expectations” were positioned as youth anthems.

Drawing from Stanley’s memory of a news story about a fan who died in a car crash somewhere in the South, Ezrin sandwiched “Detroit Rock City”, a raucous tribute to the Motor City, with an audio melodrama, complete with news radio snippet and car crash sound effects.  

  

Campion devotes quite a bit of detective work attempting to unearth the real story behind the tragedy that spawned “Detroit Rock City”, and the entire epilogue is devoted to this subject. The book consists of new interviews and tales from Ezrin, Jay Messina, Corky Stasik, Kim Fowley, Bob Gruen, Ken Kelly, (the artist who designed the iconic comic superhero cover),and lots of archival interviews.

Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon may be way too involved for the casual fan. If you’re looking for some quick gossip, or if the nuts and bolts of songwriting and the analog recording process bores you, this book’s not for you. There are the usual tales of Ace and Peter’s drinking and drugging, sex in the studio and such, but Shout It Out Loud concentrates on the writing and recording and subsequent promotion of Destroyer in minute detail. 

Devoted Kissaholics, however, will appreciate the look into every nook and cranny of the recording sessions, promotion and tour that accompanied Destroyer.        

Circus, Creem and Hit Parader - Three Great Rock Magazines of the '70s and '80s

                    The first copy of Creem I ever bought, August 1973

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," Frank Zappa once said. Or was it Martin Mull –or maybe Elvis Costello? Internet pundits have varying opinions on this matter. However, we do know that Frank told a journalist ,"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."

Frank’s quote may actually apply more to current Interweb music news items on Yahoo and AOL than the old-style print mags that inspired his comment. Do we really need constant blog posts about X Factor contestants and American Idol losers flubbing the National Anthem at football games?  It makes me pine for the heyday of my three favorite rock magazines- Circus, Creem, and Hit Parader. 

Circus

Circus combined mainstream newspaper-type journalism with behind-the-scenes interviews and reportage about rock bands. They weren’t gossipy or dirty. They gave fans straightforward news without much pontificating. The magazine was first published in 1966 under the name Hullabalo, but most people equate it with 1970s and 1980s hard rock and new wave. The weekly magazine covered everything Kiss, Aerosmith, Queen, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin oriented in the 1970s. Of course, the aforementioned bands shared column inches with any band that had a buzz at a given time. Circus didn’t discriminate based on genre. They were an equal opportunity mag. The March 16, 1978 cover featured Ted Nugent, but prominent articles on the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were also included. It wasn’t unusual to find an eclectic pop culture mish-mash edition with articles  about Dan Fogelberg or Linda Ronstadt, popular comedians and TV shows (Steve Martin, Mork and Mindy, etc.) and controversial movies du jour like The China Syndrome sharing space with the obligatory Kiss article. And this mag had the best posters and full-page photos. After I finished scavenging my favorite articles for pin-ups, there was barely anything left in the mag. This explains why I don’t have any intact copies left to sell on eBay. The magazine folded in 2006 after focusing exclusively on heavy metal and hard rock since the mid-1980s.

Creem

Creem was a great magazine for suburban teens in the 1970s  It looked like a music magazine, but  it had a lot more than pretty pictures and music reviews. It had dirty words, sexual terms you hadn’t learned yet, semi-nudity, Lester Bangs and drug references. The music reviews read like a combo of Naked Lunch, a pulp men’s mag  and Roget’s Thesaurus. You had to be intellectual and perverted to understand what was going on – a perfect combo for me.  Also, what was that exactly on the June 1976 cover, hmmm? (See above pic.) I don’t think the proprietors of  the local drugstore in Hometown, Ill. where I bought it even noticed it. I hardly knew what it was, but pot and peppermint schnapps were the hardest stuff for a junior high kid in the ‘burbs back then. I learned a lot from Creem, and not all of it music-related. I first discovered  the existence of absinthe, cock rings and bondage gear from Creem. But I first read about the Runaways, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and T-Rex from Creem while everyone in the neighborhood was listening to Donny and Marie. I read Pamela Des Barres’ column, Miss Eleganza, Creem Profiles, Confessions of a Film Fox and learned all about Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. (Even at 12, I was the resident neighborhood weirdo.) I convinced my babysitter to watch the New York Dolls on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert one Friday, after reading about them in Creem. When I saw her again Monday morning, she was thoroughly befuddled by the performance. “When you said “New York Dolls”, I thought you were talking about a bunch of weird ladies.”

The first copy of Creem I ever bought in 1973 had articles about Androgeny In Rock, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Jeff Beck and plenty of pics of glam-era David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan and Iggy Pop. One of the first record reviews I read was by Patti Smith. I couldn’t tell you what band she reviewed, but I sure did like the way she wrote about them. A few years ago, one of my friends showed me an old stack of Creems from the ‘70s and ‘80s. I looked through ‘em, but somehow they didn’t pack the same forbidden punch as they did when I was twelve. By the late ‘70s Debbie Harry ,the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were common subjects, along with lesser-known punk bands that Circus and Hit Parader neglected. (Destroy All Monsters, the Dictators, etc.) Creem may or may not exist today. This New York Times article details the struggle to revive the magazine. Creem’s archives, however, are up and running.

Hit Parader

Hit Parader, first published in 1942, printed popular song lyrics of the day. Even when pop music styles changed to rock, punk and new wave, the mag still published lyrics. Alice Cooper lyrics were far removed from “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”, but fans still wanted to sing along. One of the first  Hit Paraders I bought –in ’74 or ’75, had a great interview with John Lennon conducted by Lisa Robinson, one of the most prolific rock scribes of the time.

The photos weren’t as glossy as the ones in Circus, but I still plastered the walls with them, especially in the early ‘80s, when the magazine’s articles seemed to get shorter-only a page or two-with short to non-existent interviews. Like Circus, Hit Parader didn’t take musical sides back then- one month Van Halen was on the cover; the next month, the Clash. It wasn’t a “punk” versus “metal” culture then. It was all good. Once the mid-1980s rolled around, the magazine changed format to heavy metal/hard rock exclusively. It’s the only one of the three mags  that still exists today, with a “none more black” website design and cover stories on Slipknot and similar bands.

Interview: Larry Harris, Author of "And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records "

Casablanca Records was synonymous with the excesses of the music business in the 1970s. Rumors about the label’s heyday and it’s exuberant president, the late Neil Bogart, have abounded for years, but no official history existed until the 2009 publication of And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records.

Penned by Casablanca co-founder Larry Harris (with Curt Gooch and Jeff Suhs), the book traces the controversial company’s rise and fall in no holds barred detail. All the major players are here, from Casablanca’s exuberant president Neil Bogart to Kiss, Donna Summer, the Village People, and all the behind the scenes managers and promotion people that made Casablanca the most infamous record company in music biz history.

I recently interviewed Harris via phone and here are some of his reflections about those halcyon days of sex, drugs, disco, and rock ‘n’ roll.

On Seeing Kiss for the First Time

It was shocking. It was like “Oh my God! What’s going on here? Where did these guys come from”? You get a feeling that it’s really cool but to know that its going to be really big. When You know how hard it is out there for artists. We did know that we had something we could use as a hook, which worked in their favor and against them, was the makeup. The show that we saw was in a tiny studio and there were no special effects of any kind. So it wasn’t what it wound up being.

The Critics' Initial Response

Well, they brought it to the next level. A lot of critics hated them.A few critics thought it was okay. Lester Bangs, one of the most famous rock critics ever, was in their court, as were the people at Creem and Circus. In those days, even Rolling Stone thought they were terrible.

Their First Tour

Once the word got it was impossible. We had to spend so much money and go into hoc They had to go out on the road and perform that was their strong point.Their music wasn’t the best. There were better musicians, but when it came to a stage show there was nothing really better out there.

Donna Summer

We had a picture of her from Germany that was very heavily airbrushed. That’s all we had, one little picture of her, a headshot. "Love to Love You, Baby" that was the only song we had to listen to. Neil and Joyce, Neil’s wife, wound up managing Donna and developed her persona. I known that Donna said she was uncomfortable with being pushed as a sex symbol. She has since obviously changed but she does have an incredible voice. And she’s written some hit songs that are wonderful. “She Works Hard for the Money” is a great song.

Village People

To be totally frank with you, they were one of the easiest bands that I ever promoted. One of the easiest bands that I ever promoted. “YMCA” came out, boom!. “Macho Man” came out, boom! We hardly had to ask anybody to play it. It was like almost overnight they just jumped on the record. For a long time nobody noticed that the guy who did it add was gay and wanted to expose more of that lifestyle to the world and have some fun with it,-which he accomplished. And the music was infectious. How many people you know who don’t jump up and down at “YMCA?”

George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic

George was a definite “character” (in quotes). He was one of those people you meet and you never forget. He brought funk to the world and all the hip-hop musician’s were sampling him and still do. In those days they (Parliament) sold as many records as Kiss or Donna or The Village People. They sold a lot of records. And they held stadium shows. They’d play in front of 40,000 or 50,000 people.

Angel

Their show was not wonderful. It was not something a lot of rock fans could rock out to. After awhile, I think Greg Giuffria’s influence in using so many keyboards was too much. How many Emerson, Lake and Palmers do you need? I think the keyboard sound was probably too much for everybody. They didn’t write any great hit singles that would propel them to the next level in those days.

The rumor is that Spinal Tap used Angel screwing up on their pods as some kind of background for that. Whether that’s true or not we’ll have to ask whoever wrote the screenplay.

Branding

At Casablanca, we branded the company. We wanted people to know about the company.

It helped that we were so big in the disco genre that people would come into record stores and ask for Casablanca, not even (the individual) artists, but just what was new. We consciously took had Casablanca’s name on it. Today if you look at record ads, you don’t even known what label they’re on. They don’t say Sony, they don’t say EMI — they just don’t, and I don’t know why. I don’t understand it.

I think that’s what some of the problem has been with the music business. They’re not going out there and helping careers anymore. They certainly missed the boat on the Internet. They should have embraced it. It’s easy to look back. In hindsight, they lost the battle.

Old School Record Company Execs

There were still a lot of guys who brought themselves up on the streets running record companies, guys who started out as musicians or disc jockeys like Joe Smith from Warner Brothers. These people were entrepreneurs who really believed in the music. They tried to work as best they could with the artists. Some artists were easier to work with than others and there was more experimentation going on. Yeah, they wanted to make money but I don’t think anybody was going into it to be a superstar like they are today. I think they were going into it because of love of the music. Or just “I wanna have fun while I’m young”, and it was the whole period. Vietnam had ended in the mid-'70s, the women’s liberation movement, The Pill, Martin Luther King, civil rights — there were all these other things going on in the culture. It never happened before in America and that added to it all. It was like, “Well, the old people did a bad job. We’re not going to listen to anything they tell us — and now we find ourselves as the old people!

Drugs and Payola

We all did coke. We all smoked grass. We all did Quaaludes, to be honest, and I know about the company’s reputation. We didn’t do any more than any other company did. We didn’t hide it. For some reason, we weren’t really afraid of getting arrested. Lawyers and bankers for huge banks were doing them — really strait-laced looking bankers from huge banks were doing them with us. I talk about it in the book; during my first few days in L.A. the first person I smoked a joint with was David Janssen, “The Fugitive,” and that was a trip! Who would ever think — the Fugitive! It was part of the culture at the time especially in the music business. As for shady deals, there was payola going on all that stuff and again we weren’t the only ones doing it. Everyone in the business was doing it.

The Music Business Today

Albums sales are down. Concert sales are down. Things are changing. There’s too much for people to do. You have video games, the Internet, there are eight million things you can do with the iPhone and 200-300 TV stations. There used to be five. There are too many choices. It’s harder to get a niche into something. You got to really stand out like a Lady Gaga.

Ace Frehley Co-Wrote This Gem

For Crazy Joe & the Variable Speed band. “Crazy Joe” aka Joe Renda, went on to produce the Jerky Boys. Released on Casablanca Records in the early 80s, here’s the cheesy video for this Dr. Demento fave about the hapless “Eugene,” who “sticks his hands in fans for fun”