Paul Stanley was recently dressed up looking like a cool grandpa.
KISS frontman Paul Stanley, 73, shocked fans with a rare, low-key sighting in LA-ditching the iconic makeup but still rocking his signature hair! https://t.co/bgzCN5McwA pic.twitter.com/iFVdokCBgV
— Wanda Wanderin (@wanda_ring_) June 27, 2025
From a business point of view, Kiss is one of the most successful rock bands of all time. They’ve made huge amounts of money from merchandise, concert tickets, and album sales. Their business style has also inspired many other artists to follow a similar path.
However, not everything went perfectly. In a recent interview on The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan, longtime Kiss member Paul Stanley talked about one big mistake the band made: creating new characters to replace original members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley when they left the band in the early 1980s.
“That was a big mistake,” Stanley confessed (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar). “The whole idea, y’know, of ‘snail boy,’ we spent this time creating these characters. Yes, each one of us came up with them, but we did it as a band. And then we spent years nurturing and building it, and now we’re going to throw it away? That’s crazy. Hey, New Coke didn’t do so well either.”
Stanley said that adding new personas like the Fox (Eric Carr) and the Ankh Warrior (Vinnie Vincent) didn’t work well. He explained that the original characters were created as a group and had become iconic. To suddenly throw them out and try to replace them didn’t make sense. He compared it to the failed “New Coke” rebranding, saying people already loved what they had.
He also pointed out that Kiss is one of the most visually recognizable bands in the world. Even if people don’t know every member’s name, the face paint, costumes, and logo are unforgettable. Changing that, in his opinion, weakened the band’s image.
Stanley recalled a moment back in 1975 when he realized just how popular and recognizable Kiss had become. While shopping at a clothing store in New York, he gave them a sticker of the Destroyer album cover. Later, he saw a mother and her young son walk by, and the boy shouted “Kiss!” when he saw the sticker. That moment made him realize just how big the band had become, even kids knew who they were.
“This is Kiss. This is what people universally recognize. You can go anywhere in the world, and you could show somebody a picture, and they say ‘Kiss.’ They may not be able to tell you the names of everybody in the band, but that logo and those personas…”
“I was in a clothing store in ’75 on the Upper East Side called Jumping Jack Flash, where they had really cool rock and roll British clothes, and clothes that the [New York] Dolls and everybody were, y’know, kind of like ambiguously androgynous, and big platform shoes.”
“And I remember they had a sticker that we’d given them. I gave them a sticker of the ‘Destroyer’ album cover, and it was on one of their display cases. And a mom and a little boy walked by, and the little boy went, ‘Kiss!’ And it was like, ‘This is good, this is good.'”
