KISS guitarist and vocalist Paul Stanley recently reflected on the band’s first farewell tour, which took place in 2000 to 2001 and featured KISS’s original lineup, consisting of Stanley, bassist and vocalist Gene Simmons, guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss. During an appearance on the latest episode of Billy Corgan’s podcast “The Magnificent Others”, Stanley talked about the problems in the band.
“Unfortunately, the same problems just started to creep in,” he said.
“In a perfect world, I had hoped that we could get back together. Everybody would learn their life lessons and we’ll walk into the sunset together making music. That story doesn’t exist. So it was very stressful and disappointing, but more stressful because for me it’s all about what goes on on stage. You leave everything at the bottom of the stairs — you leave your problems. There have been times where people in the band might not be talking, but you get up on stage and hug and have a great time and make the most of that. Anything that happens beyond the stage is a bonus. So, it was very stressful, and not knowing how we’re gonna be night to night because of people’s indulgences. And that’s not fun.”
Elaborating on how relationships within the band deteriorated to such an extent, Stanley said: “Things take such an incremental turn. I don’t think most of the time things fall off a cliff… It just became, sadly, the divide happened, and it wasn’t like that when we first got back together. For me, there was a sense of anticipation and a joy in revisiting and coming back together and bringing whatever we had done in the interim. And we had some of the guys going, ‘I really fucked up. I’ll never do that again. I’m so grateful to be here.’ And it truly was the feeling and the sentiment. And over time it became, ‘You said you wouldn’t do that again. You’re doing it.’ The resentments that I think were there in the beginning came back. I think that perhaps what bothered people before just bothered them again, and maybe they had a — shall I say — distorted or inaccurate sense of who they were.”
Paul continued: “Everybody in the [original] band was so important to creating it. But when you’re in a car, only one person can drive. Everybody can be in the same car, but you can’t have everybody’s hands on the wheel because ultimately people are pulling ’cause they wanna do different things. So it became politics again of, unfortunately, people wanting things sometimes because you wanted something else.”
