Goodbye KISS: A big juicy farewell to the hard rock masters
By Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
KISS, the world’s most immediately recognizable rock band, is calling it quits after more than four decades atop spangled six-inch platforms. But not before a fabulous farewell tour.
On Friday night (Feb. 22) at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans, the kabuki-faced quartet proved why it is worthy of the Mount Rushmore of hard rock, pounding through 20 classics with the verve of performers half its members' ages.
Frontman Paul Stanley - he of the high notes, the shag, the signature black star and alluring red lipstick - said he remembered when the band first played the legendary Warehouse in New Orleans in 1976. Kiss has rocked the Crescent City area several times since (most recently at the 2017 Gretna Heritage Festival), but it’s doubtful the band has ever produced a more spectacular psycho circus than Friday’s show, with its heart-fluttering explosions, skyscraping stage elevators, bazooka guitars, trapeze, confetti cumuli and fire geysers. Time and again, the audience was swept with waves of heat as if someone had opened the oven to check whether the brownies were done.
But the special effects weren’t the thing. The thing was the band’s undimmed instinct for old-fashioned showmanship.
Stanley was tirelessly affable as he cajoled the crowd at every juncture in the two-hour concert. Six-string maestro Tommy Thayer postured heroically with each searing solo, like a silver statue of a guitar god. And kitty cat-faced drummer Eric Singer has so perfected a combination of cuddliness and self-deprecation that he could immediately become a 610 Stomper.
As the sexagenarians of Kiss (Thayer is a touch younger) bring their collective career to a close, they are anything but blasé.
Which brings us to Gene Simmon’s tongue. Rumors have already begun to circulate that the bat-winged, man-bobbed bassist’s tongue is planning a solo career.
It was certainly clear during Friday’s show that Simmons' tongue is not ready for retirement. The tongue wagged with grotesque gusto throughout the concert. Like a monster in a horror movie, the tongue was bathed in a syrupy cascade of Hollywood blood. The randy tongue lapped luridly at Simmons' microphone and Thayer’s lips. The tongue dripped with lascivious drool like something you'd see in the Krewe du Vieux parade. The untamable tongue, which has gotten Simmons into verbal hot water from time to time, is not ready to be still. For sure.
