During an appearance on the latest episode of Billy Corgan‘s podcast “The Magnificent Others”, KISS guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley reflected on the band’s first farewell tour, which took place in 2000-2001 and featured KISS‘s original lineup, consisting of Stanley, bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons, guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss. “Unfortunately, the same problems just started to creep in,” he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). “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.”
Asked by Corgan if he is the type of performer who is “very much in the moment” while on stage or if he is “inwardly reflecting on what used to be”, Paul said: “When I’m on stage, I’m in the moment. And there’s nothing ever in my life that could take the place or compete with that. You know that to be in front of 20, 50, a hundred thousand people who are there to see you, it emits such an incredible amount of force and also gratitude and adulation and a positive response and feedback to something you created and that you believed in initially.”
Looking back on KISS‘s mindset during the early days of the reunion tour in 1996, Stanley said: “Look, we can say life is short. But I reached a point where I thought, you don’t know when somebody’s going to bite the bullet. You don’t know when anybody’s gonna disappear. Let’s do this while we’re still here. And we did. So it was very exciting and also kind of tenuous because we were used to… We had been playing — Gene and I never stopped playing. We were playing. So I think perhaps our chops were a little more sharpened and there was work to be done because people’s memories over time kind of glossed things over it. We had to create the show people thought they saw, not the show they actually saw. If you look at photos from KISS ‘Alive!’ or even KISS ‘Alive II’, the lighting truss was fairly bare bones, but compared to everybody else, it was stunning. So we had to come back and raise the bar that would parallel today and take us that much bigger. And we had to be who we were. And I think part of the omnipotence, if you will, of the band has always been that we were ageless, and that’s potent stuff. If you see a band 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, they look the same. Well, we may not look the same this close up, but we can pull it off as a band, and that takes work. So everybody was told that they had to go work out and we got trainers for everybody, because we had to be how people remembered us. You don’t wanna go on stage and have somebody [go], ‘Oh, Jesus. Put a jacket on.’ Nobody wants to see a fat rock star in tights. It’s not a pretty sight.”
Stanley went on to say that he was “really miserable” during KISS‘s original farewell tour. “The music was erratic at best,” he said. “Some nights [were] awful, there was no sense of camaraderie or joy in what we were doing.”
Paul explained that while bad reviews don’t normally bother him, it becomes an issue when he agrees with them. “It’s different when you go, ‘They have their heads up their asses’ or they want to attack what you’re doing, but when you read things and go, ‘This is right and I’m really unhappy,'” he said. “So it really felt like, ‘Let’s put the horse down. Let’s just shoot it.’ It went against everything that we had always believed and that’s that the band is bigger than us.”
KISS played its two final shows ever in December 2023 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
The last show, held on December 2, 2023, streamed live on pay-per-view.
KISS launched its farewell trek in January 2019 but was forced to put it on hold in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“End Of The Road” was originally scheduled to conclude on July 17, 2021 in New York City. The trek was announced in September 2018 following a KISS performance of the band’s classic song “Detroit Rock City” on “America’s Got Talent”.
Early last year, KISS sold its entire music catalog, likeness and brand name to Swedish company Pophouse Entertainment, which is behind “ABBA Voyage”. A biopic, an avatar show, and a KISS-themed experience are already in the works, with Simmons and Stanley playing key roles in the development of all these projects, working closely with Pophouse.
