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Re: KISS (Was: Local 506 Saturday 9/28)



In <Pine.SOL.3.91.961001150128.28181A-100000@carr3.acpub.duke.edu>,
    christa <rist@acpub.duke.edu> writes:
>well, chris, i wouldn't call it "spittin".  the blood, more accurately, 
>dripped and oozed down gene's chin, his stupendously agile tongue wagging 
>away.

i can see walmart from here.

well, of course, you are right, as always. yes, oozing down his chin and all
across the chest of his bat costume.

ok, well, he did -cough- faux blood a little.

damn, he's the ugliest man i've ever seen.

and i forgive ace frehley for not having any personality coz he's got to pay
attention to what he's doing while he plays those three notes very fast.

>2) chris and i disagree that the audience shots on the big monitors were 
>choreographed.  lots of crazy crowd shots, lots of people with 
>KISS-painted faces, white on black, star over the eye and whatnot.  there 
>was a darling little girl in the front row, being held by her parents, 
>who had a paul stanley face painted on.  darling, in a metal kind of way.
>anyway, after the close of KISS' second encore (a "beth/i wanna rock and 
>roll all night" medley thing") ["detroit rock city" being the first 
>encore], after this second encore, paul stanley smashes all to hell his 
>guitar (though not the one that lit up or the one that caught on fire or 
>the sparkly one), he smashed it all to hell, and handed it to the little 
>girl in the first row, with a rose that had been tossed up on stage 
>earlier in the evening.

well, ok, mebbe i should more accurately register just what of that i thought
to be choreographed.

were all those peeps placed in the audience at just the right place on which
to focus the camera?

i think no.

did cameras pan around looking for just the right crowd shot of painted faces,
drunk yellin rednecks, and metal mamas before the feed went to through the
video mix?

i think, of course, yes.

by the way, air brush booths located around the concourse to get your face
painted up. didn't check the cost. but about one in every fifty or so seemed
to have patronized this.

also noted: only two african-americans observed among the audience all night.
however, almost every tee-shirt concession operator (price $25 to $45 with
about every fifth person buying) was african-american.

about maybe one in every two hundred arrived in full costume.

about one in every two was drunk on his or her butts.

average audience member iq estimated at about 90. i'm perfectly serious.
this was also the most 'trouble' free arena show i've ever seen even with
alcohol sales. also, -all- cops were plainclothes. i didn't even realize until
later, this was the first time i'd been to an arena show where i didn't spend
at least some time observing cop behavior. rock must be dead. it's been tamed.

did paul's axe break very cleanly in two on cue (exactly three pops on the floor,
accompanied by a pyrotechnic boom when it broke, and broke exactly on the
base of the neck with all the strings somehow falling away - yes, a breakaway
guitar).

i think yes.

the little girl, looked to be about eight years old, in the front row, face painted
in the peter criss fashion, was already the recipient of one of paul's three
rose handouts. and had already been flashed up on the monitors twice. finally
she get the smashed-up guitar handed to her and again, her picture flashed up
on the tv screens (the crowd having been prepared with previous recognition)
and the whole coliseum sighing 'o, how cute' simultaneously.

was she one well placed little contest winner?

i think yes.

of course, we could just dismiss this by claiming i'm paranoid.

i bet we could go to the next stop on the tour and see this same exact stunt
again. heck, maybe even the same little girl, i dunno. she might even be
a rock god daughter. who knows.

>they put on a fucking good show that blew my mind in two.  never been a 
>KISS fan, and probably never will be, but that was one of the best 
>concert experiences i'll ever see.

no doubt. definitely the biggest production. bigger than stones. bigger than
led zep. but i thought the sheer super cheese genius of every move being
so choreographed and stereotypically big arena rock god cliche by the
original stereotypical big arena rock god cliche band was a lot of what
made it such a great experience for me. i mean, i took real balls to go
out and do something that cheesy in the name of monster rock in the first
place. you can't get rock like that anymore anywhere else. in no way was
it apparent that these guys were dinosaurs (ok, except when paul stanley
bends over and his belly bunches up in about three folds, but hey, he's
still lookin a lot better than alice cooper).

which, ok, this might be why some might object to kiss reunion. through
sheer overkill production, they can appear to breathe life into a corpse.

i'm sayin, it was -always- this faux from the beginning. big rock was a
mere suggestion and we took the hint, ran with it, played on it. now we
can discuss amongst ourselves what punk is. ha!

nobody pretended this was real. everything was faux up front and everyone
had amazing amounts of fun. we sang along without the first hint of irony.

alright, i wore a gwar tee coz without kiss, there would be no gwar. but
i'm also thinking, without the new york dolls, there would have been no
kiss.

am i right?

without t.rex and pink fairies, no new york dolls? no bowie?

psych became glam became punk became metal?

this archeology seems a little out of order in view of the conventional canon
of analysis, but the chronology and geneoloy surely fit.

those dick st. punx got a right idea. a buck a band. yeah.

meanwhile, a buck a band will not get you what was parked out in front of
the four seasons right by the lobby door after kiss: a dino, a maserati, a turbo
carrera, and a z3. it was kind of an overwhelming sight of the type that is
not seen much anymore in connection with the big rock show, that big rock
excess kinda thing.

really though, you can know everything that is 'wrong' with a big kiss show
and still, you can party with the devil, have an amazing time. i don't know
how i'd ever top this tour in terms of sheer classic rockitude.

o, and knc was just pounding great metal this morning and at about 1:30 this
afternoon. not kiss. 'real' metal. ha!

3.2.3

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