But those albums didn’t sell nearly well enough to justify the expenses the band was racking up: Destroyer was a make-or-break gambit. Up until Destroyer, KISS rushed through their work in the studio and put all of their money and effort into their over-the-top road show. This is the book’s focal point, the making of their fifth album, for which they hired production wunderkind Bob Ezrin, who’d launched Alice Cooper to the forefront of American rock. That success peaked, not financially but artistically, with the Destroyer album - Campion, and a consensus of critics, agree. Meant for the general reader as much as for the hardcore fan, Shout It Out Loud covers the band’s beginnings, reminding us that two guys playing for loose change on a corner in Greenwich Village-Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons-put together one of the world’s most successful rock bands. Here’s how he places KISS in rock chronology: “These were the freshly minted faces of rock and roll’s third generation the mutated offspring of the 1950s teen-consumer monster that shed the post-war dirge for a sock-hop, greasy stroll on the sexual side of the Caucasian blues and the direct descendants of the 1960s’ acid-crazed fade of the Woodstock echo.” I’m not widely read in music journalism, but this is one of the best efforts I’ve come across-easily better, for example, than Dave Marsh’s rather disappointing Springsteen bio Born to Run.Ĭampion takes pleasure in minutiae, in detailed descriptions, and his high-energy style reflects both the music and the mood of the ’70s. The book, as it turns out, is better than the band. So I wasn’t expecting more than a fling with my distant adolescence when I picked up James Campion’s Shout It Out Loud, subtitled The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon. I came to consider them a mediocre band at best-the inane lyrics, the lack of musicianship-comic-book characters who reached stratospheric heights through hype, stage antics, and teen power. I still enjoy hearing the occasional KISS tune on the radio, but I no longer have any of the vinyl albums I collected, and only three or four of their later hits made it to my MP3 player. I haven’t been a KISS fan for decades-probably since I ditched my cap and gown after graduating from college. Painful as it is to admit in print, I fought for KISS in the ever-popular, high school debate over whether KISS or Led Zeppelin was the better band. I still recall a friend sitting me down at a party of eighth-graders to listen to this bad-ass, new song “Detroit, Rock City.” By the time I was fifteen or so, I had covered sixteen square feet of the wall behind my bed with a KISS poster, a medley of concert scenes-close-ups, solo photos, group shots. The first LP I ever owned was KISS’s next release: Destroyer. ![]() ![]() I wasn’t just mesmerized by the fantastic figures wielding guitars and drumsticks I loved the music. The first rock album I ever listened to was Alive!, which my older brother had brought home and I sneaked out of his room to listen to whenever he wasn’t around. Shout It Out Loud: The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion. Shout It Out Loud begins as a forensic examination of KISS’s Destroyer album, but it ends up as more than a book about an album, the group, or even the metal tributary of ’70s rock.
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