A Vulture series in which artists judge the best and worst of their own careers.
“The people who don’t like you will never like you, and if you pursue them, all you’re going to do is lose the people that do like you.”
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“It’s hard to edit me,” Paul Stanley says as an introduction of sorts. “I’m not a ham. I’m the whole pig.” As the front man of Kiss, the ultimate people’s band, Stanley has been dressed to kill as the Starchild since the group’s 1974 debut album; he, along with bassist Gene Simmons, have served as Kiss’s two constant members throughout its history. The band retired from touring in 2023 and will now find infinite life as digital avatars, proving that their spirit of rock and roll will never fully die, regardless of whether some critics would’ve liked to have seen such a fate.
Stanley and Simmons, representing Kiss, are among this year’s inductees for an honor that caught them a bit by surprise: the Songwriters Hall of Fame. (The sonic potpourri of the 2026 class also includes Kenny Loggins, Alanis Morissette, and Taylor Swift.) While Stanley stressed several times in our conversation that the band wasn’t making “high art,” he still knew there was a wide mountain range for their titillating, energetic, and shameless approach to music. If you’re unable to remain in control of your faculties when “I Was Made for Loving You” or “Lick It Up” starts blasting on the nearby TouchTunes, congrats on living a less fun lifestyle than everyone else — but you should know that all those hits were created with a lot more integrity than you may expect.
“It kind of goes back to: Anyone can write a song, but that doesn’t make you a songwriter,” Stanley says of the craft. “It was always, This is what our album is about. I think that was my main strength. If we were making a cake, Gene would talk about the frosting and the dressing on the outside. And I would go, ‘But we have to have a cake.’”
It’s hard not to go with “Rock and Roll All Nite.” That song is really the template for a lot of songs that came after it, whether ours or other people’s, because it’s an anthem. When I started writing it, there were no “anthems,” per se. Our record-company president sat us down and very fortuitously told us that we needed an anthem and we had no idea what that meant. His examples were Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Dance to the Music.” I saw Sly and the Family Stone when their first album came out and they were opening for Jimi Hendrix, so I understood what the directive was. I went back to the hotel, sat down with my guitar, and thought about it for a minute. And I went — I swear — “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day.” It wasn’t “we,” it was always “I,” because what empowers you is “I.” From there I went to Gene’s room. He had a song called “Drive Me Wild” that he was working on at the time, and we took my chorus and put it with his verse and that became “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
Partying didn’t mean pointed hats and fly whistles. It also wasn’t a drug-fueled social event. It was getting together with people and having a great time. So although it wouldn’t necessarily be my favorite song, its legacy is undeniable. We’ve closed our shows for 50 years with that song because it encapsulates our ethos. There were so many bands who came up with their own versions of “Let’s get together and rock” kind of songs after ours, and I would have to assume credit for a lot of that without pointing fingers and the idea of, Hey, look who I influenced. That’s for me to know, but certainly not for me to announce. That’s too much self-aggrandizing for me.
I’ve always dealt with perception becoming reality. I was an unpopular, zhlubby little kid who was deaf in one ear and created an alter ego of sorts to cope with that. Some of the songs were “You want me” songs. Often it’s parenthesis. You want me, you need me, you’re after me. “C’mon and Love Me” was one of those songs that touted, built, and fortified that persona. A lot of my songs were in that realm. You create something and if you do it well enough or long enough, it becomes true. I reveled in it. It doesn’t suck becoming Superman.
Honestly, we were not dealing with high art. We were writing musical food for the masses, but that doesn’t mean it’s disposable. Pretty much everything we wrote together was crafted. I’ve always believed that your best game of tennis is when you play with somebody equally as good, if not better, and that’s what you have with Carole King, Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry, Elli Greenwich, Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe. So we were at our strongest together. We brought something to each other’s work — a spark — that wasn’t there as individuals. I tend to craft things more and Gene is more impulsive to push it out. For each album we would do, if I knew that I had five slots on the album, I would write five songs and they would be tailored and designed to fill a certain niche, and also serve a certain purpose to give the album an identity, whether it was opening with “Detroit Rock City” or “Love Gun.”
Alive! was such a turning point for us. We already had three albums out. We did three albums in 18 months, which is pretty much unheard of for rock bands, because we really wanted success. The idea for Alive! wasn’t to have a live album in the sense that at the end of a song you heard people clapping. We wanted you to be in the crowd and have a sense of empowerment. We wanted you to hear the noise of people next to you between songs, because technology doesn’t really allow for multisensory overload.
“Rock and Roll All Nite” was the song that broke out. It had been on an earlier album, Dressed to Kill, but this was the real crossover moment when people were singing it as an anthem. I think the entire album showed the power and commitment of us as a band. Nothing could stop us, not because we were the best necessarily. Maybe there’s naïveté involved. Before that album came out, we were building a following as a live band, but our albums weren’t selling because they didn’t sound like we sounded live. So the perception of the band was perhaps bigger than we actually were. I remember doing an interview and somebody said, “So how does it feel to be rich and famous?” I said, “Well, I can tell you how it feels to be famous.”
I’m not sure we ever wrote a song like that. The middle finger came from us flaunting and celebrating who we were. We sang about self-empowerment, enjoying life, and not taking shit from anybody — those are the cores of a lot of our songs without having to say it. The middle finger is just living your life your way and maybe setting an example for others. Admittedly, I don’t think that advice is usually well taken. It’s kind of like parenting. I think people respond more to what they see you do than what they hear you say, and our big middle finger was success. Our middle finger was going against the people who didn’t like us and going against the naysayers and winning. That’s very hard for people who don’t like you to understand. The Kiss Army, if you want to call it that, was a tribe much closer than some bands where the demographic is narrow and the last thing you want to see is your dad or little brother there. Whereas with us, it’s always been inclusive and everybody has always felt a part of this family.
The roots of “Calling Dr. Love” were from a Three Stooges episode where they’re in a hospital and on the intercom. They’re saying “Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.” Gene thought someone named “Dr. Love” was just hilarious. At times, Gene’s songwriting can be so campy, but he can get away with it. Obviously at some point when you don’t have the persona, the bandwidth is much narrower. But within the scope of being the demon and that character, “Calling Dr. Love” is lascivious but also humorous. I think he gets away with it because Kiss is timeless. Part of what has been our strength over the years is looking the same onstage. The idea of being omnipotent, of being ageless, is incredibly powerful. When somebody comes to see the band live and goes, “My God, they look like when I saw them in 1975,” that’s something other bands can never have. So in that way, we’re timeless superheroes — Batman with a guitar and Superman with a Marshall amplifier.
I go back to our Kiss Unplugged album, where the songs had to stand on their own without makeup, bombast, and eight-inch platform heels. “Sure Know Something” is a really well-written song that transcends Kiss’s many signature songs. I wouldn’t minimize or negate that one by saying it was for the masses. For me, it’s just hard to say what’s a “serious, credible song.” They all are. I thought that Kiss Unplugged made it more obvious that we have a lot of great songs that will stand the test of time, are timeless, and could just as easily be done by someone else. This isn’t on the official Unplugged album, but I originally wrote “Hard Luck Woman” with the idea of, This would be great for Rod Stewart. Let’s write our own “Mandolin Wind.” I’ve written songs using other artists or songs as templates.
The motivation for Kiss Unplugged was we were doing Kiss conventions. A much smaller group of people would come to a hotel ballroom or venue, and there would be displays of Kiss history, costumes, outfits, guitars — and then we would do a Q&A and play an unplugged set. Those sets were always pretty damn good. MTV approached us with the idea of doing an Unplugged, and the format appealed to us because it goes back to something I’ve always believed: If you can’t play a song on a piano or guitar, it’s not a good song. If you have to say, Imagine this with a synthesizer in the background, that’s all window dressing. You don’t have the structure.
And at the same time as Unplugged, we were thinking about reuniting with the original two members, Peter and Ace. It was part of the dating process. The time to find out you don’t want to be in bed with somebody isn’t when you’re in bed with them. You want to date and have dinner. So Unplugged was a chance for us to put the feelers out, and we wanted to showcase how good the band was. Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer were consummate players, and we worked our asses off to be really, really good at playing acoustic guitars versus electric guitars.
Stanley, with and without makeup, performing over the decades. Clockwise from left: Photo: Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesPhoto: John Atashian/Getty ImagesPhoto: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Stanley, with and without makeup, performing over the decades. From top: Photo: Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesPhoto: Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesPhoto: John A… more
Stanley, with and without makeup, performing over the decades. From top: Photo: Gary Gershoff/Getty ImagesPhoto: Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesPhoto: John Atashian/Getty Images
When Kiss was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a decade ago, I said in my speech that we were being inducted for the same reasons that we were kept out. The hierarchy at the organization had very little to do with the public, and the public’s beliefs should be in there. It was really a backroom boys’ club. There were people who I won’t give the attention to by naming, but they’re gone. Anyway, I’m a pretty tough critic. It very rarely comes down to what others think of what I do. If I think the show sucked or if I wasn’t up to par, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, because you go home and you’ve got to like who you see in the mirror. If you’re going to believe all the good stuff that people write, you’re going to have to believe the bad stuff.
You can get caught up in a vicious cycle like that. The people who don’t like you will never like you, and if you pursue them, all you’re going to do is lose the people that do like you. Certainly, there were decades of scathing reviews and dismissals by so-called critics who ultimately had to go, “This is good.” Time is ultimately what gives something credibility. So, yeah, I’ve never given much credence to reading reviews because some of them are also fodder for therapy. When people have such deep hatred directed towards you, it’s not really about you. Go work that out, because who hurt you? Who beat you? We’re just a band.
This may sound corny, but I’ve never, ever found playing any of those songs a chore. They made me what I am, and I love them all dearly. When I would go see a band and they were bored and would rearrange a heavy rock song and do it as a reggae tune, I was terribly disappointed and felt minimized. I paid to hear the song that I loved the way I loved it. The idea of going up on stage with a sold-out audience and showing disrespect by fulfilling some need in me, or boredom, is unimaginable. Play it the way people know it, the way it became famous, and show the respect you had for it when you wrote it. You’re only deviating because you’re bored, and that’s irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. The worst I can say is if you win the lottery, you shouldn’t complain about taxes.
That would be me saying, “Look how I influenced somebody,” and I don’t go there. We’ve always had great support acts, because we love all types of rock music, whether it was Tom Petty, Bob Seger — who got his first gold album with us — AC/DC, Rush, Judas Priest, Bon Jovi, and Motley Crüe. The list goes on and on. We wanted to make sure we not only championed bands that we loved, but gave them a chance onstage. There should be someone every night in a concert who justifies being the headliner, and if that happens because you sabotage or limit any other musicians, then you don’t deserve to be the headliner. So we’ve always practiced what we preached. We would go out there and make sure you had everything you needed and talk to you if you wanted some advice. A lot of bands would be on the side of the stage because you learn more by watching. I didn’t invent anything; I was just inspired by so many people.
The North Star. Because it guides you.