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‘We Wanted To Be Larger Than Life’: Paul Stanley Of KISS On Almost 50 Years Of Rock

Members of KISS perform in Vancouver, Canada, for the band's "One Last Kiss: End of the Road World Tour" in Jan. 2019.
Keith Leroux / Courtesy of the artists
Members of KISS perform in Vancouver, Canada, for the band's "One Last Kiss: End of the Road World Tour" in Jan. 2019.

After nearly 50 years, KISS is saying goodbye to touring. The over-the-top purveyors of heavy metal have embarked on a year-long finale tour titled “One Last KISS: End of the Road World Tour.” The 105-stop tour spans North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand and will encapsulate KISS’ larger-than-life show for the last time.

Before his storied rock rise, KISS’ lead singer Paul Stanley recalls being a New York cab driver and driving people to Madison Square Garden to see Elvis. He remembers telling himself that night, “One of these days, people are going to be driving here to see me.”

Stanley formed KISS in 1973 along with bassist and back-up vocalist Gene Simmons. Inspired by glam rock, the band was determined to make its performances into an all-encompassing experience.

“As a rock fan I had gone to see bands who oftentimes made you think they were doing you a favor by showing up when I just paid them,” Stanley says. “I think there was a lot of apathy onstage in a sense of complacency.”

Even if you’re not an avid fan of KISS, you can probably conjure up a mental picture of the group: Black and white face paint, performative alter-egos, space suits and platform boots performing on spectacular sets. “We wanted to create iconic images. We wanted to be larger than life.” Stanley says.

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS perform during the "End of the World Tour" in Jan. 2019.
Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS perform during the “End of the World Tour” in Jan. 2019. Keith Leroux / Courtesy of the artists

As a withdrawn child who grew up with an ear condition called microtia, Stanley liked the idea of figures like Zorro or the Lone Ranger, who could be heroic but still keep a sense of anonymity by wearing masks. That idea, paired with his love of music helped transport Stanley to another place. “If you take a shy, chubby kid who is not very popular and put him behind makeup and give him a strong enough persona, that can get you pretty far,” he says.

After decades of making music, breaking up, reuniting and yes, touring, at 67, Stanley says the guys are ready to say farewell to touring after this year. “There is a finite quality to life. The physical wear and tear of what we do is enormous,” he explains. “If I was out there in a T-shirt and jeans I could do this into my 90s but I’m carrying around 30, 40 pounds of gear and making it look easy.”

Stanley and his bandmates have celebrated more highs and lows than they could’ve imagined as kids when they were just starting out in their parents’ apartments. “It’s been a long road, and at times it hasn’t been fun, but we’ve always understood the value of each other,” he says.

Stanley spoke with NPR’s David Greene about his childhood, gaining confidence as a performer and deciding to stop touring. Hear their conversation at the audio link.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. utm

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David Greene is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author. He is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most listened-to radio news program in the United States, and also of NPR's popular morning news podcast, Up First.

Prior to taking on his current role in 2012, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics east to Siberia. During that time he brought listeners stories as wide-ranging as Chernobyl 25 years later and Beatles-singing Russian Babushkas. He wrote the best-selling book Midnight in Siberia, capturing Russian life on a journey across the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Greene later won an Edward R. Murrow Award for his interview with two young men badly beaten by authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya as part of a campaign to target gay men. Greene also spent a month in Libya reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli. He was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for that coverage of the Arab Spring.

Greene's voice became familiar to NPR listeners from his four years covering the White House. To report on former President George W. Bush's second term, he spent hours in NPR's spacious booth in the basement of the West Wing (it's about the size of your average broom closet). He also spent time trekking across five continents, reporting on White House visits to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay – and, of course, Crawford, Texas.

During the days following Hurricane Katrina, Greene was aboard Air Force One when President Bush flew low over the Gulf Coast and caught his first glimpse of the storm's destruction. On the ground in New Orleans, Greene brought listeners a moving interview with the late Ethel Williams, a then-74-year-old flood victim who got an unexpected visit from the president.

Greene was an integral part of NPR's coverage of the historic 2008 election, reporting on Hillary Clinton's campaign from start to finish, and also focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters' decisions. The White House Correspondents' Association took special note of Greene's report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama addressing the nation's racial divide. Greene was given the Association's 2008 Merriman Smith Award for deadline coverage of the presidency.

After President Obama took office, Greene kept one eye trained on the White House and the other eye on the road. He spent three months driving across America – with a recorder, camera, and lots of caffeine – to learn how the recession was touching Americans during President Obama's first 100 days in office. The series was called "100 Days: On the Road in Troubled Times."

Before joining NPR in 2005, Greene spent nearly seven years as a newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He covered the White House during the Bush administration's first term and wrote about an array of other topics for the paper, including why Oklahomans love the sport of cockfighting, why two Amish men in Pennsylvania were caught trafficking methamphetamine, and how one woman brought Christmas back to a small town in Maryland.

Before graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in government, Greene worked as the senior editor on the Harvard Crimson. In 2004, he was named co-volunteer of the year for Coaching for College, a Washington, DC, program offering tutoring to inner-city youth. He lives in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, with his wife, Rose Previte, a restauranteur.

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