Kiss says goodbye to the stage, but its musical career enters a new era. The New York City hard rock quartet performed their final live concerts ever on Friday and Saturday at Madison Square Garden, capping a half-century of all-night rock and roll and partying every day.
It was goodbye, but there was a final surprise. But they weren’t cameos from former members, as many fans had wanted. Kiss announced at the end of Saturday’s final show that the band will live indefinitely as digitized avatars, deployed in yet-to-be-revealed ways.
However, they did leave a clue: In a promotional video released after the show, Gene Simmons said, “It’s going to be the best concert you’ve ever seen.”
Many Kiss fans said they are not interested in paying to see virtual recreations of the band, including syndicated rock host Eddie Trunk. A lifelong Kiss fan from New Jersey, he has criticized the band in the past for what he considers missteps. “I have very little interest in seeing a concert of avatars of Kiss, or anyone else,” he said. “It’s like going to see a movie. It in no way replaces the live concert experience. “There is no live music.”
On Facebook, negative comments about the avatars far outnumbered positive ones on Sunday. “I couldn’t be more disappointed, disgusted and shocked by the horrible Franken-Kiss they have now created,” wrote Gary Stevens, who plays Paul Stanley in the Kiss tribute bands Strutter and Kiss Revisited. “Now it makes a lot of sense why they didn’t want Peter, Ace, Bruce, etc. were there to end the era. “Everyone would have had to be laughed out of their wits if they had known what was coming.”
This and other references highlighted criticism of the absence of former Kiss band members from the final shows, despite Stanley’s repeated statements that he would be open to former band members appearing in some capacity.
But the same lingering resentment toward original members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss that kept the band from performing together at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction prevented it from happening again.
The farewell tour was Kiss’ second, following one in 2000 with the four original members. The show on Friday and Saturday was basically the same one Kiss has been putting on since their last farewell tour, called End Of The Road.
Launched in early 2019, it spanned a good portion of the band’s 50-year catalog and featured the kind of special effects that set Kiss apart from contemporary bands since the ’70s. With the possible exception of Alice’s guillotine and snakes Cooper, no other band has taken live performances to the extremes that Kiss did.
Each band member adopted a stage persona and developed kabuki-style makeup, studded leather outfits, and ridiculously high platform boots; Simmons took the form of dragons. He spat blood, breathed fire, and flew to the top of the lighting platform.
Frehley modified his Gibson Les Paul guitar to belch smoke and, later, fire rockets, one of many things current lead guitarist Tommy Thayer would copy.
Stanley rode a circus-style acrobat harness over the crowd to a satellite stage to sing three songs near the end of the show. The band members were lifted on hydraulic platforms above the crowd, and the same lifts that lifted original drummer Criss to the arena roof now did the same for current drummer Eric Singer.
Over the course of the final two shows, Stanley took the temperature of the crowd and tried to channel the sadness over the imminent end of the flesh-and-blood Kiss’s concert career into a celebration of the last half-century. “So this is the end of the road,” he said Saturday, acknowledging some stray boos. “I know. It seems sad. But tonight is a night of joy. This is a night to celebrate what we did together. We couldn’t have done it without you!”