The Enduring KISS
When I was thirteen, I started to see kids with KISS shirts for the first time.
This was at McMillan Middle School in an area of Miami called Kendale Lakes. I think it was called McMillan Junior High School when we attended in the seventies.
I had no idea what those shirts were, but the kids who wore them seemed proud of them somehow.
I’m sure my twin brother noticed those shirts too.
I can’t speak for him, but I didn’t like my time at McMillan. In retrospect, some of the classes were really cool, like photography class (I learned how to develop film there) and a comedy class that was part of the English curriculum – but I didn’t like the kids. I found this horde on the whole to be mean-spirited and cliquish.
But I digress, kind of.
We had moved to Kendale Lakes from Coconut Grove, and it was logical that we’d go to a closer school. But we made it abundantly clear that we hated it. We also missed our small group of friends from seventh grade, some of whom we knew from the third grade before we moved to California for a time.
It wasn’t until our mom allowed us to go back to our previous school, St. Hugh, that we discovered the meaning behind the shirts.
Our friend Ramon was already listening to KISS – and if memory serves, had at least the Rock and Roll Over album, which included the song, “I Want You.”
I don’t know how we came to hear it. Maybe it was during the coolest detention ever, where we were allowed to play records and eat lunch in Mr. Shemp’s air-conditioned classroom – a way better deal than eating outside in the sweltering Miami heat.
And so it began – the KISS indoctrination.
It continued when our now long-dead older brother Paul took us into a record store and told us we could have any album we wanted. Our choice was obvious: KISS’ Alive!.
“That’s for kids,” Paul judged in his opiate-addled voice. But we pressed him and he relented. After all, that choice counted as “any album we wanted.”
KISS fans have long suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous judgment, and Paul’s criticism wasn’t the last time we’d hear that KISS was for kids.
We didn’t care.
Later, when we saw KISS for the first time, our dad was with us. He said something like, “Boys…that’s Kabuki Theatre.”
Yes, Dad – if you add pyrotechnics and Marshall stacks. You had a point.
That show was at the Los Angeles Forum – a stop on the Love Gun Tour with Cheap Trick opening and portions of Alive II being recorded at the venue.
Cheap Trick deserves more love in a future blog post.
We finally got those (no longer mysterious) T-shirts that night, along with “I WAS THERE” badges – and down the KISS rabbit hole we went.
Roger Yale 