... The early 1970s was a crowded place among rock and roll bands. After The Beatles blew the doors open in the mid-1960s, scores of young musicians picked up electric instruments as they began to develop songs and styles. As the decade progressed, rock music began to get harder and louder thanks to the influence of The Who and Jimi Hendrix. Hard rock would go on to define the 1970s thanks to bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but America would have its own pioneering group of hard rockers as well.
Kiss was still an unknown entity at the start of 1973. After breaking up their previous band, Wicked Lester, Paul Stanley, and Gene Simmons recruited drummer Peter Criss to begin rehearsing as a new group.
The trio recruited Ace Frehley in January of 1973, and after a short time discussing previous band names, the members arrived at the name "Kiss". It was the beginning of what would become America's most notorious and popular shock rockers.
It didn't take long for the band to implement gimmicks to stand out among the scores of other hard rock bands in New York. Kiss began experimenting with new approaches: Gene Simmons began teaching himself how to breathe fire, while smoke machines and lasers became an integral part of the band's show.
But the most important development arrived shortly after their first gig at the Popcorn Club in Queens: the group started to wear stage makeup.
"At the same time that we were forming in New York, there was a very big glitter scene, where boys were basically acting like girls and putting on makeup," Simmons told the fanzine Porkchops & Applesauce in 1996. "Y'know, all the skinny little guys, hairless boys.
Well, we were more like football players; all of us were over 6 feet tall, and it just wasn't convincing! The very first pictures we took when the band first got together, we looked like drag queens. ...
Thank-you Ace Frehley for helping to make drag queens a pop sensation.
R.I.P. Ace Frehley.
