The Album My Sister Didn't Want

I was five years old when I fell in love with a band, and it happened because my teenage sister didn't want them.

I grew up in Marietta, Georgia, with my parents and my sister Lisa, who was ten years older than me. Lisa liked rock music, played her stereo loud, had a collection of records and 8-tracks, talked on the phone for hours, argued with our parents, and was soon driving her own cars. She also played the piano. From about the time I could stand on my own, I'd reach up and bang on the keys while she played, which I'm sure drove her crazy. There's a photo of the two of us doing exactly that, framed and hanging on my parents' wall to this day. She was the quintessential teenager, and I looked up to her completely. Our local rock station was WFOM, and it was always playing, in her room and in whatever car she was driving that year.

In 1976, I was five and she was fifteen. Somehow, she won an album off the radio. I've never known the details. Maybe she was the right caller, maybe she played some game. She's since passed away, so I can't ask her now, and the station changed formats in the years that followed, so that rock-radio era is a lost corner of the old Marietta music scene. The album she won was KISS' Destroyer.

Lisa was not a fan. Not long after she won it, she handed it to me and announced she didn't like them. I was instantly intrigued. All through my toddler years I'd been fascinated by her record collection, her posters, the whole vibe of a cool older sibling's room, which meant I was frequently pawing through her things and frequently irritating her. Mostly I studied the album covers. I remember staring at Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors, Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive!, Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch Fever, and the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits, trying to comprehend what I was looking at.

When Lisa put Destroyer in my hands, it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. I won't belabor it, since that cover is widely recognized as one of the greatest in rock, from the true golden age of album art. I'll just say I spent hours, and then years, studying every detail of that painting of those amazing characters, usually with the record playing on a loop. Between the cover and the most powerful music I'd ever heard, my lifelong love of this band was forged for good. I know I was only five. But I'd heard a lot of radio by then, and I knew this was different.

I kept bugging Lisa with questions until she snapped: "Andrew, I don't like KISS, I don't know KISS, so leave me alone about KISS!" I'm pretty sure it was my asking whether Ace Frehley was a girl that finally did it. From then on, KISS fandom in our house was mine alone.

We lived on Sandtown Road. A street called Parker Drive made a semicircle off of it, so that if you pictured a capital letter D, Sandtown was the straight line and Parker was the curve. Most of the houses had chain-link fences around their backyards, and some, like ours, had them out front too. The neighbors beside us on Sandtown were related to the neighbors directly behind us on Parker, and every day family members crossed between the two houses at the corner where all four yards met, climbing the fence back and forth. There was so much diagonal traffic that someone, possibly my dad, before my time, had built a little wooden bridge over the fence at that corner, and we all kept step stools and stumps handy to climb up onto it. The house diagonal from ours was where my best friend Deveron lived.

A lot of kids got into KISS around then, so I know my story isn't unique. Deveron was a fan too, and we spent years crossing that bridge between our yards. It was always a special feeling to climb over toward his house, or to look up and see him hopping down into ours, because we always had fun, and most of that fun was KISS. Playing the records, talking about them, pretending to be them, collecting whatever we could find.

For a few years, every Christmas and birthday brought new KISS records from my parents, who strangely encouraged the whole thing. On family road trips, my mom would buy me magazines, almost always a Mad or a Cracked, plus whatever she could find with KISS on the cover: 16, Creem, anything. I devoured every scrap of information I could get in the pre-computer era. A new magazine, a new TV appearance, a new record turning up at the local Turtle's Records & Tapes, or in the record aisle at K-Mart, Zayre, or Richway, and I wanted it desperately.

Deveron and I had our favorites, and we "shared" certain albums that only one of us actually owned, listening on whoever's record player we were at. Neither of us owned Hotter Than Hell, probably because the title and the artwork were too wild for either of our moms to buy. I associate Rock and Roll Over and Love Gun with Deveron, because he owned them when I didn't. I knew all the songs, but I didn't wear those two out the way I wore out the ones that lived in my room.

There was a girl in third grade who was also a KISS fan, and for her birthday I talked my mom into buying Hotter Than Hell as the present I'd bring. That was the only time the record was ever in my hands, still sealed in plastic. It was a thrill to watch her unwrap it, knowing how badly she wanted it and that I was the one giving it to her.

Whenever we pretended to be KISS, Deveron was always Paul and I was always Gene, our respective favorites. His little sister Kelly would sometimes agree to be Ace or Peter. It's funny that even as little kids we gravitated toward the two members who'd end up with the real longevity. Paul and Gene gave off a stronger aura on stage and on TV than the other two, and somehow we picked up on it. Paul is probably my favorite today, but I'll always have a soft spot for Gene and everything he represented. In our games there were only two possible plots: playing a concert or fighting crime. KISS were superheroes to us, and a concert was usually how an adventure ended. Put on Alive! or Alive II, grab the tennis-racket guitars, and off we went.

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special and the movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park were historic events in our house. The Paul Lynde special was my Ed Sullivan Beatles moment, the first time I saw them move and perform their songs. I can't overstate how mind-blowing it was to see them as real, animate people instead of comic-book heroes and carefully posed photos. When you see your heroes that way for the first time, something rewires in your head. You catch the flaws, the awkward moments, the seams in what had seemed seamless, and instead of losing the magic you fold all of it into your growing idea of who these people are. I saw the flaws in their playing and their acting and their movements, and, a lot like falling in love with a person, I took it all in, sat with the limits of it, and embraced them anyway. I knew even then that KISS was special, and that no one else was like them or ever would be.

I was amazed, and still am, at how precisely I can tie each release to a time, a place, and whose copy it was. Deveron had Dynasty; I didn't. I had Gene's and Paul's solo albums, and Peter's on 8-track, and another neighbor had Ace's. By 1979 or so Lisa had moved out, I inherited her room, and I got a big stereo of my own. Every moment in that room had a record playing on it. Not always KISS, but they were the staple. I had a stack of K-tel compilations, and most of them snuck in at least one KISS song, usually "Calling Dr. Love" or "Beth," and it was a genuine puzzle to me how anyone could hear those next to the other hits of the day and not notice how much more exciting they were.

Then Unmasked caught me completely off guard in the record store. For a while I didn't believe it was real, since it looked nothing like the other albums, and I half-suspected it was a fake of some kind. Eventually I got it, and it became one of my all-time favorites. The production, the pop songwriting, the little touches of keyboard, the sheer catchiness of every track, I genuinely hoped this was the new direction for the shiny new decade called the 1980s.

And then I learned Peter wasn't actually on the album.

Like millions of other kids, I was crushed. I think I soon found out he might not have played on Dynasty either. To my young mind that was the turning point. It just wasn't the same once I couldn't picture the four of them playing the songs together. Thank goodness Unmasked is such a strong record, because my love for the music, and especially for Paul's gift for writing and singing a really good pop song, never faded. But the aura of the original four dissolved in my head, and the spell was broken.

I never bought Music from The Elder. By then I knew there was another drummer, and that cover gave no hint of the band, the music, or what any of it was supposed to be. I saw Killers and Creatures of the Night at Turtle's, but now there was a new guy on the cover, and I wasn't ready to accept him. The next year I heard Ace had left, saw a TV spot with the new guitarist, and my interest dwindled further, knowing only half the original band was left. KISS just didn't hold the same magic for me anymore.

Right around then, though, I discovered Devo, and then Duran Duran, and I fell for synthesizers, which made sense, because I'd been playing piano ever since Lisa first handed me Destroyer five years earlier. I still marvel that I never picked up the guitar. Deveron did. I was a piano kid, the way I'd watched my sister be a piano kid from my earliest memory, and while I loved miming guitar with a tennis racket, none of my KISS obsession ever pushed me to actually learn the instrument. I only became a drummer because in sixth grade the percussionists started on bells, laid out like a piano, which I understood instantly. That KISS never drove me to guitar or drums probably says something about how they lived in my imagination and my ears more than in my hands. Even so, it amazes me. Guitar has never come naturally. Drums have, but not in a Peter Criss way. I was drumming along to new wave, not to hard rock.

In high school I played drums in the marching band, the smallest bass drummer on the line of four. Two of the others were seniors I looked up to, and one of them was a KISS fan, the first I'd met besides Deveron since I was little. He loved all the '70s albums as much as I did, but he had them on cassette, which struck me as a whole different world. You could drop a tape in your car and blast an entire album on a loop, and he did. It amused me to see an older kid rocking out to the music I'd loved as a "child," but it was cool, and he was cool. This was the era of KISS resurfacing on MTV as one more hair-metal act among many, and I watched from a distance, only half interested. Through the rest of the '80s they stayed on the edge of my awareness. I had no real interest in the non-makeup records. I still don't, though I keep meaning to sit down and give Lick It Up through Revenge an honest listen, if only for the nostalgia of that sound blasting out of other kids' cars and boomboxes. The one I did buy, in college, was Alive III, and I've always loved it, recognizing that the band was probably at its musical peak with Eric Singer and Bruce Kulick.

That lineup is the one that played the famous MTV Unplugged, and that performance blew my mind all over again. Watching them play and sing their hearts out on songs from the '70s I never thought I'd hear live was the biggest shift in my brain since the Paul Lynde special. It was the realization that these guys were really good, that the songs were really powerful, that they were finally getting the respect the original era had earned. And when Ace and Peter walked out to join them, the dam broke.

I won't try to describe the earth-shattering, multi-year event that the reunion became, or the decades after it when they outperformed every other rock show on the planet. I'll just say that in my mind they wrote the book on the rock spectacle, and no one has come close. I saw them twice on the reunion tour, once on Psycho Circus, and one last time on the End of the Road tour. Every single time I was ecstatic to see these childhood heroes still doing it, still, all these years later, inspiring me to keep performing well into middle age and beyond. Not to be them or do what they do, but simply to know that it's possible. That it's worth it.

To this day I'll debate anyone about the greatness of KISS. Maybe I was just a kid who caught them, and got caught by them, at exactly the right moment to leave a permanent mark. But I'll make and defend plenty of bold claims about their legacy and what they actually accomplished. Don't get me started. Some people laugh them off, but I know the truth: KISS changed my life for the better.

Music is transportive, therapeutic, transcendent. It heals and teaches and expands. I'm grateful to my sister, my parents, my friends, and my bandmates for handing me so many different dimensions of it over the years. Every time I'm on a stage now, playing with one of my bands, and especially when it's the old classic rock I grew up on, I think of Lisa. She won a record she didn't even want and handed it to her little brother, and it set the whole thing in motion. I know how happy she'd be to see me up there playing the music I love.

KISS' music may not be the highest quality ever made, and I can't pretend to hear their '70s records objectively, but I've made peace with that. To me those are perfect rock songs. The lyrics aren't profound, the chords aren't complex, the themes aren't lofty, except in the one sense that matters: rock and roll is something to celebrate, and nobody ever celebrated it with more joy than KISS. That's inspiration enough to keep me playing for the rest of my life.