KISS

The American band that treated rock and roll as a comic book and sold a hundred million records inside it. Kiss formed in New York City in January 1973, when Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons abandoned their failed band Wicked Lester and recruited drummer Peter Criss from an advertisement in Rolling Stone and guitarist Ace Frehley from one in The Village Voice. They played their first show on January 30 at a club in Queens with no makeup at all. By March they had the face paint and the four characters — the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman and the Catman — and within a year Casablanca had signed them and the live show had become the product: fire-breathing, blood, smoking guitars, rockets and a drum kit that rose off the stage.

Critics spent a decade treating them as merchandising with a backing band, which underrated the songs and missed the point simultaneously. Alive!, Destroyer and Love Gun built an audience that never entirely left, the band removed the makeup in 1983 and kept selling, and the 1996 reunion of the original lineup was the highest-grossing tour in America two years running. Kiss were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 10, 2014, fifteen years after first becoming eligible. They played their last show in New York City in December 2023, closing the End of the Road tour where the whole thing started. Ace Frehley died on October 16, 2025.