Were KISS Anti-Semitic?
LIFE as a member of KISS must be more mental than living in a hedge filled with laughing spiders. And depressing too. More depressing than Gene Simmons blood-chilling sex tape. No, we’re not providing a link. Look for it yourself. You’ll never listen to Foreigner in the same way again.
Anyway, former KISS honcho Paul Stanley (the one with the star on his eye when done up) has released a new new memoir, ‘Face the Music: A Life Exposed,’ written with journalist Tim Mohr. Naturally, it is anecdote-central and is filled with a myriad of bold claims.
Stanley is rather candid about his decades of disappointment with original KISS members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. Of course he’s disappointed with Gene Simmons, but that’s a given.
While Gene gets a kicking, it is nothing compared to the beatdown that Frehley and Criss are on the end of. Stanley accuses Frehley of stashing drugs “in the bags or pockets of crew members — without their knowledge — so he wasn’t on the hook if they were found.”
Turning innocent people into drug mules is pretty bad, but more shocking is the claim that the pair were anti-Semitic. Stanley notes that Frehley owned a collection of Nazi memorabilia and that some of his earliest recollections of Criss involved the drummer racially mocking waiters at Chinese restaurants.
Stanley also claims that Frehley and Criss resented him and Simmons for controlling the band’s creative output. Why might they do that? Because their contributions “just didn’t amount to much.”
“Ace and particularly Peter felt powerless and impotent when faced with the tireless focus, drive and ambition of me and Gene,” Stanley writes. “As a result, the two of them tried to sabotage the band — which, as they saw it, was unfairly manipulated by [us] money-grubbing Jews.”
Maybe this is all a big misunderstanding? The New York Post got in touch with Stanley who reiterated that yes, he does think that Frehley and Criss are anti-Semitic.
“Yes, I do,” he says. “It’s based on years and years of interactions. It’s not pulled out of thin air.”
Feh! What a pair of shmendriks!
Posted: 10th, April 2014 | In: Music, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
