KISStory - a documentary on Hulu

KISS - You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best!

I recommend the documentary KISStory.

I have been watching a documentary about "the hottest band in the world!" on Hulu: KISS. Hulu describes it as "The definitive documentary on the most recognizable band in the world, KISS. Chronicles the band's five decades in the business as founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons reflect on their historic career." It's a fascinating look into rock music in the 1970s in the United States, and why rock fans took to the band like fish to water! Watching it you will understand why just about all the 1980s heavy metal bands grew up on KISS music. The documentary covers the 1980s, 1990s and all the way to the reunion and beyond. You wanted the best, you got the best!

I transcribed the powerful beginning when bassist Gene Simmons and singer/guitarist Paul Stanley explain their childhood and their humble beginnings.

Gene Simmons: I was born in Israel. Both my mother and my father came from Hungary after World War II. When I was six and a half my father picked up and walked out, and my mother and I came to America. In New York my mother goes (to work) to a sweat factory. She makes half a penny for every button she sews on to a winter coat. Clears just enough money to pay the rent and food and we survive.

Paul Stanley: If Gene was a stranger in a strange land, I was a stranger in a strange neighborhood. I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in an Irish Catholic area. We were the only Jews. My mom had been born in Berlin, and had fled to escape the Nazis and the extermination of six million of our people. I grew up with people with (Nazi concentration camp prison) numbers on their arms. On top of that I was born with a condition called a microtia, so I had no right ear. It was a crumpled mass of cartilage, and I couldn't hear on my right side. When you don't look like everybody else, the scrutiny is unrelenting. And for a little kid to be stared at or pointed to or taunted, is devastating. Gene and I, what we share is a sense of being outsiders for different reasons, but we also found escape in music.

Gene Simmons: I came here as Chaim Witz. I couldn't speak a word of English. I was aware I didn't fit in. I still feel like an outsider, but I soon devoured everything American, and I started listening to the radio all the time. I heard Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson and Fats Domino. I couldn't speak English, I just loved the music.

[For more context, Wikipedia points about Gene's mother: Flóra Kovács (later Florence Klein, then Florence Lubowski) (1925–2018), was born in Jánd in the Northern Great Plain region of eastern Hungary. She survived internment in Nazi concentration camps from November 1944 to her liberation from the Mauthausen camp in Austria on May 5, 1945. She and her brother, Larry Klein, were the only members of the family to survive the Holocaust. Witz's father, Ferenc "Feri" Yehiel Witz (1925–2002), was a carpenter whom Klein married in 1946; the couple moved to Israel the following year.]

Paul Stanley: I had a little pocket transistor radio, and I walked around with it waiting to hear The Beatles. Here were these four guys. They looked like buddies.

Gene Simmons. I'd never seen anything like it. The girls were going out of their minds.

Paul Stanley: And I had an epiphany.

Gene Simmons: And I thought, "That's a pretty cool job."

Paul: It was a revelation to me. I'm a little overweight kid named Stanley Bert Eisen. I'm deaf in one ear, but I see The Beatles, and I go, "I can do that. I can touch that nerve." Why I thought that, God only knows.

Gene: My mother bought me a copy of a Höfner bass called a Kent, and I've never looked back.

Paul: I knew I wanted to make rock and roll.

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Here is one of my favorite KISS songs. It is from the 1984 album Animalize.

KISS - I've Had Enough (Into The Fire)

KISS - I've Had Enough (Into The Fire) Live (Ipswich 1984) Audio Only