Simple Fantasies Boost Kiss to the Top of Uriah Heep

December 1976; reviewed By Dale Anderson

The hard-rock life is full of ironies. A year ago the venerable British quintet Uriah Heep would have been headlining the show Wednesday night in Memorial Auditorium and Kiss would have been opening. This season it’s the other way around.

Then too, Heep’s bombastic tradition has pretty much been mined out over the past 5 years. Their new tricks consist of three different shades of intensity on a tune from their latest album.

The rest rides on the pyrotechnic vocals of David Byron, shirtless in leather pants, and mastermind Ken Hensley at the keyboards. Heep’s lumbering anthems recall many of the old dark resonances, but they don’t always spring to life.

Nevertheless, Heep gets to play for an hour and draws a strong encore from a crowd of more than 10,000. They exit shaking hands with the kids on the edge of the stage like rock ‘n’ roll politicians.

But Heep probably will never get the acclaim Kiss is gathering these days. Four New Yorkers with painted faces, Kiss is not just rock stars. They’re comic book heroes, creatures of fantasy and mystery.

For one thing, they almost never are seen without their makeup and high platform boots. The only report of what they really look like came from Frank Rose in Circus magazine some 18 months ago.

He wrote that they were tall, old-looking and “almost unrecognizable without their makeup.” He added: “Their faces are pitted and leathery – the afterburn from all that makeup, I suppose.”

Otherwise, it’s easy to believe anything and everything about them. When half a dozen fire trucks wail up to the Aud at 8 p.m., imagination says it’s Kiss arriving.

After all, isn’t one of their long-standing sensations a song called “Firehouse,” which features Gene Simmons spitting flame from his mouth?

Though there’s a score of painted faces sprinkled around the hall, Kiss has advised fans not to imitate them. For good reason. One Buffalo singer tried “Firehouse” and got seriously burned.

Instead, Kiss offers to live out your teen-aged fantasies for you. It’s calculated and it’s for a fee, naturally. Those explosions and black leather costumes and ghostly stage machinery don’t come cheap, you know.

After the ponderousness of Heep, this simple, driving, four-man rock is refreshing and electrifying, though the thundering echo makes it hard to discern any but their most familiar numbers, stuff like “Firehouse,” “Rock And Roll All Night” and “Ladies Room.”

The three encores include their big teen rave-up, “Shout It Out Loud,” and, of course, “Beth,” with cat-faced drummer Peter Criss coming to sing and sit alone on an equipment case while a tape plays in the background.

Compared with Alice Cooper’s elaborate dramatics, Kiss is simple. Basic chords, basic showmanship, basic fantasy. By stripping rock down to its essences, they’re able to run circles around old heavy-metal purveyors.