Paul Stanley has explained why no former members of Kiss appeared at or were mentioned at the group’s final concert.
The Dec. 2, 2023 show featured Stanley and co-founding bassist Gene Simmons joined by the group’s most recent and longest-tenured lead guitarist and drummer: Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer.
Although they were occasionally featured in historical footage on the video screens at the show, founding members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, former members Vinnie Vincent, Bruce Kulick and the late Mark St. John and Eric Carr were not thanked or mentioned by name.
This upset some fans and even some former band members. “Kisstory was not represented for the final show,” Kulick later told UCR. “I don’t understand. I’ve offered my services, and they just haven’t made the decision to bring me back,” Frehley declared early in his former band’s End of the Road farewell tour.
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It’s safe to say Stanley sees things differently. “To be somewhat diplomatic, there were people who made unrealistic demands of what they required,” he told the Talk is Jericho podcast. “And it’s not about that. It wasn’t, for example, a celebration of the beginning of the band; it was a celebration of 50 years of a band, as opposed to a tribute to the start.”
He also questioned just how such a tribute would take place. “What are we gonna have — videos up on the screen or draped photos? The fact that we were there, we were there because of everybody who participated, some more than others, but the tribute to everyone is us existing.”
Two Kiss Box Sets Reportedly Arriving in 2025
Earlier this month, Mark Cicchini of the Three Sides of the Coin podcast revealed that Kiss would release two new box sets and at least one new entry in their ongoing Off the Soundboard live bootleg series in 2025. (The noted Kiss collector explained that he had helped assemble the collections.) “The next Off the Soundboard is nothing that’s in the trading circles, totally out of left field. Wait till you see the show that it is, there’s going to be a lot of happy people.”
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Gallery Credit: Jeff Giles
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