Garbage Days Revisited #11: Kiss - "Crazy Nights" (1987)

 

"If life is a radio, turn it up to ten!" - Kiss - Crazy Crazy Nights

It always used to make me chuckle in the early days of living in London about a decade ago before Soho was ruined by gentrification thanks to the fat greedy useless f**k who's somehow managed to now crawl his way up to the post of Prime Minister how upon visiting the Crobar or the 12 Bar and running into an American rocker tourist taking in the sights (and trust me, there always used to be a few of 'em dotted about) how, if the conversation got onto Kiss and you mentioned Crazy Crazy Nights being the group's biggest hit over here they'd usually get an expression on their face akin to that of a Victorian gentleman who'd just been plonked in a helicopter pilot's seat at 30,000 feet and asked to fly the thing.

The general consensus about Kiss is that their '70s stuff was their heyday and once Ace Frehley and Peter Criss left it was basically all just piling dirt on the coffin from thereon out. Which I always think is a bit unfair as Kiss' output in the '80s definitely has plenty of high points - I mean sure not as many as their makeup era stuff but there's plenty of good singalong pop-metal in there. And to those who say that they dumbed it down in this era to fit in with the hair metal crowd...well, I'm sorry, much as I like Kiss, none of their stuff is music you come to for any sort of deep and hidden meaning - it's simple good time fun party rock 'n' roll to sink a beer and holler along to.

By 1987 when Crazy Crazy Nights came out, the band had finally got a settled line-up after several years of instability with Eric Carr now settled behind the drum stool and Bruce Kulick, a guitarist with the requisite amount of flashy solos and fretboard skill for the era, established on lead six-string. However, their output since Creatures Of The Night some six years before had been a bit patchy to put it mildly - Music From The Elder was an ill-advised foray into prog rock that went down like a lead balloon with the group's fans while the group's first three albums since going makeup-free, 1983's Lick It Up, 1984's Animalize and 1985's Asylum had all had a few good points but been a bit on the patchy side.

Crazy Nights, while not faring much better than its predecessors Stateside did at least give the group a smash hit over in the UK thanks to its timeless title track and the rest of Europe, going Top 3 over here and topping the charts in several of the mainland countries and giving the group's flagging profile a much needed boost. With Gene Simmons in and out of the band at this point, Paul Stanley was shouldering the majority of the songwriting and this album is probably the sound of '80s Kiss at their most immediate. However, fair play to Paul, he was on a good run at this point and there's plenty of other potential smash hits on here such as I'll Fight Hell To Hold You and the slightly cringingly titled Bang Bang You (followed on here by Simmons' No No No - what was it with the repeating words on this album?)

The album would spawn three Top 40 hits for the group in the UK with Reason To Live, probably one of the strongest Kiss power ballads, making the Top 30 in the dying days of 1987 and Turn On The Night just scraping the chart in early '88. The album would also see Kiss recording a version of Thief In The Night which Gene had written for the late former Plasmatics singer Wendy O Williams' album a year or two earlier.

I'll be honest, I think a lot of my love of this album is because it's the first Kiss album I bought as a 12-year-old - it was in a sale at Woolworths for £3 on cassette and I remember liking the title track when it had been all over the radio a few years earlier so I bought it. And y'know what? I still like it now. It's simple big dumb fun rock the way all Kiss' best albums are. A few months after that, the Revenge album would take the band back into the Top 10 in 1992 (thanks in no part to their ramped-up version of Argent's God Gave Rock 'n' Roll To You hitting the Top 5 in the wake of featuring on the Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey soundtrack - as I mentioned in the Faith No More GDR entry, the two Bill & Ted films probably had a big hand in shaping my metalhead tendencies which probably tells you everything). Much heavier than Crazy Crazy Nights (probably in keeping with the winds of change that were blowing across the metal scene at the time), it was another that was on my stereo for a while afterwards and still sounds good now.

 I've continued to roll with Kiss ever since through thick and thin - they did kind of fall off my radar after two decidedly underwhelming albums in the mid-'90s (1996's Carnival of Souls and 1998's Psycho Circus, an ill-fated attempt at reuniting the classic '70s line-up which rapidly fell apart) but by this time I was out discovering the band's '70s output and discovering a whole new side to them. At least with 2009's Sonic Boom they delivered a comeback album which was way better than it really had any right to be and 2012's Monster wasn't bad either. I even finally got to see the band live playing a special gig at Kentish Town Forum just after the latter album came out thanks to my lovely girlfriend, now wife, buying me tickets as a birthday present. It was everything you'd want it to be with all the hits present and correct, pyros, fireworks and the whole shebang. Although a combination of Gene's firebreathing, loads of pyro onstage and a sold out and rammed to the gills gig on a boiling hot June night does not a comfortable environment make!

Nope, I don't care how many people want to tell me Kiss are uncool, to me they'll always be one of the first rock bands I got into and I still love listening to their good albums, including Crazy Nights now. It may be bubblegum but when it tastes this good, you certainly won't hear me complaining.