“The KISS Army” will appreciate Simmons’s fondness for them and uncritically consume his heavy-metal memories.
Raunchy, good-hearted memoirs of the prodigiously tongued co-founder of megaselling band KISS.
Simmons (previously Gene Klein, previously Chaim Witz) defends his warts-and-all narrative of pop-culture collisions and 1970s excess by noting, “Those of you who believe in KISS need to know the truth.” The most colorful, engaging sections here deal with Simmons’s childhood in Israel and Queens. He attended yeshiva to please his fiercely devoted mother, yet became obsessed with “television, the Beatles, superheroes, science fiction, girls. Everything about America.” As for the band’s roots: “We all picked up guitars because we all wanted to get laid,” Simmons writes. With his ambitious songwriting partner Paul Stanley, and the rougher-edged Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, Simmons lived and rehearsed in dingy lofts while writing flamboyantly muscular songs like “Strutter” and “Firehouse” and devising schemes to attract industry attention. Their tactics worked well, and their dynamic stage show (incorporating pulp-Kabuki makeup, tight leather, pyrotechnics, fire-breathing, and blood-spitting) rapidly built their reputation. KISS sold out stadiums throughout the ’70s, but by 1982 internal strife and commercial missteps made the band appear shopworn. KISS soldiered on without Criss, Frehley, or makeup throughout the heavy-metal 1980s. The events become less compelling here, as Simmons surveys his merchandising savvy and his then-insatiable drive for short-term romance: Like many aging rockers, he recalls his odyssey with hazy bonhomie and good-humored bluster that can turn nasty, e.g., his gratuitous slams of ’70s art rock bands and ’90s grunge and his acrimonious portrayal of Criss and Frehley as self-destructive chuckleheads who needed to leave the band for everyone’s benefit. They were eventually hired back as contract players, in time for a final tour in makeup and appearances at lucrative, popular fan conventions.
“The KISS Army” will appreciate Simmons’s fondness for them and uncritically consume his heavy-metal memories.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60855-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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