But I wouldn’t say they ruined it, exactly. Rather—to indulge in the psuedo-political hyperbole rock critics love to abuse—it started the kind of Domino Effect that Kissinger would have told you Vietnam was meant to stop. Sgt. Pepper started all those bad good vibes, but we wouldn’t be where we are today if the likes of Pete Townshend, Roger Waters, Ray Davies, Keith Emerson, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Howe hadn't carved their faces atop a regrettable Mt. Rushmore of rock pomposity. The best-intentioned of the lot, Pete Townshend deserves as much blame as the Beatles if not more, since it was The Who’s Tommy that must live in infamy as the first, fateful rock opera.

It’s hard to believe a man as smart as Townshend actually believed marrying rock ‘n’ roll's fun and intensity and youthful spirit of rebellion and release with the mind-numbing, stentorian inscrutability of opera was a good idea. Opera singers are old, fat, establishment, and imperious. At least in 1969, when Tommy debuted, rock singers weren’t like that yet. It just made no sense.

Two decades later, long after rock 'n’ roll had given up hope of dying before it got old, I spent a summer working with two metalheads from the head-banging-happy cornfields of western Illinois. Always on the lookout for new bands and genres, I didn't think I’d learn much from them. In fact, I can remember few particulars of my midwest musical exposure; sadly, it was the late '80s and thus a blur of cod-pieced blown-dry glamour boys showing their sensitive side in one excruciating power ballad after another. I can recall only one musical revelation of note, and it began with a conversation I remember verbatim. “When they first hit in the early 70s, it was hard to ignore the principles KISS stood for,” my East Peorian co-worker told me. “What were those?” I asked. With academic precision, he replied, “Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n' roll, of course.”

I recently caught a snippet of an interview with Paul Stanley promoting yet another redundant KISS greatest hits album, and he said, just as earnestly as my friend, “The reason people continue to buy Kiss albums and see our shows is because our songs contain eternal truths.”

Inspired by the Illinois boys' example, I've assembled a respectable KISS collection over the last decade, and I can confidently tell you that “Star Child” Paul is of course speaking of the “eternal truths” found in such anthems as “Shout It Out Loud,” “Love Gun,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night.” And in the early '70s era of Quadrophenia, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, In The Court of The Crimson King, and Tales From Topographic Oceans, those shoot-from-the-crotch sentiments must have seemed incredibly refreshing and refreshingly rock 'n' roll. This was disposable music instinctively aware of its disposability. As Gene Simmons said when their ascent began, "Everything about this band--our riffs, our lyrics, our looks--is below average. But I guarantee in six months we'll be the biggest band in the world.”

Rock opera hit The Wall, so to speak, in 1979, and with it the music plunged to depths no one could have ever imagined possible. A multi-platinum mess that only made a shred of sense if you saw the utterly nonsensical movie that accompanied it, Pink Floyd’s The Wall sold especially well because no one cared. The album made you glad Elvis was already dead, because you knew he would have stuck to truck-driving if he'd realized this would be the end result of giving white people the idea of playing rock 'n' roll.

Meanwhile KISS had recently gone gold with another single, the estimable “I Was Made For Loving You,” but as the Pink Floyd debacle unfolded, the band was cashing in big down under on the Unmasked tour. When they returned stateside in early ’81 (minus long-time drummer Peter “Cat-Man” Criss, who was said to be writing a novel), guitarist “Space Ace" Frehley promised fans the band's hardest-rocking LP ever. Front-man Gene “The Demon” Simmons and producer Bob Ezrin had another idea: namely, to produce a monstrously ambitious rock opera steeped in the very repugnant rock pomposity to which they'd long provided such an energetically mindless alternative.

Titled Music From “The Elder,” and seeming, from the liner notes, to be the soundtrack from a movie apparently never made, the resulting album made songwriting partners of Simmons and Lou Reed and placed KISS at the center of a rock fable of Arthurian proportions. "When the earth was young, they were already old…" the liner notes began, and proceeded to sketch the story of a godlike council known as “The Elder” who have watched over a “virgin world and all its creatures” since the dawn of time. In times when “evil is loosed… to destroy all that is good," we're told, The Elder anoint and train a warrior, a champion, to cast out that evil and save the world. The album begins with a single oboe playing a simple theme that will become the melody of “Just A Boy,” in which the hero confesses his fear that he's not up to the challenge that stands before him. Through songs like “Dark Light" (Frehley's lone contribution), we learn of the evil descending on the world (“a darkness never ending”) that he must conquer; in “Under The Rose," what seems to be a large choir of Gregorian monks (but is clearly the multi-tracked voices of Simmons and Stanley) tells the boy of the sacrifices and commitment he must make to save the world; in the climactic “I,” our hero claims his victory and proclaims in a righteous, fist-pumping frenzy: “I believe in something more than you can understand--I believe in me.”

It's easy to see the album's Arthurian theme as a rather egotistical metaphor for KISS' hiring and breaking in new drummer Eric Carr. But it's The Elder's piece de resistance, the Simmons/Reed composition “A World Without Heroes,” that bespeaks the heartfelt message at the album's core: “A world without heroes is like a never-ending race… Where you don't know what you're after/Or if something's after you/And you don't know why you don't know." Sure, it's sentimental hogwash, but it's far from the programmatic cash-in hokum of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and every other sickening metal ballad that followed it.

And Simmons’ soulful reading of “Heroes” isn't even the best performance on the album. “Dark Light” has a stinging Frehley solo, “Mr. Blackwell” a killer bass line. (The coolest bass part of all may be the pulsing line on “Only You,” that sent out such vibrations my Radio Shack turntable couldn't even play it.) Limited as Stanley and Simmons are as vocalists, they sing the hell out of everything from the passionate “Only You” to the plaintive “Just A Boy” to the inspiringly balls-out “I.” Throughout they come on like a bunch of blue-collar rockers determined not so much to show they have something to say (misguidedly or not, they know they do), but rather, that they've got the chops and the pipes to say it convincingly. And for my money that makes it one of the few rock “message” albums--and the only rock opera--worth the price of admission, if only because there's a measure of humility in the presentation. (Take that, Roger Waters!)

As if to prove the world wasn't ready for a message album from the likes of KISS, The Elder was a total flop: the first KISS album not to go Gold, it scared the band away from ever trying anything remotely that ambitious again. They never even played the songs live except for one TV performance, according to the liner notes on the new remastered CD; Simmons later said, “I don't know what the hell we were thinking.”

Returning their music's aim to regions well south of the heart, KISS recaptured their hold on rock's “eternal truths" and survived several more monster tours and inevitable personnel changes (among them drummer Eric Carr's early death) along the way to reunite the original members, a decade and a half later, on MTV Unplugged. An admittedly odd setting for a band whose fire-and-brimstone reputation was no metaphor--Simmons' trademark being actual on-stage fire-breathing--KISS nonetheless made nice and mellow. And midway through the set, Simmons pulled out a KISS chestnut that drew mostly blanks among a crowd that certainly included more than its share of kitsch-mongering thirtysomething former KISS fanatics. It was none other than “A World Without Heroes.”

OK, I admit it. I was never one of those KISS fanatics in their heyday. I didn't listen to KISS for a reason (besides that I was just a kid and that horror-movie makeup scared me): namely, because I was into Stevie Wonder, The Spinners, and yes, Sgt. Pepper. For the most part, I've always had “good” musical taste. And yes, I’d probably think Peter Gabriel or Pete Townshend was an idiot if he'd stuck a song like “Dark Light” in the middle of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway or Quadrophenia. But the fact is, I'd probably never even get to it. I like The Who, and although Genesis never did it for me, I like some of Peter Gabriel's solo work. But did Townshend really expect me to plow through two LPs of crap on Quadrophenia to unearth a couple of gems like “5:15” or “Love, Reign O'er Me?” I’ve got a store-bought Quadrophenia tape somewhere but I'd never have known those songs if I hadn't heard them elsewhere. But I found “Dark Light” and “World Without Heroes” and I can enjoy them individually anytime (now that I'm a proud owner of the remastered CD) and what's more, I can hear them as I listen to the album straight through, something I could never do with anything else in the whole miserable “rock opera" genre.

So if you’re reading here, and your interest was even a little piqued when you heard that oddly enchanting “World Without Heroes” song on Unplugged and wondered if you’d ever find out where it came from without plowing through KISS' now-enormous (and mostly wretched) catalog, now you know. So check it out. You won’t be disappointed. And you might even be inspired to save the world from evil. Somebody ought to do it.

Click here to buy Music from 'The Elder' at Amazon.com!

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