Let the word go forth from this day forward!
Let it be heard from every hamlet and village be it on mountaintop or valley floor!
Let the children sing it out! Unafraid of getting litigious calls from Paul and Gene's attorneys!
UNMASKED AND THE ELDER ARE GREAT RECORDS AND NOT TO BLAME FOR KISS's EARLY 80's FALL FROM GRACE.
The story can now be told, gather round, as I strum my lute and sing as bards do of yon days of old....THIS is why KISS went into the crapper circa 1980, I'll just jump right in.....
KISS became a mainstream fad in the late 70's which was great except that mainstream fads all have one thing in common,
They have three years to live. After which the backlash ensues and they are tossed in the Pop-culture trash.
So, in 1980 KISS released a great, logically styled, New-Wave-Power-Pop masterpiece called Unmasked. This was the year the backlash began. They could have released Destroyer in 1980 and it would have flopped. Unmasked wasn't a total failure but sold FAR less than the worldwide smash Dynasty (4 x platinum) KISS panicked and blamed a good record for the downturn so they decided to get adventurous and record a concept record, the infamous Music from the Elder,
now for myself and anyone else who was too young to be there, this is a confusing record, not because it's confusing, but because IT'S EXCELLENT. It's a departure from the usual KISS record, but it does sound like KISS and is a great record from top to bottom, Lou Reed co/wrote some of the songs and Bob Ezrin produced. We've been told all our lives how horrible it is and on first listen we see we've been lied to...
KISS was HATED by the media in the 70's and the thought of them releasing a Spinal Tap record and falling on their faces was titillating beyond belief (The cover to Unmasked pokes fun at this relationship) The record failed again, this time BADLY, but NOT because of the music, but because KISS shouldn't have been releasing ANYTHING in 1981, they needed to go away for a while, but they didn't, the press was MERCILESS and they were considered D.O.A at the time.
Stay with me, I am going to answer your question, but you need to understand a few things before it can be answered.
OK, So after the Elder debacle KISS was desperate, to make matters worse they had signed a new huge record deal in early 1980 when they were still one of the biggest bands in the world but no one had forseen thier incredible fall in so short a time, the deal was predicated on 3 original members being in the band and Ace had decided to quit (The only reason he is pictured on the original cover is so they could collect the advance fee owed under their old record contract, as soon as it was known Ace had left, the label renegotiated the deal, for FAR less money, this is a crucial factor in answering your question.)
KISS had always been a rock n' roll band and nothing really resembling a Heavey Metal band but in 1982 they took stock of the music scene and figured the best option for trying to save thier careers was to do a heavy metal record.
Enter Creatures of the night, considered by many o be one of their best (Personally not a fan)
What a lot of people neglect to mention is the Creatures Floped as bad as The Elder had NOBODY bought it when it was first released.
KISS realized at this point people were listening with thier eyes instead of their ears, they knew they were a hairs breadth away from being dropped by their label and in a last ditch attempt to regain relevance took off the make up and recorded Lick it up.
Lick it up was inferior in everyway to Unmasked, The Elder and COTN, but sold more than those three records combined, it went double platnum.
KISS learned a lesson, sadly I wish they hadn't but they can only go by what they experience.
"Nobody cares what the records sound like, they care about the packaging, the perception"
Now, here is a specific answer: Armed with this new revelation and working under the confines of a much stingyer record contract KISS was not about to put themselves in debt with high recording budgets and made their next several Non-make-up records as cheaply and quickly as possible, under the terms of any deal production costs are recoupable by the label based on future revenue, so why spend money on something that didn't increase sales?
This philosophy was never more crudely on display then on 1988's Hot in the shade, the record was a collection of demos. One track (Can you guess which) is Gene and Bruce Kulick playing along with a Roland 707 drum machine, another is Gene, Bruce, and a DMX drum machine. PRODUCTION COSTS = ZERO. RECORD SALES = PLATINUM (With a top ten single)
There were two occasions when this version of KISS decided to invest in their records sonics. One time was Crazy Nights Ron Nevison was paid the big bucks to get them to the Def Leopard promised land, this record produced a top 10 hit in the UK, but domestically, it went platinum and stalled, thus selling half as much as the Paul and Gene produced ASYLUM, the other time was when Ezrin was brought back for the critically acclaimed REVENGE.
As much as REVENGE is lauded by fans, in the first year, it was released it only went GOLD,
So THIS is why KISS records from that era sound so blah, they were done haphazardly on a shoestring budget after it had been proved to the band that investing in a records sonics did nothing to increase its sales.
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