KISS’ first farewell tour wasn’t something that Paul Stanley enjoyed. During a recent episode of The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan, the guitarist opened up about the less-than-ideal 2000 tour that was supposed to be the end of KISS.
“I’m going, ‘I am miserable I’m really miserable,’” Stanley recalled thinking during the tour. “The music was erratic at best. Some nights [were] awful. There was no sense of camaraderie or joy in what we were doing.”
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While Stanley didn’t usually blink at negative reviews, he said that there was something different this time around.
“It’s different when you go, ‘They have their heads up their asses’ or they want to attack what you’re doing [than] when you read things and go, ‘This is right and I’m really unhappy,’” he admitted.
At that point, Stanley said, “it really felt like let’s put the horse down, let’s just shoot it.”
“It went against everything that we had always believed, and that’s that the band is bigger than us,” he noted of the tour.
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It wasn’t until a fan approached him and asked if a 35th anniversary show was in the works that Stanley started to think there still may be a future for the band.
“You still want us?” he recalled asking the fan. He then came to the realization that “we were only gone ’cause we decided to be gone. Nobody wanted us gone.”
The band eventually decided to give a farewell tour another chance in 2019. After delays amid the COVID-19 pandemic, KISS played what they dubbed their final show at Madison Square Garden in 2023.
That wasn’t the end of the road for KISS, though. While their days of heavy makeup and elaborate costumes are behind them, the band is set to play unmasked during a Las Vegas fan event.
“This virtually will become a KISS cruise in Vegas. It doesn’t need a ship. It will have all the familiar touchstones that people love about a KISS cruise,” Stanley said on the Broken Record podcast. “The other bands that are gonna be announced, it’s gonna be everything that everybody loves on KISS cruises… We’re really excited. So I think people should just stay tuned.”
KISS Army Storms Vegas will celebrate the KISS Army’s 50th anniversary and the 30th anniversary of the first KISS fan convention. It will take place November 14-16, 2025.
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
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