Welcome to another edition of From My Collection. Today’s album is one I’ve been wanting to tackle for a very long time. In fact, I’ve had a fascination with this album for the better part of a decade. Even when I didn’t care for KISS’ Music from “The Elder” (AKA junior high), it amazed me that such a black sheep of an album could exist. It further amazes me that for a band who were cranking out multiplatinum releases left and right just a few short years earlier, The Elder didn’t even go gold. What brought the self proclaimed “hottest band in the world” to this point? Why do so many continue to disregard this album 40 years later? Is it really THAT bad? In this week’s essay, I attempt to answer all of these questions and more. “Will you give your life under the rose?”
Alright, so before we can even touch on this doozy of an album, we have to recap the last couple years of KISStory circa 1981. Ever since 1979’s Dynasty (fueled by lead single “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”), KISS has failed to replicate their once “Larger Than Life” status. 1980’s Unmasked was a respectable attempt at rehashing the pop rock/disco formula of Dynasty, but barely went gold here in the States. It sold so poorly that the band didn’t even tour behind it here, choosing instead to play Australia where the lite rock ballad “Shandi” assumed mega hit status.
Furthermore, trouble was brewing within the KISS camp. After years of tension dating back to the Love Gun era, Peter Criss finally left the band. Could Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Ace Frehley soldier on without the Catman? The answer was a resounding “yes” with the addition of previously unknown drummer Eric Carr AKA The Fox. The plan was for the “new and improved” KISS to go into the studio and record an album that was “hard and heavy from start to finish, straight-on rock and roll that will knock your socks off”. At least that’s what the KISS Army newsletter claimed. That’s not what ended up happening.
Instead, Gene Simmons arrived one day with a vision for a grandiose rock opera. After six albums of rowdy rock n’ roll and two albums of pop rock bandwagoning, it was time for KISS to go “serious”…or at least as “serious” as KISS could attempt to be. Mind you, Pink Floyd was still basking in the success of the Bob Ezrin produced The Wall. Simmons figured he’d bring Ezrin back to the helm to work the same magic on his tale of a boy being trained by a mysterious group of elders to combat the evil forces of the world. It just so happens that this boy is next in a long line of elders, who have been there from the beginning of mankind, watching our every move. Seems easy to understand, right?
The problem herein is that Simmons’ ability as a storyteller is mediocre at best. Similar premises would be utilized to much greater effect on albums like Blue Öyster Cult’s Imaginos and Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. The story of The Elder is almost too big for its own britches, becoming lost, convoluted, and downright confusing throughout the course of the album. That said, this isn’t to undermine the music within, which is for all purposes awesome. That’s right. Yours truly is about to go where no man (or perhaps very few) has ever gone before: I’m going to defend The Elder.
The album opens with one of the finest songs in the KISS catalog, “The Oath”. I recently said in a group chat that adulthood is struggling to decide which song entitled “The Oath” is better, KISS’ or Mercyful Fate’s. All joking aside, “The Oath” kicks all sorts of ass. It’s a go for the throat, no holds barred metal song with epic riffing, powerhouse drumming, and over the top falsettos from Paul Stanley, who goes full David Byron for this album. Did you expect anything less? Such dramatic lyrical content requires equally dramatic vocals, which indeed continue after the instrumental “Fanfare” on “Just a Boy”. If “The Oath” is this story’s prologue, “Just a Boy” is where things really begin.
“Dark Light” is Ace Frehley’s sole vocal performance of the album. It also comes off as the only song where Frehley had any significant input. It’s a guitar driven showcase of the raw, organic, pleasantly uneven hard rock that made up his 1978 solo album. Such “unevenness” had to be kept to a minimum, so not to disrupt Simmons’ creative vision…whatever that was. Four songs into The Elder and we’ve heard tinges of metal, hard rock, prog rock, and rock opera. I’m not even sure if KISS themselves knew what they were exactly for. “Only You” only adds to the confusion, coming off as a commercially conscious Rush song. Side A closes with my second favorite song of the album, “Under the Rose”. Ominous atmosphere, chanting vocals, nefarious guitars: “Under the Rose” might be the least KISS sounding song that KISS ever recorded. If anything, it comes off as a distant ancestor to the type of black metal heard on Bathory’s Under the Sign of the Black Mark.
As we flip over to side B, we’re greeted by the album’s lead single, “A World Without Heroes”. This symphonic ballad was written by Simmons, Stanley, Ezrin, and…Lou Reed. Yep, THAT Lou Reed. I’m not entirely sure how the famed Velvet Underground main man found his way into KISS world, but he contributed some lyrics to “Heroes”, as well as the aforementioned “Dark Light”. With its gentle melodies, melancholic lyrics, and passionate vocals, I feel that “Heroes” was written as a blatant attempt to land KISS on adult contemporary radio. That doesn’t make it a bad song. I and a theater full of KISS nerds absolutely lost it when Simmons performed it on his 2018 solo tour. It just comes off as what it is: “the single”. Unfortunately, “Heroes” only made it to #56 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“Mr. Blackwell” is yet another oddball of a song, sounding like a distant cousin of “Only You”. It’s hooky and enjoyable, but proof positive that despite his most ardent attempts, Simmons cannot write prog. He can try all he wants, but it’ll still come out sounding like something completely different…like “Mr. Blackwell”. “Escape from the Island” is the second of three instrumentals on this album. On this brief, frantic rager, Frehley wails away on his signature Les Paul one last time before his abrupt (or not so abrupt) 1982 departure.
This brings us to the album’s unofficial closer, “Odyssey”. Did you think Lou Reed was an unorthodox songwriting partner for KISS? Well how would you feel if I told you this song was completely written by Tony Powers? I know. You’d ask, “Who the hell is Tony Powers?” Let’s just say you know him better as Jimmy Two Times from Goodfellas. Granted, this was nearly a decade before he got the papers, the papers, but still. Vocally, Stanley hits it out of the ballpark with yet another bombastic Meat Loaf-esque performance. If The Elder foreshadowed anything, it was the vocal heroics Stanley would unleash into the 80s. While I feel for the sake of sequencing the album should’ve ended here, of course it continues for two more songs…or one song and an epilogue, this of course being the quirky “I” and “Finale” respectively.
So is The Elder really THAT bad? That depends on who you ask. I’d vouch for no. It’s stylistically and compositionally uneven. It’s uncharacteristic of KISS, with even the hard rocking moments sounding like anything but KISS. However, I wouldn’t call it bad. I’d actually go as far to echo a sentiment of a friend which is if this album were recorded by Black Sabbath or Judas Priest, it would be hailed by the metal underground as a “forgotten classic”. But because it was recorded by the oft maligned KISS, it remains the obligatory whipping boy. The older I get, the more I appreciate The Elder in all its bizarre, unhinged glory. Perhaps you will two if you give this dark horse another chance.