Kiss promoted their Oct. 2, 1979, concert at St. Louis’ Checkerdome in a unique way, appearing on a live television interview with their backs to the camera.
With only their long curly hair visible, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons (the latter wearing backward sunglasses) appear to be doing their best impressions of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family while talking to Dick Ford and John Auble of KSD’s Newsbeat.
“What we’re doing on stage is so theatrical, and the image that we’re creating has such a tremendous amount of mystique,” Stanley explains when asked why the band had always refused to be filmed or photographed without their onstage makeup. “We’d really rather leave our fans with that image… there’s a lot of people who look like this, but there’s not a lot of people who can look the way we do on stage.”
At one point Stanley notes that he and Simmons look like they could be in a Doublemint gum commercial, while Simmons assures the hosts that offstage Kiss were just normal guys: “We eat french fries, we play racquetball.”
In his 2001 book Kiss and Make-Up, Simmons explains that keeping his face hidden became much more difficult when he was dating Cher: “I was used to the idea that photographers tried to capture me without my Kiss makeup, this kicked it up tremendously. We were constantly hounded by paparazzi, night and day. I started covering my face with handkerchiefs, like a bandit.”
According to Ace Frehley, many fans wanted to preserve the mystery. “In 1978 a photographer saw Michael Corby of the Babys in Studio 54 and thought it was Paul Stanley,” he recalled in Kiss: Behind the Mask. “The New York Daily News printed the photo. They had to correct themselves a few days later. Fans wrote in and said, ‘Please don’t print pictures of Paul like that.’ Everybody asks if we’ll unmask ourselves before we quit. It guess it’s inevitably going to happen… once we do it, it’s going to damage the myth.”
Read More: The Day Kiss Finally Removed Their Makeup
Four years later, with Frehley and founding drummer Peter Criss gone and their career in desperate need of a jump start, Kiss removed their makeup just before releasing 1983’s Lick It Up, revealing their real faces live on MTV. The move helped revive the band’s fortunes, and they released several platinum selling albums before putting the greasepaint back on for a massively successful original lineup reunion tour in 1996.
Watch Kiss’s 1979 ‘Newsbeat’ Interview
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Gallery Credit: Matthew Wilkening
