-
Functions
“People can’t stop talking about Ace doing his pick-tapping thing. Given that this was ’77, before Eddie Van Halen did Eruption, it’s even more incredible”: Eric Johnson, Nuno Bettencourt, and 40 other guitar legends share their favorite Kiss guitar moments
(Image credit: NBC NewsWire/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images)
It had to happen eventually, Kiss fans. We knew the proverbial End of the Road was coming, but it’s taken the band 5 years to wrap things up, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Back in September 2018, when Kiss announced the End of the Road tour, saying, ‘We’ve got time’ was easy. Some hardcore fans hoped that Kiss, now consisting of Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, along with Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer, would change their minds. There was a desire to keep the good times going.
Alas, Kiss fans, this time, it’s really the end — we’re going to have to say goodbye to our beloved band of masked superheroes, who took the world by storm back in 1973, and from there embarked on an extraordinary 50-year run of blistering bombast.
After 5 years, one global pandemic, 13 legs, and over 250 shows, Kiss will culminate the End of the Road on December 2, 2023, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, the same city where the band originated all those years ago.
Nostalgia and bouts of fire-breathing denial aside, it goes without saying that Kiss’s music has been influential, especially from a guitar perspective. They couldn’t have possibly predicted their impact as young men wielding six-strings in the early ’70s. While Stanley and Frehley changed the world, Vinnie Vincent, Mark St. John, Bruce Kulick, and Tommy Thayer did their part to contribute to the band’s legacy.
Looking back, Stanley is all too aware of his contributions, recently telling Guitar World that his vision for Kiss is and always has been to create the sound of “one big guitar.”
“I’ve had some famous guitar players at my house, and invariably, we’d start playing, and I remember several of them on different occasions saying, ‘Hey, wow, you can really play!’ They were impressed, which maybe made sense early in Kiss’s career, because at that time, it was easy to be overwhelmed by what we do live and have my ability be overshadowed.
“But at this point,” he continues, “you’d have to be shortsighted and perhaps more than a little hard of hearing not to get what’s going on. If you don’t get it, then you’ve probably never seen Kiss.”
His perspective often differs from Stanley’s (he reportedly won’t be on hand for Kiss’s final NYC shows,
