Rock Menace A Friendly Phantom Now

ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN (Music Critic)

The downtown record store is jammed, everywhere except the space in front that's being kept clear by a couple of giants in security jackets. At the front of the crowd, there's a skinny long-haired guy with the busted-off neck and strings of an electric guitar in his hand, which he waggles now and then like a magic rattle.

There's another guy holding a big photo in a frame, who says he drove six hours and stayed on the sidewalk all night to see the man whose pouting, painted face fills that frame. And there's a round, ever-smiling woman in white pancake makeup with a black star over one eye, who identifies herself as "the lady who makes the KISS oven mitts."

These people are part of the fan battalion known as the KISS Army, well known for its insatiable desire for anything and everything related to its favourite hard-rock band from the Seventies. The Army is about to make contact with the soft-bodied theatre world of Andrew Lloyd Webber, thanks to Paul Stanley, a founding member of KISS and, as of this week, the newest Phantom of the Opera.

The DJ fingers his mike. "Will you please welcome. . ." The name almost disappears as people start screaming, punching the air, chanting, "Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul!"

He strides in, all in black, his lank hair pulled back from a receding hairline. His manner is poised, his eyebrows perpetually arched, and 30 years of onstage pouting have left him with a tendency to purse his lips as the fans blurt out their questions. They want to know: Will the band tour again? Will it keep going with the original four members, who reunited for what turned out to be the biggest-grossing tour of 1996? Stanley answers (yes to the first question, maybe to the second), then makes the pitch for his present gig.

"I like romantic, passionate theatre, musical or otherwise," he says. "The Phantom is the best version of a family opera that I can conceive of participating in."

Somebody asks how his five-year-old son reacted to the sight of his father in rehearsal for Phantom -- possibly reflecting the fan's own anticipated trauma. "When you've seen your dad dressed in tights and eight-inch heels," Stanley says, "seeing him in the Phantom costume is no big deal."

Oven mitts. Family opera. Dad. Whatever happened to the macho, polecat ethos of KISStopia -- that fantasy realm where, as one of the band's vintage hits put it, you can rock and roll all night and party every day? Where sexual politics have stood still since the early Playboy era?

Not to worry; it's all here, family values and Hefnerian snigger, wrapped up in one sleek package. When a fan asks where the 47-year-old Stanley gets his inspiration, he points at the full breasts of a young woman standing nearby. Everybody laughs. Rock on, Dad.

A couple of hours earlier, at his hotel, Stanley was picking over a breakfast of Earl Grey tea and sugar-frosted flakes. He doesn't usually rise or eat this early, but preparing for the night-loving Phantom is essentially a daylight occupation.

Stanley, who makes his official debut Wednesday, is the eighth person to take the title role in Toronto, not counting stand-ins and understudies (Jeff Hyslop, who takes over after Stanley finishes his nine-week run, will close the show Sept. 26). The transition from touring with KISS was not exactly leisurely.

"I came off the stage at a stadium in Mexico City, had my hair cut off, went home and spent a day with my family, and then flew here and went straight into rehearsals," he said. "I wasn't aware of how intense it would be. Rehearsals for maybe the first two weeks were just me. It was like being in a classroom and having no one to hide behind.You keep getting called on, not the kid in front of you."

The first call came 10 years after Stanley decided that Phantom was the next best thing to rock 'n' roll. He was so enamoured of the show that he didn't mind climbing down from his rock-star pedestal to submit to an audition.

"It's got a great love story, great special effects and a really interesting character," he said. "And Andrew Lloyd Webber's music has a lot of the structure and melodic content of some Italian opera, which I also love."

Lloyd Webber's Puccini-flavoured romance is admittedly remote from the sound and spirit of KISS anthems like I Pledge Allegiance to the State of Rock & Roll -- one of Stanley's songwriting contributions to the band's latest album, Psycho Circus. But the divide narrows when you compare ballads like KISS's I Finally Found My Way to Lloyd Webber's All I Ask of You.

"It just connected with me the first time I heard it," Stanley says. "I kind of had an epiphany -- how's that for a good word?"

He still talks like a kid from Queen's, New York, where he was born into a music-loving Jewish family in 1952. His gestures are soft, almost feminine, and his speech is studded with the kind of homespun aphorisms you might hear from a well-meaning aunt: "Life is to live;" "As long as we enjoy every day, let's not worry too much about the future." And the show-stopper, the one that thuds on the breakfast table like a stack of gold and platinum KISS albums: "You can't argue with success."

KISS was so successful in 1996 that it made the cover of Forbes magazine. And why not? Bob Dylan had to license The Times They Are A'Changing for a Bank of Montreal commercial before fans would believe that their prophet was also a businessman.

But KISS's transgressive exterior has always kept in close touch with its interest in total customer satisfaction. On Psycho Circus, the band offers several head-banging tributes to the virtues of working hard and winning big, of listening to the fans and giving them what they want, while somehow claiming to be "exiles from the human race."

Rarely has a pose of rebellion been so profitable. KISS has sold 75 million records since 1974, and controls a vigorous merchandising empire of band-related comic books, clothing, arcade games, toys, commemorative silver coins, and even toilet paper.

"KISS really has a life of its own at this point," Stanley says. "There is a KISS which is the four live individuals, but there's another KISS in the merchandise. That will be perpetuated and go on indefinitely, regardless of whether or not the band exists. In a sense, it's a coveted trademark. I have no problems with that, I'm very proud of it."

For its first decade, KISS was the band without a face, never photographed without its garish black-and-white makeup. Its stage shows were legendary for their extravagant costuming, and for the Grand Guignol antics of bassist Gene Simmons.

For many fans, the face-painted KISS is the band for the ages. When I asked a Toronto video-store clerk about tapes the band made after wiping off the goo in 1983, he said: "That stuff never rents. Everybody wants their make-up stuff."

There were a few relatively lean years in the early Eighties, and a couple of spin-offs that Stanley doesn't like to recall, including a made-for-TV movie called KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. It was supposed to be "Star Wars crossed with A Hard Day's Night," but it turned out to be a cheesy fairground riff on the same Gaston Leroux novel that inspired Lloyd Webber's musical. In the film,band members emit rays from their eyes, roar like lions and fly through the air as convincingly as if they were suspended by wires. The climax is a campy battle royal between the real KISS and a quartet of identically made-up imposters. It's a must-see segment for postmodernists who may wonder who the "real" KISS might be, especially after umpteen changes in lineup.

The original members regrouped in 1995 for an MTV Unplugged session. "In a manner of speaking, we dated for months before we committed to doing the reunion tour," Stanley says. "I always say the time to find out that you don't want to be in bed with somebody is not when your clothes are off."

And when the bed was finally turned down, everyone was back in full makeup, just like in the old days.

"The trouble with the past is that it grows bigger and bigger the further away it is," Stanley says. "So you're not only competing with the reality of what once was, you're competing with the fantasy of what people remember. For us to go back out and not look virtually the same would have been a disappointment."

The Phantom, of course, always looks the same, even after trying to win Christine for 10 lucrative years at Toronto's Pantages Theatre. Stanley believes that the KISS Army and Phantom's more staid audience may be closer than most people think: "You never know. Take off the doctor's jacket and you find a KISS shirt underneath."

If Stanley's doctor wears a KISS shirt, he or she has earned it. After 30 years of leaping around on stage and pumping his right arm in well-paid defiance, the singer has had surgery on both knees and one shoulder. He once broke a rib during a show when he ran into a piece of metal, and one ear shows signs of permanent burn damage -- not surprising considering the flares and fireworks of a typical KISS show.

There's nothing quite so perilous in Phantom, though the show makes some demands Stanley finds novel. "It teaches economy," he said. "There are some scenes where there's an incredible sense of vulnerability and exposure, of a different kind than I'm used to. And I love that. I never got into this to turn it into The Rocky Horror Show."

Back at the record store, the KISS Army is drinking in The Presence, while hundreds more wait on the sidewalk for a chance to do the same. Someone asks Stanley whether he collects KISS merchandise himself. After a diplomatic pause, he ventures: "I usually keep two or three of everything." Somebody else wants him to bless the Leafs' chances for the Stanley Cup. "The Paul Stanley Cup," he quips. "It's a double D, isn't it?"

It's corny, it's sexist, but the Army doesn't care. And, after 30 years of money and fame, neither does Stanley. To quote another of his aphorisms: "The public knows very well what it likes, and should be left to enjoy it."