In the early ’80s, right around the time MTV was reaching its full ascendancy, the band KISS decided to abandon their trademark make-up and fantastic costumes. I suppose you can’t blame them. After a decade of performing in that stuff and never letting anyone see their true faces, the gimmick was probably feeling pretty stale. Also, it seems reasonable to imagine they might have had concerns about wanting to be taken seriously, and that the make-up might have seemed like a barrier to that. Or perhaps the “unmasking” was a gimmick in itself, just a stunt to draw attention back to themselves and boost sagging record sales. Whatever the reasoning behind it, it must’ve been a huge risk for them. Essentially, they chose to become less visually distinctive just as the visual was becoming enormously important to the music industry.

Whether or not they hurt themselves either commercially or artistically with this “unmasking” is a question for genuine connoisseurs, rather than a greatest-hits dilettante like myself. But I do know that KISS continued recording hit singles for many years after they revealed their faces, including one I was hoping to hear at the concert the other night, the title track from their 1983 album Lick It Up. Alas, it wasn’t part of the setlist. So I’m going to play it for you here instead:

This is admittedly a stupid video. Skanky women squatting in what is presumably supposed to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland but looks more like the back alley behind Safeway… the interminable shots of the band’s crotches as they, um, walk… a couple of little plastic skulls laying in the road, trying hard to look ominous… everyone eating cake and frosting or something squirted out of mustard bottles (yeah, I know, phallic imagery was never subtle or especially clever in heavy-metal videos, but this was just dumb)… seriously, what the hell, man? Things improve somewhat when we cut to just the band playing in the burning ruins, but all the scenes that take place in daylight… oy. Even Gene Simmons looks embarrassed, and that takes something. It’s hard to imagine how a band that had always been so conscious of the power of visual imagery could have been so out of their depth on this one.

So yeah, not a fan of this video… but I do like the song. It’s catchy, and there’s that cool little guitar thing just before the second verse. And I’ve got to be honest, I enjoy a good innuendo. Although this song is blunt enough that I’m not sure it even qualifies as innuendo. It’s just plain suggestive. But that, of course, was irresistible to a naughty boy growing up in the buckled-down atmosphere of small-town Utah in 1983…