Listen to the Paul Stanley interview

Last summer, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons sat in the Ramada Plaza Hotel in Indianapolis and told fans not to expect them to reunite with the other original members of Kiss, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss.

The reunited band will be in full makeup and costumes on Friday, playing a sold-out show at Market Square Arena. “I think what I was saying,” Stanley says by phone from Toronto, “was that there was no way I was going to play with the guys that I stopped playing with” – drummer Criss in 1980, lead guitarist Frehley in 1982. “In other words, if people were the same people that they were, then there’s certainly no reason to get back together.

“But having spent time with everybody, it became real obvious that everybody was of like mind and focused and clear-headed and ready to do this the way it would have to be done. And that is, 100 percent. There’s nothing worse than tarnishing people’s memories of something that was great with something that isn’t. If we were going to do this, we had to be able to at least live up to what we had done in the past and, ideally, smash it.”

Whether Kiss achieves that onstage remains to be seen, but the band certainly has created excitement at the box office. Four shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden sold out in 45 minutes and fans in Detroit grabbed up 40,000 tickets in 40 minutes.

Indianapolis was comparatively slow; one Market Square Arena show took two hours to sell out. Next to Garth Brooks – who grew up loving Kiss – this is the second-highest-grossing tour of the year. Kiss takes in nearly

$650,000 a night, according to the magazine Pollstar, which monitors the concert industry. The band sees its current wave of popularity as a backlash against the anger and seriousness of today’s rock music. “Life is good, life is great. We all have the opportunity to live the American dream,” Stanley says. “If your life isn’t good, you have the ability to make it good.”

So you could say that everything is good for Kiss. “But that would be a lack of respect for how things are going,” Stanley says. “It’s common knowledge that they’re going amazingly well. And the closer you get, the better it looks.”

Apart, then together

In the late 1970s, Kiss didn’t look nearly as good. Fame, drugs and alcohol combined to splinter the band, which had married hard rock, theatrics and pyrotechnics to become one of the world’s most popular acts.

To critics, Kiss was a cartoon. But fans considered the band’s music to be an integral part of their lives. At the Kiss Convention last July at Indianapolis’ Ramada Plaza Hotel, 600 people paid $100 each to meet the band, ask questions and hear a two-hour, all-request show.

At the time, Bruce Kulick was Kiss’ lead guitarist; Eric Singer was the drummer. “We had just finished with them arguably the best studio album we’d done in 10 years,” Stanley says. “But this came along and it was clearly the right time to do it. They’ve been nothing but champs about us going out and doing this. This monument – this building that we’ve built over the last 20 years that is Kiss – has to be built on a pretty solid foundation. Ace, Gene, Peter and myself are the ones who built that foundation.”money not the object, he says

Stanley says their reunion has nothing to do with money (“If this weren’t done with the right spirit and with the right intent, it would never have happened”) but doesn’t know whether the “foundation” will stay together. “The only way to do this and enjoy it is to not think about the future,” he says. “As long as this is fun for us, we’ll do it. When it stops being fun, we’ll go home. There’s nothing more transparent to an audience than a band onstage that isn’t getting along.”

Yes, they are getting along, Stanley says. Yes, he says, they are clear- headed, smarter and better musically than in their heyday.

And while this tour is focusing on songs from the first six Kiss records, Stanley cautions that fans shouldn’t think of it as an exercise in nostalgia.

“It wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying to be playing for an audience that wanted a stroll down memory lane,” he says.

“It wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying to play for an audience that wanted to relive its past as it is to play for the audience that we’re playing for, which I would say is overwhelmingly people who’ve never seen us. They’ve heard the stories about us or have seen old footage of us and are really only judging us by what they listen to today.

“That’s how something has to stand up. It can’t live on its past.”