THE KISS-OFF
My initiation into KISS world had nothing to do with the music. As if it ever did.
I found myself in New York on a Monday night in October of ’74 after returning from one of those excessive and expensive junkets to London that rock writers used to avail themselves of. A photographer I knew had invited me to go out to dinner, but first we had to stop by a panel for NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) that he had to shoot. I said yes, not because I was enticed by the rather provocative title—“Superstar or Superstud and Homosexuality in Music: Is it a turn-on or a turn-off?”—although I probably should have been. No, I was more interested in the blinis and caviar at the Russian Tea Room, a hot spot at the time that Yoko Ono used to regularly frequent, always sitting at one of the front tables.
The panel was held at Columbia Records Studio B, where Dylan recorded New Morning and Simon and Garfunkel did Bridge Over Troubled Water. When I arrived there were only a handful of people sitting on folded chairs in a small room that couldn’t have held more than 30 people comfortably. But most of the psychic space was already taken up by four looming creatures in fetish wear, looking like warlords of the underworld.
