The book, as it turns out, is better than the band. So I wasn’t expecting more than a fling with my distant adolescence when I picked up James Campion’s Shout It Out Loud, subtitled The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon. I came to consider them a mediocre band at best-the inane lyrics, the lack of musicianship-comic-book characters who reached stratospheric heights through hype, stage antics, and teen power. I still enjoy hearing the occasional KISS tune on the radio, but I no longer have any of the vinyl albums I collected, and only three or four of their later hits made it to my MP3 player. I haven’t been a KISS fan for decades-probably since I ditched my cap and gown after graduating from college. Painful as it is to admit in print, I fought for KISS in the ever-popular, high school debate over whether KISS or Led Zeppelin was the better band. I still recall a friend sitting me down at a party of eighth-graders to listen to this bad-ass, new song “Detroit, Rock City.” By the time I was fifteen or so, I had covered sixteen square feet of the wall behind my bed with a KISS poster, a medley of concert scenes-close-ups, solo photos, group shots. The first LP I ever owned was KISS’s next release: Destroyer. I wasn’t just mesmerized by the fantastic figures wielding guitars and drumsticks I loved the music.
The first rock album I ever listened to was Alive!, which my older brother had brought home and I sneaked out of his room to listen to whenever he wasn’t around. Shout It Out Loud: The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion. Shout It Out Loud begins as a forensic examination of KISS’s Destroyer album, but it ends up as more than a book about an album, the group, or even the metal tributary of ’70s rock.
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