Chartsweep 1976: Beth - Kiss
by Donald Gorinchem
My dad is one of those Kiss fans. He's seen them in concert a number of times, he's dedicated an entire room in my parent's apartment to his collection of Kiss memorabilia, and he's dragged my poor mother to the Kiss Kruise every year it’s happened. Like many kids in the mid 70s, he was pulled into their hard rock spectacle, and has been a lifer ever since. Consequently, I've been surrounded by Kiss' music since birth. While I'm not their hugest fan, that constant level of exposure over time has bred some level of appreciation and respect for Kiss' music. Since day one they’ve been a punching bag, a laughing stock and incredibly over-hated in my estimation. The makeup provided a gimmick, they played very basic hard rock, represented a certain kind of gross “rockstar” attitude, whored themselves out to anyone who wants to make a licensed Kiss product, and Gene Simmons does himself no favours. I get it. At the same time, one has to acknowledge they were the hottest band in the world in the mid-to-late 70s hard rock landscape. But for all that, their commercial peak in terms of chart performance actually came in the form of a syrupy orchestral ballad sung by the drummer, the divisive “Beth.”
You know the names by now: Chaim Witz, Stanley Eisen, Paul Frehley and Peter Criscuola. Or maybe you know their stage names: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. These four New Yorkers built a reputation as a live band, thanks in part to their theatrical stage show, which included pyrotechnics and smoke bombs, as well as all four members of the band in outlandish costumes and makeup, each a reflection of their personalities. Simmons the demon, Criss the catman, Frehley the spaceman, and Stanley the starchild—whatever that was supposed to be. Up until 1975’s Alive!, their heavily doctored "live" album, the band had little commercial or critical success. The previous three studio albums had solid hard rock songs, but were mired in lifeless performances and poor recording. This is especially true of the second, Hotter Than Hell, which has one of the most atrocious drum sounds in music. A side-by-side comparison of any of the Alive! versions with their studio counterparts reveals just how weak the original takes were, and goes a long way to explain why Alive! was their breakthrough. The live version of "Rock n Roll All Nite," perhaps their most well known song, and one that often closes their live sets, was their first song to crack the top 40, reaching #12 in early 1976; the studio version, their highest charting song up to that point, only reached #68. This began Kiss' rapid ascent from "hottest band in the land” - the announcement that began their concerts, a total blag—to "hottest band in the world”—which replaced the original concert announcement, and was absolutely true. Very quickly they would dominate the charts, the live circuit, and thanks to their infamous merchandising which included everything from comics and dolls to condoms and coffins, all aspects of American life.
But first they needed to follow up this success, to establish themselves further as a big band, and avoid going right back to where they started. Their studio efforts thus far were lackluster, not due to a lack of good songs, but a lack of good production and a lack of energy. Now that the band and their label, Casablanca, had some capital off of the success of Alive!, they could afford a producer that was going to help elevate them for their next studio album, 1976's Destroyer. That man was Bob Ezrin, known at that point for whipping Alice Cooper into shape for their post-Zappa albums, beginning with 1971's Love It To Death, and for producing Lou Reed's Berlin. Ezrin is known for a couple of things in terms of being a producer. If you look at albums like Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies, Berlin, Destroyer, and later successes like Peter Gabriel's first self titled album (AKA Car), or Pink Floyd's The Wall, you'll get an idea of Ezrin's over-the-top bombastic production. He's a guy that prefers the kitchen sink approach, throwing every string section, found-sound recording, bell and whistle he can. I'm honestly not a huge fan of this aspect of his production. It's a little overwrought. Or maybe a lot overwrought. I don't know if the ambient sounds of kids voices added to Kiss' "God of Thunder" add much, the exaggerated version of Gabriel's "Here Comes The Flood" from his first solo album is vastly inferior to the more subdued version found on Robert Fripp's Exposure, and "The Trial," by far the weakest and most comically theatrical song on The Wall, is basically all Ezrin.
That being said, he also works his bands like dogs, and is very hands-on in terms of writing with the musicians, often to excellent results. These are the aspects that helped to heighten Kiss, although even the elaborate and overworked production like on Destroyer is a welcome change to their previous studio efforts. Simmons and Stanley have stated that while Ezrin’s process was challenging, it was ultimately for the better, as it whipped the band into shape as performers and songwriters. Though not everyone rose to the challenge as easily as Simmons and Stanley. Frehley was often absent from recording, as he was off galavanting with friends, drinking and drugging. Criss found it extremely difficult to keep up, with minor details like the skipped beats and odd numbers of bars in “Flaming Youth” requiring a lot of effort on his part to master. These things showed gulf in the dedication between band members, the first cracks in the face paint that led to rifts which ultimately teared the original lineup apart.
“Beth” is the song on Destroyer that Ezrin had the biggest hand in. It first formed in Peter Criss’ previous band, Chelsea, as “Beck,” the mocking tale of a wife nagging her musician husband to come home. Criss kept it in his back pocket until presenting it to the band during the Destroyer sessions. Despite Criss having a writing credit on the song and it becoming one of the signature songs he sang on, Stanley and Simmons are all too quick to say that he basically had no hand in it, claiming instead that it was penned entirely by Chelsea’s guitarist Stan Penridge. Whether this is the truth or just another one of the many snipes Simmons and Stanley have aimed at Criss over the years is hard to ascertain. Or perhaps they wanted to curb Criss’ ego, which inflated to the size of a football stadium after the song’s success. Either way, there’s no doubt that Ezrin took the fairly standard folk song and transformed it into a truly lavish ballad. There’s a demo of “Beck” floating around on the internet, and from it one can hear that the base song is basically already there in terms of the lyrics and the vocal melody. But Ezrin applies his over the-top touch in the form of a sophisticated orchestral arrangement that creates a level of harmonic and emotional complexity that just isn’t there on the demo.
As a kid, I always hated “Beth,” because it was a ballad and I wanted to rock, man. It’s one of the only Kiss songs my mom can tolerate, and so she would request it when we were gathered around the stereo listening to Kiss, meaning I heard it more times than I wanted as a kid. While it’s definitely a cheesy song, I’ve sort of warmed up to it over time, purely due to the heartwarming string arrangement. Up until that point, “Beth” was a bit of an anomaly in the Kiss catalogue. The music up until that point was straight ahead hard rock, and though they may have had songs that were poppy or slow, they were always rock songs. “Beth” by comparison stands out for being purely a ballad. More importantly, it doesn’t sound out of place on Destroyer. Despite being mostly composed of hard rock songs, the record remains united by Ezrin’s ornate treatment. In fact, “Beth finds” company on Destroyer in the form of “Great Expectations,” another orchestral ballad cut from the same cloth.
Despite coming across as a total anomaly when compared to Kiss’ earlier material, “Beth” actually falls in line with a lot of chart music in the mid 70’s. When we think back to the 70’s with 21st century eyes, we often think of things like hard rock, arena rock, glam, disco and prog. And while these genres had large audiences, sold records and charted singles, the charts at that time were clogged up with middle of the road AM pop fodder that has been either completely forgotten, or remembered as embarrassing relics of the time. This is conceptualized by some as “the lame 70s,” an era where artists like Captain & Tennille, Barry Manilow, and the Bay City Rollers dominated the charts, where Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was the #1 song of the decade according to Billboard. While in 1976, hard rock artists like Aerosmith and Peter Frampton were notching hit singles, the number one single of the year according to Billboard was Wings’ turgid “Silly Love Songs,” a tongue-in-cheek celebration of this lightweight AM fare. Hard rock was an album genre, played on FM stations. When you think of it, “Beth” isn’t that far off sonically from Barry Manilow’s saccharine “I Write The Songs,” a huge smash from that year. So in a way, “Beth” was poised to become Kiss’ biggest chart hit, as it fits in rather well with this AM pop landscape.
Regardless of the songs promise as a shoe-in as a radio hit, this almost didn’t happen. Casablanca President Neil Bogart hated the song and relegated it to the B-side of “Detroit Rock City”, another classic Kiss song that has become a fan favourite. He did this specifically so it wouldn’t be a single, despite outsiders telling him it had the potential to be a hit. But sometimes a song’s success can’t be stopped, and when disc jockeys were presented with the single, they chose to play the B-side instead. From here, the song gained traction regionally through listener requests, to the point where Casablanca had to issue it as a single itself. By December of 1976, “Beth” had peaked at #7, not only their highest placement to that point, but in their entire career since. It became a concert staple as a Peter Criss solo spot, where he would sing to the backing track.
The success of “Beth” and Destroyer as a whole continued Kiss’ ascent to hottest band in the world. They followed it up with further successes, the albums Rock And Roll Over and Love Gun as well as Alive II. Rock and Roll Over contains “Hard Luck Woman,” an acoustic song sung by Criss that was a blatant attempt to follow up the success of Beth (it reached #15 on Billboard). But the cracks were beginning to show. Frehley and Criss descended further into rock excess, and Criss’ performance was starting to suffer. Cocaine and Beth’s success was a dangerous combination for Criss, who was under the impression he would be better off doing a solo album. To limit infighting and keep the band together, the band and label decided on the ill-advised temporary fix of allowing each member to record a solo album and release all four on the same day in 1978. This was part of Casablanca’s “two-pronged attack” for 1978, along with horribly cheesy film Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. These were the first real missteps since their breakthrough success. In the end, the original lineup fell apart anyway, with Criss only playing drums on one song on their next album, 1979’s Dynasty, and none of the songs on 1980’s Unmasked. Ultimately he left or was kicked out (depending on who you ask) shortly after, to be replaced by the immensely talented Eric Carr. Frehley left after the next album, 1981’s poorly conceived but underrated concept album Music From The Elder, with Ezrin returning to the mixing desk. During this period, their popularity began to wane in America (despite growing in European and Australian markets) from the dizzying heights it had been just a few years prior.
Despite ups and downs, lineup changes and reunions, taking the makeup off and putting it back on, Kiss is somehow still around, but even this will be coming to an end with the End of the Road tour. They have continued to notch hits here and there, including their take on disco, “I Was Made For Loving You,” which reached #11 on Billboard in 1979, and the power ballad “Forever,” which almost matching Beth’s success at #8 on Billboard in 1990. They have followed trends (‘80s glam metal and an attempt at a grunge album) and been outside of trends. But they never quite recaptured the massive success they had in the mid-and-late-’70s or the chart success of an uncharacteristic ballad sung by the drummer.