I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KISS-Smashes, Thrashes + Hits (1988).

This was Kiss’ second greatest hits collection (Double Platinum being the first).  This was before there were literally hundreds of Kiss Greatest Hits collections.  Seriously, look at the list on AllMusic.  This was also the era in which bands would release a greatest hits collection and include one song to sucker fans into buying it.  And we did.

Kiss also re-recorded a bunch of songs for this disc (something they would do many times in the future as well).  I’m not exactly sure what has been re-recorded, although the one obvious change is that Eric Carr sings on “Beth.”  But some of the other songs get tweaks as well.

As for the two new songs, it seems like maybe they were leftovers from the Crazy Nights sessions–they are poppy with keyboards.  “Let’s Put the X in Sex” sounds a lot like Robert Palmer, which is pretty embarrassing.  Although interestingly, the song itself seems to serve as a model for a couple of songs on Hot in the Shade (as if maybe they thought Kiss fans wouldn’t buy the greatest hits?).  “(You Make Me) Rock Hard” is another okay song (which sounds a lot like another song on Hot in the Shade).  Both of these songs are just filled with sex similes, I swear they have more than any other writers in the world.  Both songs would be better without those pesky keyboards.  I rather liked the songs at the time as they are both better than anything on Crazy Nights, although neither one has held up all that well.

And “Beth,”  Kiss’ biggest hit, which may be largely forgotten by the general public by now, has Eric Carr on vocals.  He sounds a bit like Peter Criss, but without Criss’ years of hard living in his voice.  It’s a weird choice, although I understand it from a business standpoint–which is clearly more important than the music, right?

[READ: August 10, 2012] “Paris in the Twenties”

This story starts out with a paragraph that I found very confusingly written.  There’s a very long sentence with several clauses that, after reading the story, make perfect sense, but which up front are more than a little confusing.  The upshot of that paragraph is that in 1972, when the narrator was a senior in high school, a whole bunch of bad things happened to her in a short period of time–just before they were to hear which of the Seven Sisters had accepted them.

The catalyst was that her father threw a tumbler of scotch at the giant window of their penthouse apartment.  The window shattered but did not fall and the glass came back into the room.  The irony of course is that he had chosen the apartment for the gorgeous panoramic views those windows afforded.  Her father had been riled up about the state of the world, and felt that the sexual revolution meant that monogamy was outdated.

Their father was also very conscious of wealth and was very conscious of appearing wealthy–even if “he usually had more credit than money and now had very little of either.”

The narrator escaped into fantasies of Paris in the twenties–she read A Moveable Feast and was determined to move to Paris even if the party was over decades ago.

Given that I have been reading JR and that I also just read Desperate Characters, I really related to this comment: “My students and my daughters have the same fascination with New York City in the seventies that I had with Paris in the twenties.  Even the children of millionaires and billionaires–my students, not mu own kids–yearn for the New York of Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, Death Wish, days of art movie houses and cheap rents.  When I mention the crime back then, the threat of so much random violence, they’re even more intrigued, as though they’re sorry they missed out on that too.”

The story returns to 1972, to the days just after her father smashed the window, when she learns that someone in her (small, private school) class has died.  She wonders whether she should go to the funeral but the other girls, who are not really her friends, are appalled that she would even consider not going.

When she gets home, her parents are not speaking–her father has just received a phone call from a woman and he is running off to meet her, and her mother has been shopping.  Her mother informs her that if she and her father separate, the narrator will not be able to go to the most expensive schools like her siblings did.  But the narrator refuses this information and keeps up that hardness whenever her mother tries to talk.  “How long did I keep that pose–pissed off and trying not to cry, trying not to be wounded and needy?  Ten years, fifteen, maybe twenty?”

She did go to the funeral, but her emotionlessness remained.  Although she is far more emotional about things now.

This was a powerful story.  It’s amazing that the whole plot was revealed in the first paragraph and yet the fleshing out was so effective.  There’s just so much to like about this story.

You can read it here.