What do you think?
Rate this book
Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon
How does an underground oddity become a cultural phenomenon?
For over forty years, the rock band Kiss has galvanized the entertainment world with an unparalleled blitz of bravado, theatricality, and shameless merchandizing, garnering generations of loyally rabid fans. But if not for a few crucial months in late 1975 and early 1976, Kiss may have ended up nothing more than a footnote.
Shout It Out Loud is a serious examination of the circumstance and serendipity that fused the creation of the band's seminal work, Destroyer —including the band's arduous ascent to the unexpected smash hit, Alive! , the ensuing lawsuits between its management and its label, the pursuit of the hot, young producer, a grueling musical "boot camp", the wildly creative studio abandon, the origins behind an iconic cover, the era's most outlandish tour, and the unlikely string of hit singles.
Extensive research from the period and insights into each song are enhanced by hundreds of archived materials and dozens of interviews surrounding the mid-'70s-era Kiss and its zeitgeist. New interviews with major principals in the making of an outrageously imaginative rock classic animate this engaging tale.
For over forty years, the rock band Kiss has galvanized the entertainment world with an unparalleled blitz of bravado, theatricality, and shameless merchandizing, garnering generations of loyally rabid fans. But if not for a few crucial months in late 1975 and early 1976, Kiss may have ended up nothing more than a footnote.
Shout It Out Loud is a serious examination of the circumstance and serendipity that fused the creation of the band's seminal work, Destroyer —including the band's arduous ascent to the unexpected smash hit, Alive! , the ensuing lawsuits between its management and its label, the pursuit of the hot, young producer, a grueling musical "boot camp", the wildly creative studio abandon, the origins behind an iconic cover, the era's most outlandish tour, and the unlikely string of hit singles.
Extensive research from the period and insights into each song are enhanced by hundreds of archived materials and dozens of interviews surrounding the mid-'70s-era Kiss and its zeitgeist. New interviews with major principals in the making of an outrageously imaginative rock classic animate this engaging tale.
- GenresMusic
1 pages, Audio CD
First published October 13, 2015
14 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 23, 2025
I'm not the world's biggest KISS fan...not even close. I've never even owned a KISS album. But the band fascinates me, and this, of course, is when they went from being just another band to a trademark, a marketing success, a known entity.
What I didn't expect, and what I found so interesting about this book was that, when it comes down to it, this is, much like Meat Loaf's BAT OUT OF HELL (both the first and the second), this is a Bob Ezrin solo album that mostly utilized Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter to get the job done and, when they couldn't do it all, he leaned on other, better musicians. Yes, they provided the bones of the project, but it was Ezrin that shaped it, improved it, and turned this into something far greater than just another KISS album.
It's a truly epic, bizarre, twisty journey, as I'm sure most album recording projects are, and it's so much more than just the four members of KISS and Bob Ezrin.
Of particular interest was how the cover came to be.
Overall, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.
What I didn't expect, and what I found so interesting about this book was that, when it comes down to it, this is, much like Meat Loaf's BAT OUT OF HELL (both the first and the second), this is a Bob Ezrin solo album that mostly utilized Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter to get the job done and, when they couldn't do it all, he leaned on other, better musicians. Yes, they provided the bones of the project, but it was Ezrin that shaped it, improved it, and turned this into something far greater than just another KISS album.
It's a truly epic, bizarre, twisty journey, as I'm sure most album recording projects are, and it's so much more than just the four members of KISS and Bob Ezrin.
Of particular interest was how the cover came to be.
Overall, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.
July 1, 2025
Wow! Lots of good stuff… And lots of fluff. But I’m glad I read it.
October 13, 2015
Shout It Out Loud- The Story of KISS’s DESTROYER and the Making of an American Icon
by James Campion
Backbeat Books $24.99p - Published October 13th 2015
• Sam Hawksmoor review
A brilliant forensic insight into the making of KISS and Destroyer
My first thoughts on seeing ‘Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s DESTROYER and the Making of an American Icon’ was why James Campion, why? KISS were never more than an artificial, in your face, money-making machine with lesser skills than most other rock and roll bands in the 70’s. Their first two albums were abysmal; the recording quality dire and glam rock was so surely over when they started who was ever going to take them seriously as musicians. I was living in New York when they launched and everyone knew it was a joke. People knew they were fake, except the 14 year old boys they were pandering to I guess, all of who became devoted to KISS despite the mockery and as an act of rebellion began to think of themselves as the KISS Army, kept well supplied with merchandising. And guess what, those 14 year-olds grew up and one of them wrote this book.
Rather like taking a good book and making a lousy movie with it, James Campion has taken a mediocre band and written something amazing with it. He has given the making of their double-platinum album a forensic examination. He combines the dedication of a fan with the meticulous research that reaches into the very heart of the making of an album with such energy and exhausting detail you actually feel that you were there in that studio for a whole month. Nothing and no one is left out. (Except perhaps the janitor whose miserable job it was to clear out the coke debris and wipe clean the deleterious from Simmonds liaisons with hookers in the studio. Can’t believe you didn’t find the janitor, Campion).
This then is the story of Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley who were, on their own admission, in the last chance saloon with the record buying public and their label Casablanca, who were going to make a fortune with Donna Summer rather than these New York boys who thought they were good enough to be another New York Dolls (in their dreams). We get the beginning, the smell of desperation, the attempts to change labels, the egos, the endless lack of money, the sheer desperation of their manager Bill Aucoin who was stretched financially to keep The Act on the road. We can see the shoddy special effects on the live shows slowly becoming more accomplished and then enter stage left when the album Alive was just taking off.
Simmonds was desperate to capture the loudness of their stage act that drew big crowds but failed to sell their albums, which just didn’t reflect the noise they were making. Radio ignored them. What was keeping them alive was the devotion of the fans, but touring was expensive and crippled finances. The Alive album was a halfway house to success – barely live, studio enhanced with over –dubbing, but it did at least play LOUD. And as luck would have it, began to sell. That all important fact gave Casablanca and the man who saw the potential in KISS, Bill Aucoin the courage to spend the money on getting a first class producer on board for the next album and who better than Bob Ezrin who had made a star out of Alice Cooper? Better yet Ezrin had heard some material that he thought would make a good KISS song and was interested in working with them.
The curious thing about Campion’s detailed build-up into the making of what would become DESTROYER, is that although I care nothing for the music, the layering of every little detail matters. We get the lives and motives of the engineers Corky Stasiak, Jay Messina (whose names would crop up on amazing albums through the next decades), the nitty-gritty on finance, the brilliance of Bob Ezrin and his dog whistle in disciplining the ‘four wild men from Borneo’ as their first ever critic had labelled them. It is an incredibly fascinating page-turner in fact.
Day by day, hour by hour, we get the pressure as each song on the album is teased out, the drama, the strops, the sex and drugs (Simmonds and Stanley were against drugs, but Ezrin and Criss were into it and Frehley, in particular, was so wasted by coke and booze, his guitar was replaced on at least four songs by Dick Wagner, who was available, sober and on call in Manhattan where they made this album at Record Plant studio.
When the album finally came out in 1976, it sold well, then began to tank. No one knew why, although there must have been a clue in the harsh critical comments in the media. Bob Ezrin was fired from producing the next album. But one song, the one that Ezrin had laboured long and hard over with Peter Criss, the song that was unlike any KISS song, a ballad, took off. Campion details just how important the hiring of PR man Scott Shannon was to KISS and Casablanca. He instinctively knew ‘Beth’ was a hit but Casablanca were trying to bury it on a b-side. Hated the song, as did the rest of KISS because it had nothing to do with them and had an orchestra on it for christ’s sake. How ‘Beth’ became their biggest success and the roots of that song in something called ‘Beck’ by Stanley Penridge is just extraordinary research and writing. How KISS finally conquered AM and AOR radio is all down to Shannon and the KISS Army who demanded the radio stations play their band.
More than anything this is a pean to Bob Ezrin who guided the sound and feel of the album and is credited on at least seven of the songs on Destroyer. I loved the detail on the all-important album cover and how they finally found the artist Ken Kelly and rescued him from comic horror book hell. To be honest, the comic hero cover on Destroyer is possibly the single most important element of the album’s success.
‘Shout it Out Loud’ by James Campion is more than a record of a moment in rock and roll history, it is a brilliant apprentice handbook on how to handle a rock-band, build a recording career, create a particular sound and all the necessary elements that are needed to do that. You are there in the studio, at the control board, fiddling with the amps, placing the microphones, hunting for a calliope, dealing with massive egos… And by the end you know exactly why he has a 382 page book, because that it what it takes to get it all down, every last nuance, every fact checked in the making of an iconic album. Just think of what Campion could do with Pet Sounds…
Shout it Out Loud comes complete with two 8-page photo inserts of all the protagonists
© Sam Hawksmoor Oct 13th 2015
Editor - Hackwriters.com
Author of Another Place To Die: The Endtime Chronicles
by James Campion
Backbeat Books $24.99p - Published October 13th 2015
• Sam Hawksmoor review
A brilliant forensic insight into the making of KISS and Destroyer
My first thoughts on seeing ‘Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s DESTROYER and the Making of an American Icon’ was why James Campion, why? KISS were never more than an artificial, in your face, money-making machine with lesser skills than most other rock and roll bands in the 70’s. Their first two albums were abysmal; the recording quality dire and glam rock was so surely over when they started who was ever going to take them seriously as musicians. I was living in New York when they launched and everyone knew it was a joke. People knew they were fake, except the 14 year old boys they were pandering to I guess, all of who became devoted to KISS despite the mockery and as an act of rebellion began to think of themselves as the KISS Army, kept well supplied with merchandising. And guess what, those 14 year-olds grew up and one of them wrote this book.
Rather like taking a good book and making a lousy movie with it, James Campion has taken a mediocre band and written something amazing with it. He has given the making of their double-platinum album a forensic examination. He combines the dedication of a fan with the meticulous research that reaches into the very heart of the making of an album with such energy and exhausting detail you actually feel that you were there in that studio for a whole month. Nothing and no one is left out. (Except perhaps the janitor whose miserable job it was to clear out the coke debris and wipe clean the deleterious from Simmonds liaisons with hookers in the studio. Can’t believe you didn’t find the janitor, Campion).
This then is the story of Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley who were, on their own admission, in the last chance saloon with the record buying public and their label Casablanca, who were going to make a fortune with Donna Summer rather than these New York boys who thought they were good enough to be another New York Dolls (in their dreams). We get the beginning, the smell of desperation, the attempts to change labels, the egos, the endless lack of money, the sheer desperation of their manager Bill Aucoin who was stretched financially to keep The Act on the road. We can see the shoddy special effects on the live shows slowly becoming more accomplished and then enter stage left when the album Alive was just taking off.
Simmonds was desperate to capture the loudness of their stage act that drew big crowds but failed to sell their albums, which just didn’t reflect the noise they were making. Radio ignored them. What was keeping them alive was the devotion of the fans, but touring was expensive and crippled finances. The Alive album was a halfway house to success – barely live, studio enhanced with over –dubbing, but it did at least play LOUD. And as luck would have it, began to sell. That all important fact gave Casablanca and the man who saw the potential in KISS, Bill Aucoin the courage to spend the money on getting a first class producer on board for the next album and who better than Bob Ezrin who had made a star out of Alice Cooper? Better yet Ezrin had heard some material that he thought would make a good KISS song and was interested in working with them.
The curious thing about Campion’s detailed build-up into the making of what would become DESTROYER, is that although I care nothing for the music, the layering of every little detail matters. We get the lives and motives of the engineers Corky Stasiak, Jay Messina (whose names would crop up on amazing albums through the next decades), the nitty-gritty on finance, the brilliance of Bob Ezrin and his dog whistle in disciplining the ‘four wild men from Borneo’ as their first ever critic had labelled them. It is an incredibly fascinating page-turner in fact.
Day by day, hour by hour, we get the pressure as each song on the album is teased out, the drama, the strops, the sex and drugs (Simmonds and Stanley were against drugs, but Ezrin and Criss were into it and Frehley, in particular, was so wasted by coke and booze, his guitar was replaced on at least four songs by Dick Wagner, who was available, sober and on call in Manhattan where they made this album at Record Plant studio.
When the album finally came out in 1976, it sold well, then began to tank. No one knew why, although there must have been a clue in the harsh critical comments in the media. Bob Ezrin was fired from producing the next album. But one song, the one that Ezrin had laboured long and hard over with Peter Criss, the song that was unlike any KISS song, a ballad, took off. Campion details just how important the hiring of PR man Scott Shannon was to KISS and Casablanca. He instinctively knew ‘Beth’ was a hit but Casablanca were trying to bury it on a b-side. Hated the song, as did the rest of KISS because it had nothing to do with them and had an orchestra on it for christ’s sake. How ‘Beth’ became their biggest success and the roots of that song in something called ‘Beck’ by Stanley Penridge is just extraordinary research and writing. How KISS finally conquered AM and AOR radio is all down to Shannon and the KISS Army who demanded the radio stations play their band.
More than anything this is a pean to Bob Ezrin who guided the sound and feel of the album and is credited on at least seven of the songs on Destroyer. I loved the detail on the all-important album cover and how they finally found the artist Ken Kelly and rescued him from comic horror book hell. To be honest, the comic hero cover on Destroyer is possibly the single most important element of the album’s success.
‘Shout it Out Loud’ by James Campion is more than a record of a moment in rock and roll history, it is a brilliant apprentice handbook on how to handle a rock-band, build a recording career, create a particular sound and all the necessary elements that are needed to do that. You are there in the studio, at the control board, fiddling with the amps, placing the microphones, hunting for a calliope, dealing with massive egos… And by the end you know exactly why he has a 382 page book, because that it what it takes to get it all down, every last nuance, every fact checked in the making of an iconic album. Just think of what Campion could do with Pet Sounds…
Shout it Out Loud comes complete with two 8-page photo inserts of all the protagonists
© Sam Hawksmoor Oct 13th 2015
Editor - Hackwriters.com
Author of Another Place To Die: The Endtime Chronicles
October 8, 2020
You wanted the Best, You got the Best, The greatest band in the world...KISS
Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion is the history of Kiss up to and including the making of Destroyer. Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of Deep Tank Jersey, Fear No Art, Trailing Jesus, and Midnight For Cinderella.
It's hard to believe that Destroyer was released forty years ago. I was introduced to Kiss by a school friend when I was in that musical stage of moving out of AM Gold and into progressive rock. Eventually Kiss and Led Zeppelin posters covered most of the empty wall space in my room, and CREEM magazine replaced MAD as I began to take music seriously. A good part of growing up in the 1970s included quite a bit of KISS. It was hard, loud, and its simple message. Today, however, the music seems tame. The rhymes and lyrics are almost humorous at times:
You were distant, now you're nearer
I can feel your face inside the mirror
The lights are out and I can feel you, baby, with my hand.
~ C'mon and Love Me
Still I manage to listen to KISS with fond memories of youth.
Shout it Out Loud tracks Kiss from its early roots to finally making it big with Destroyer. It's hard to believe that KISS almost didn't make it. Their early albums floundered which is difficult to believe with songs like "Deuce", "Strutter", and even "Rock and Roll All Night". KISS created a frenzy at live shows with pyrotechnics and Gene Simmons spitting fire and "blood." The act, however, did not transfer into studio success. The band was tanking and released "Alive" as an act of desperation in 1975. The impossible happened. The live album sold, and sold, and sold. The same studio songs that fizzled now sold. Kiss was about the act as much as it was about the music. "Alive" captured some of the act and saved the band so that Destroyer could be produced.
The making of Destroyer reveals much about the band and its members. From the drinking and drug use of two members and the unexpected tea toddler to the songs that made it to the album, Campion writing and history will capture any fan's attention. Alice Cooper fans will also enjoy this book as both bands shared producer Bob Ezrin who left his mark on their music. KISS moved from being a raw power band to a more refined rock band under Ezrin drill instructor type leadership.
Shout It Out Loud is an excellent look at the evolution of one of the most recognizable bands in rock history. It is not an easy ride and there are more challenges than most people can expect. It was not an easy way to the top for KISS and their contemporaries in Australia, AC/DC, may just as well be singing about KISS when they played:
Ridin' down the highway
Goin' to a show
Stop in all the byways
Playin' rock 'n' roll
Gettin' robbed
Gettin' stoned
Gettin' beat up
Broken-boned
Gettin' had
Gettin' took
I tell you, folks
It's harder than it looks
It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock 'n' roll
Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion is the history of Kiss up to and including the making of Destroyer. Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of Deep Tank Jersey, Fear No Art, Trailing Jesus, and Midnight For Cinderella.
It's hard to believe that Destroyer was released forty years ago. I was introduced to Kiss by a school friend when I was in that musical stage of moving out of AM Gold and into progressive rock. Eventually Kiss and Led Zeppelin posters covered most of the empty wall space in my room, and CREEM magazine replaced MAD as I began to take music seriously. A good part of growing up in the 1970s included quite a bit of KISS. It was hard, loud, and its simple message. Today, however, the music seems tame. The rhymes and lyrics are almost humorous at times:
You were distant, now you're nearer
I can feel your face inside the mirror
The lights are out and I can feel you, baby, with my hand.
~ C'mon and Love Me
Still I manage to listen to KISS with fond memories of youth.
Shout it Out Loud tracks Kiss from its early roots to finally making it big with Destroyer. It's hard to believe that KISS almost didn't make it. Their early albums floundered which is difficult to believe with songs like "Deuce", "Strutter", and even "Rock and Roll All Night". KISS created a frenzy at live shows with pyrotechnics and Gene Simmons spitting fire and "blood." The act, however, did not transfer into studio success. The band was tanking and released "Alive" as an act of desperation in 1975. The impossible happened. The live album sold, and sold, and sold. The same studio songs that fizzled now sold. Kiss was about the act as much as it was about the music. "Alive" captured some of the act and saved the band so that Destroyer could be produced.
The making of Destroyer reveals much about the band and its members. From the drinking and drug use of two members and the unexpected tea toddler to the songs that made it to the album, Campion writing and history will capture any fan's attention. Alice Cooper fans will also enjoy this book as both bands shared producer Bob Ezrin who left his mark on their music. KISS moved from being a raw power band to a more refined rock band under Ezrin drill instructor type leadership.
Shout It Out Loud is an excellent look at the evolution of one of the most recognizable bands in rock history. It is not an easy ride and there are more challenges than most people can expect. It was not an easy way to the top for KISS and their contemporaries in Australia, AC/DC, may just as well be singing about KISS when they played:
Ridin' down the highway
Goin' to a show
Stop in all the byways
Playin' rock 'n' roll
Gettin' robbed
Gettin' stoned
Gettin' beat up
Broken-boned
Gettin' had
Gettin' took
I tell you, folks
It's harder than it looks
It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock 'n' roll
February 2, 2017
James Campion's Shout It Out Loud is an enthusiastic and informative account of the making of KISS's Destroyer album. It's full of the sort of minute details that KISS fans love. We learn about the album's conception, recording, production, and even how it was promoted and paid for. The author is clearly a passionate fan of the band and his zeal and energy seeps right off the pages.
Campion also takes the opportunity to debunk some of the mythology and outright lies that surround the album's legend. KISS have never been the kind of band to allow truth to get in the way of a good BS story and Campion leaves no stone unturned in finding out the truth about some these tales. "Detroit Rock City" was supposedly written about a fan who died in a car crash on his way to a KISS concert. Did that really happen? Did Bill Aucoin, KISS's manager at the time, really mortgage his house to pay for the recording sessions or did he just think it would make for a sexy story?
The book takes a long time to pick up momentum though. The first 60 pages or so cover KISS's formation. These early chapters are rife with credited quotes and passages from previously published KISS bios such as Nothin' to Lose: The Making of KISS, KISS: Behind the Mask - Official Authorized Biography, and Black Diamond: The Unauthorized Biography of KISS as well as the band members' individual memoirs. Anyone who's a big enough fan to want to read about the making of a specific KISS album will already know the intricacies of the band's history. It was unnecessary preamble. Campion also writes extensively about producer Bob Ezrin's backstory. Ezrin's history is interesting and necessary to this book but like the chapters on KISS's early years, it could have been trimmed a bit. I've been slightly critical of Julian Gill's books which also chronicle the making of KISS albums but at least his works get to the point.
Shout It Out Loud has some other weird quirks about it too but they're not deal breakers. At one point in the book Campion devotes several pages to the practical jokes the sound engineers played on each other during the sessions. Who cares? There are also a lot of typos, misspelled words, and missing words. Its funny when he talks about how the song "Beth" had a quick 'accent' up the charts. Campion refers to Mötley Crüe as 'Motley Crew' and he calls the Red Hot Chili Peppers's drummer 'Brad' Smith. (His name is Chad.) With all the meticulous research that went into this book, he couldn't take the time to find out how to spell 'Mötley Crüe?'
This book is highly recommended for the KISS fans who like to dig into the weeds of KISS minutia.
Campion also takes the opportunity to debunk some of the mythology and outright lies that surround the album's legend. KISS have never been the kind of band to allow truth to get in the way of a good BS story and Campion leaves no stone unturned in finding out the truth about some these tales. "Detroit Rock City" was supposedly written about a fan who died in a car crash on his way to a KISS concert. Did that really happen? Did Bill Aucoin, KISS's manager at the time, really mortgage his house to pay for the recording sessions or did he just think it would make for a sexy story?
The book takes a long time to pick up momentum though. The first 60 pages or so cover KISS's formation. These early chapters are rife with credited quotes and passages from previously published KISS bios such as Nothin' to Lose: The Making of KISS, KISS: Behind the Mask - Official Authorized Biography, and Black Diamond: The Unauthorized Biography of KISS as well as the band members' individual memoirs. Anyone who's a big enough fan to want to read about the making of a specific KISS album will already know the intricacies of the band's history. It was unnecessary preamble. Campion also writes extensively about producer Bob Ezrin's backstory. Ezrin's history is interesting and necessary to this book but like the chapters on KISS's early years, it could have been trimmed a bit. I've been slightly critical of Julian Gill's books which also chronicle the making of KISS albums but at least his works get to the point.
Shout It Out Loud has some other weird quirks about it too but they're not deal breakers. At one point in the book Campion devotes several pages to the practical jokes the sound engineers played on each other during the sessions. Who cares? There are also a lot of typos, misspelled words, and missing words. Its funny when he talks about how the song "Beth" had a quick 'accent' up the charts. Campion refers to Mötley Crüe as 'Motley Crew' and he calls the Red Hot Chili Peppers's drummer 'Brad' Smith. (His name is Chad.) With all the meticulous research that went into this book, he couldn't take the time to find out how to spell 'Mötley Crüe?'
This book is highly recommended for the KISS fans who like to dig into the weeds of KISS minutia.
November 18, 2021
I, like many a KISS fan, consider “Destroyer” to be my favorite album of theirs. The music is strong and emotive. The KISS characters (The Demon, The Starchild, The Spaceman, and The Cat Man) are prominent in their individual songs, such as “God of Thunder” for Gene Simmons: The Demon and “Do You Love Me?” for Paul Stanley: The Starchild. And to top it all off the album bares the art of Ken Kelly, showing the members of KISS jumping into the air in front of a destruction filled city in true comic book style. James Campion’s “Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon” goes over “Destroyer” and its history with a fine tooth comb. Beginning with the history of KISS and its members, he moves onto the background of the producer and production staff and then to the writing, recording, and mixing of the album. Campion also discusses the album art and overall sales. There is no stone left unturned. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I hoped I would. James Campion’s writing style is overcomplicated and wordy. I struggled to trudge through certain passages, because it was all words and very little substance. I also felt Campion could have taken sections out of the book and it still would have made sense. They were unnecessary to the overall story. Lastly, the book was not edited well and some information was incorrect. “Shout It Out Loud” does contain a lot of great information for those wanting an entire view of “Destroyer”, but I feel it could have been written better.
December 18, 2019
"Shout It Out Loud" by James Campion is not only the very best book about Kiss. But, it is so because it is also an excellent example of rigorous scholarly work on a pop culture subject. Despite being a huge Kiss fan, I have always been more or less disappointed by books on Kiss. They often do not provide an interesting critical analysis of Kiss's music and times. They often limit themselves to provide the reader with more or less useful information, with no or little critical filter. James Campion as well presents all information we need to understand the historical and musical context where Destroyer comes out. And yet, his analysis of the record-making process uses this context to stress and make the reader fully realize the exceptional character of Kiss's masterpiece. It seems that Campion has not written his book only for Kiss's fans (as all the other books seem to have been written for) but, for anybody interested in American pop culture in the Seventies, and in particular to convince anybody of Kiss's' greatness. His book reminds me of another great scholar (maybe the greatest) in American music (although of another epoch), Peter Guralnick.
June 20, 2021
Amazing book, super well researched and gives ton of info about this masterpiece. Well done James!
April 25, 2024
Utterly exhaustive but worth every single word.
January 4, 2017
A sweeping overgeneralization: If you are a male and were in the latter-stages of elementary school or in junior high school in the years between 1976-1980, chances are KISS’s Destroyer holds some sort of meaning in your life. Maybe it was even your first album. It is, at best, a great album, and, at least, a seminal album. This book, in definitive fashion, gives credence as to why both of those things are irrefutably true. The book in question, here, however, is not so easily defined. The reader will easily vacillate from, “this book sucks” to “this book is awesome” many times before finally finishing its nearly 400 pages (about an album that is pretty much 33 minutes long). It is likely that one reason a reader may become disenchanted with this book is its dense text. The font is small and the paragraphs large. In addition, it is very detailed; maybe to a fault. We learn every detail about every “character” that ever enters the book. Admittedly, most of it is interesting, but it is too much. The book suffers in other areas, too, however. It even has mysterious lapses of poor editing with spelling errors and improperly used words that somehow made it to the presses. But in the end, it has some pretty good conceptual ideas: each section is announced by an ode to each of the album’s songs, in order. Also, more than any other book about this band, one gets to really objectively understand the inner workings of Ace, Gene, Peter and Paul both individually and collectively as most of the previous major books about KISS are written by people that have too much personal feelings about the band to be objective or even autobiographies that are filled with revisionist history and self-serving anecdotes. But, in the end, if you love this album, you have to read this book. It will, at least, resolve the guilty pleasure that exists when you see this album’s iconic cover and think, “that album’s awesome.” Because now you will know empirically why.
April 17, 2016
The story behind Destroyer is an expansive one that encompasses ad agencies, lawyers, and talented sound producers/engineers that mold and stretch the raw talents of a rock band into the stratosphere of fame and fortune. Bob Ezrin was the mastermind producer who along with engineers Jay Messina and Corky Stasiak created KISS' greatest album. Or shall we say their most ambitious album, and let's face it they could not have achieved this without these guys. The book was fascinating on many levels. The book is filled with tremendous amount of info regarding the recording, including mic placement and recording drums in elevator shafts, for the average music fan this may be too much minutiae. I loved the stories about the Record Plant (studio in NYC where Destroyer was recorded) but at times the book does wander away from the band. Ezrin co wrote around 7 songs, came up with arrangements, pretty much saved the song Beth. From crude demo tapes to productions filled with strings and piano motifs that quoted Beethoven, Ezrin was the "King of the Studio World"! Without Bob Ezrin at the helm it's hard to imagine where KISS would have gone after the success of the 2 LP set Alive. If you love minutiae about music production and crazy stories about the 70's then this book is for you!
December 16, 2015
An exhaustive look at the making of KISS's Destroyer, by any measure the band's most important album. This is not a simple rock and roll bio, this is real history-doing. Starting with a thesis in which he proposes that KISS didn't become the iconic band/brand we know today until Destroyer was made, the author crafts an un-put-downable narrative that includes new interviews with everyone from the great producer Bob Ezrin to DMV employees to folks that literally swept up at the Record Plant. Songwriting sessions, microphone placement, 70s drug culture, groupies—it is all in this book. If you are going to write a 300 page book about a rock and roll album and it isn't by the Beatles, you better do it right. James Campion did.
October 10, 2015
I am an avid KISS fan and a member of the KISS Army. That being said, I have mixed emotions about this book. I believe the author did extensive research into the band but there was so much detail, I lost interest. It was interesting subject matter, but for me it just wasn't told in an interesting story. However, you will probably learn some things about the band as there is a lot of in depth information provided. I was provided a digital copy of this book by Netgalley free of charge.
October 12, 2016
Very well done
Or isometric moral Bru Bruner u ok gaps eh hcx rv Noam hci dusk or wicks thin kfc,thsnk you very much!....
Or isometric moral Bru Bruner u ok gaps eh hcx rv Noam hci dusk or wicks thin kfc,thsnk you very much!....
April 24, 2017
Rating this any higher seems silly. It's 400 pages devoted to a single KISS album. But if you're part of that select audience that would even consider reading 400 pages on a single KISS album, feel free to add another star, symbolically.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews