NYPress

William S. Repsher A Tisket, a Tasket, a Kiss Fan in a Casket

Leave it to the rock band Kiss to come up with a merchandising scheme that would have done P.T. Barnum proud. On top of hawking the usual t-shirts and baseball hats via their website, Kiss will soon be offering fans the chance to purchase funeral caskets, with photographs of the original band and the words "Kiss Forever" emblazoned on the side. The price is expected to be between $4500 and $5000.

This isn’t so unusual when you consider that fans in full makeup have gotten married at Kiss conventions, or that plenty of the band’s adult fans (some, frighteningly in terms of taste, with children) have turned their homes into Kiss shrines. Why not go the distance, and six feet under, with a Kiss casket, maybe to the strains of "Beth"? I can already hear the whispered conversations: "Dude, you know, like, Beth is God in this song, only this time him and the boys can come home right now, they finally found the sound. This is so heavy, man, hand me some tissues."

Frankly, it’s great news for the rest of the world that the band anticipates its fans' imminent departures, although maybe a Kiss retirement village in Hollywood, FL, might’ve been a more logical first step for all those spigotheads who didn’t die before they turned 30. To judge by the burgeoning 70s package tours that hit America every summer, plenty of people over 30 want to go on believing that that decade was the zenith of great pop music. More likely is that, like most music "fans" before and since, those people simply stopped buying records when they hit their early 20s, turning their musical tastes into nostalgia-laden time capsules instead of making any effort to let them grow.

(This is assuming they ever exerted any initiative at all with their musical tastes. The 70s bands now revered by so many morons were force-fed to listeners by record companies, albeit in ways that seem subtle by today’s bludgeoning standards.)

True, something like this is one more zit on the ass of America’s decaying culture, but what the hell? Take a look around: Kiss is like Mozart compared to what passes for a lot of pop music today. I flashback to the most rabid Kiss fan I knew in my teen years, this pudgy, troubled kid named Billy who always smelled vaguely of feces and owned every Kiss product: dolls, lunchboxes, Halloween costumes, even the special plastic bag one attained only by buying all four Kiss solo albums simultaneously at the local mall. My most vivid memory of Billy finds him in our junior high lavatory, urinating on a clanking radiator in his Love Gun t-shirt, watching the steam rise and muttering, "Man, I love that smell," just before being roughly collared and then suspended by our vice principal.

By today’s standards, Billy would be a relatively happy, well-adjusted kid.

So bring on the caskets, I say, and let’s not stop there. Rather than use a staid old crematorium, a recently departed fan (for a nominal four-figure sum) could stipulate in his will that Ted Nugent could use his gas-soaked corpse to shoot a flaming arrow into at one of his shows. The aging delinquents at the county fair would go wild seeing something like that. Or doomsday cults could book Styx to reenact their astoundingly awful Kilroy Was Here stage show in local theaters, which would make even an "Up with People" rally consider a Jonestown-style mass suicide.

Alice Cooper, what hath thou wrought? I like to think you’re laughing about all this, but considering your time’s now spent on the golf course or at your new theme restaurant in Arizona, something tells me you’ve been taking copious notes from your students.

(6/15)

-- Anonymous, June 15, 2001

Answers

Decades ago, a friend of mine had this awful vision that when we were elderly residents of an old-age home, the perky young therapists would make us do sing-alongs of "Yellow Submarine."

It creeps closer by the moment.

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2001

By the time we are old enough to need to be in a retirement home, they may be yellow submarines....

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2001

Sure, Sweetie, the Hungarian and I have talked about this too. All you have to do is look at the Stones to imagine what it will be like--ancient rock groups entertaining equally ancient nursing home residents on special occasions. I have left orders that if I go ga-ga, I am to be put in a New Orleans nursing home--I wanna be with the lapsed Catholics, not the Methodists from around here. The management would put me in a straitjacket or feed me drugs to keep me quiet. No cussin' or drop of wine allowed in those places!

And by that time, nursing homes may not be yellow submarines, but we may think they are.

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2001