page_title: Kiss (band)
section_title: 1978: Solo and film projects
hierarchical_section_title: Kiss (band) / History / 1978: Solo and film projects
caption_attribution_description: English: Trade ad for Kiss's Alive II. To better adapt it to his respective Wikipedia article, the ad was cropped and cleaned in a graphics editing program. The original can be viewed at the source below.
context_page_description: Kiss is an American rock band formed in New York City in January 1973 by Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, and Ace Frehley. Well known for its members' face paint and stage outfits, the group rose to prominence in the mid-to-late 1970s with its elaborate live performances, which featured fire breathing, blood-spitting, smoking guitars, shooting rockets, levitating drum kits, and pyrotechnics. The band has gone through several lineup changes, with Stanley and Simmons being the only members to feature in every lineup. The original and best-known lineup consists of Stanley, Simmons, Frehley, and Criss
  With their make-up and costumes, the band members took on the personae of comic book-style characters: the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman or Space Ace, and the Catman. Due to creative differences, both Criss and Frehley had departed the group by 1982.
  In 1983, Kiss began performing without makeup and costumes, thus marking the beginning of the band's "unmasked" era that would last for over a decade.
context_section_description: Kiss was at its commercial peak by 1978. Alive II was the band's fourth platinum album in just under two years, and the ensuing tour had the highest average attendance (13,550) in the group's history. In addition, Kiss's gross income for 1977 was $10.2 million. The group, along with manager Aucoin, sought to take the band to the next level of popularity. To that end, an ambitious, two-pronged strategy was devised for 1978.
  The first part involved the simultaneous release of four solo albums from the members of Kiss. Although Kiss has claimed that the solo albums were intended to ease rising tensions within the band, its 1976 record contract did in fact call for four solo records, each of them counting as half an album toward the group's five-record commitment. Each album was a solo effort (none of the group appeared on another's album), and were all released and marketed as Kiss albums (with similar cover art and poster inserts). It was the first time that all current members of a rock band had released solo albums on the same day.
  For the band members, it was a chance to showcase their individual musical styles and tastes outside of Kiss, and in some cases to collaborate with contemporary artists. Stanley's and Frehley's albums were most similar to Kiss's hard rock style, while Criss's album featured an R&B style with multiple ballads. Simmons's was the most diverse of the four, featuring hard rock, ballads, Beatles-influenced pop and a cover version of "When You Wish upon a Star" from the Disney film Pinocchio. Simmons' many collaborators included Aerosmith's Joe Perry, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, the Doobie Brothers' Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Donna Summer, Janis Ian, Helen Reddy, Bob Seger, Katey Sagal and his then-girlfriend Cher.
  The solo albums were released on September 18, 1978. Casablanca spent $2.5 million on the marketing campaign for the albums, and announced they were shipping five million copies, guaranteeing platinum status. Despite the large shipments, none of the albums sold particularly well and were later sold as cut-outs. Of the four, Frehley's album was the most successful, and spawned the only resulting hit single, a cover of "New York Groove", written by Russ Ballard and originally performed by Hello.
  The second part of Kiss's and Aucoin's plan called for the band to appear in a film that would cement its image of larger-than-life rock-and-roll superheroes. Filming commenced in the spring of 1978. Although the project was proposed to the band as a cross between A Hard Day's Night and Star Wars, the final result fell far short of those expectations. The script underwent numerous rewrites, and the band (particularly Criss and Frehley) grew increasingly frustrated with the filmmaking process.
  The final product, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, debuted on NBC on October 28, 1978. It was released theatrically, after many changes, outside the U.S. in 1979 under the title Attack of the Phantoms. The band members were unhappy with the finished film, and would speak about their filmmaking experience in later interviews with a mix of humorous embarrassment and regret. They felt that the film portrayed them more as clowns than superheroes. The artistic failure of the film led to a rift between the band and Aucoin. It has been only sporadically available on home video; currently, a version of the film is available on the compilation DVD Kissology Volume Two: 1978–1991.
caption: Frehley demonstrates the pyrotechnics that helped make Kiss a live sensation.
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