Interview With Bill Starkey
Kissintime
"This is my music, it makes me proud. These are
my people, and this is my crowd"
Photo courtesy of Bill Starkey
KT: Bill you are the man we can all thank for creating rock's
most devoted fan base, The Kiss Army. Could you tell us how it all started? It's
a great definition of standing up for what you believe in.
BS: I had seen KISS by mistake while watching Don Kirshner’s In Concert one February. I was hoping to see Foghat. KISS blew me away. I was fortunate that my father, who worked in a warehouse shipping records for Warner Brothers, always encouraged my interest in music. Warner was shipping Casablanca Records at the time so my father got me the first two albums by my request. My Dad also got to talk to the Casablanca people so he would tease me about how KISS was touring but he wasn’t shipping any of their records…..they weren’t selling. Of course he teased me about the band’s appearance as well. The group Deep Purple was on the Warner Brothers label and they offered my dad free concert tickets for all of his dedicated work. His record plant at the time pressed most of the world’s vinyl in the 70’s. When he asked me if I wanted to go to my FIRST ever rock concert, I jumped at the chance. However Deep Purple was extremely popular in 1974 and the tickets went fast. They never came through with our tickets.
To make it up to me he asked me if I wanted to see KISS in Evansville, and I agreed. He drove me and my younger brother in his old pick up to a concert with KISS on a shared bill with ZZ Top. It was a cold Sunday night in December. KISS played first and I immediately heard a difference between the live KISS and my records at home. They were incredible! When Z Z Top came out, after their first song, my Dad knew we had seen the REAL headliners- KISS and we left. Now he wasn’t one to enjoy rock, let alone heavy metal, but I think he appreciated the band’s work ethic and how they whipped the crowd into frenzy. He compared the frenzy to a typical Indiana high school basketball game. I’ll never forget those people stomping on the wooden bleachers chanting “KISS, KISS, KISS”.
The next week he dared my mother to take us to Indianapolis to see KISS play in a 5 hour post-Christmas Jam with REO Speedwagon and others. She took the dare and we went. KISS played last, after midnight, when most of the crowd that had come to see REO had left. Again KISS out-performed everybody that night.
Monday morning I was riding the school bus with one of my best friends from school, Jay Evans. Jay already enjoyed KISS at the time but hadn’t seen them live. It was hard for me to explain on the bus. Plus with this being my first two rock concerts it probably looked like I was just exaggerating to many at the time. Afew months later we convinced two car loads of our classmates at Terre Haute North Vigo to go to Indianapolis to see KISS in April. KISS was now theheadliner. That was it, we now had our KISS Army.
We would go back to school bragging about KISS only to be told, “If they’re so good, why aren’t they on the radio?” We couldn’t answer that but we knew the injustice. Jay and I would meet in my basement where we came up with the “Army” theme and started calling the one and only radio station calling ourselves the KISS Army. One of the guys, Rob Smith, actually mass-produced a school-made KISS t-shirt that we would wear to school despite the jokes we’d get about the band’s lack of air time. Jay found out that it was the radio station’sprogram director who didn’t like the band so we directed our playful threats towards him. He’d try to make us mad by playing “Love Theme from KISS” before a station break just to appease us. Other times he’d play a cut like Strutter, but NOT tell the audience the name of the group. This was all intentional to keep us riled up no less.
Five months later Jay and our KISS friends started college in the fall. I was unemployed with little direction. KISS Alive had just come out and KISS announced they were coming to Terre Haute in two months. Now we had many top acts pass through our city since it was a college town. Aerosmith, the Doobie Brothers, and Chicago to name a few, but only Elvis Presley was able to sell our new arena out.
The program director, who we feuded with, asked me to bring my KISS albums by the station since he had trashed the ones Casablanca gave them. KISS Alive was starting to get some serious airplay and the radio dj’s would play a song and dedicate it to “the KISS Army.” At this time Jay and the others continued to call in as well. The program director asked me to write a “KISS Army Letter of the Day” similar to what we were writing during the summer. This would be for two weeks leading up to the November concert. I agreed and used my bully pulpit to proclaim KISS as Gods and put down all other acts including the Beatles. Eventually the concert sold out and when the people at Aucoin Management asked the radio station why KISS had sold out, while other acts with MORE airplay had not, they told them about The KISS Army Letter of the Day and how we had been attacking the radio as a group for several months. They contacted me on my birthday to tell me they wanted to start a national KISS Army….in Terre Haute no less with me running it. I have the letter to prove it. Of course that’s another story.
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