Was this "band" just for teenage nerds?
or were geeks included as well?
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MovieChat Forums > KISS Discussion > Was this "band" just for teenage nerds?
What was the their fan base?
Good question!
I don't know anyone who liked this band, but I'm a Gen xer...by the mid 1980's this band was pretty much old news.
Here's a good 47 seconds of what Kiss fan base crowd looked like in 1976
https://youtu.be/jihBk-0CwHY
They look mostly like non-college.. shop school..future working class heros.
Just your average semi stoner where partying and a good time were more important than school and grades.
So not nerds or geeks.
I am an early Gen Xer and when I was in 6th grade in 1976-77 (middle to upper middle class neighborhood) almost everyone in my class was a Kiss fan. I didn't like popular music much yet, but even I bought the Kiss comic book and I was a card-carrying future D&D playing nerd.
As far as the audience in the video you linked goes, in 1976 virtually EVERYONE between 16 and 30 looked like that. Dropoouts or Honor roll... Unless you were a total fashionless geek or into Disco or were a very rare Punk Rocker, as a young adult, you had longish feathered hair, t-shirts for boys and t-shirts or halter tops for the girls, and bell bottom jeans.
It wasn't until about 1983 that the groomed "Preppie" look came into fashion for the "achievers" and the long-haired Rocker look was left to the "working class heroes".
Good point. A new and definitely unique band probably had a diverse fan base at first.
But the music wasn't exactly Fleetwood Mac in it's complexity, very simple rock and roll cords. The bands genius, like Madonna was it's presentation and showmanship.
I live in a town where I can get two college radio stations. One is considered "elite" and another one is a typical everyman college.
I regularly turn into both stations. The musical selection between the two is noticable.
I was twenty-two in 1976. That crowd looks like any group of college kids of that period. Today we have fat MAGA-hat dudes at one extreme and frail androgynous soyboys at the other extreme. It wasn't so clear back then.
As far as KISS was concerned, I never paid much attention to their music. The silly makeup and costumes were kind of off-putting, and made it hard to take them seriously.
You would be surprised how much of the audience was between 9-13, such as the crowd I hung around with at the time. The only kids who didn't like them were those with parents who forbade it. Then they'd take the high ground with the kids who did like them by saying, "That's SO childish!"
It's even been told that the reason they took off the make-up in 1983 was because the band noticed how many kids were attending the concerts with their parents: "This isn't rock'n'roll, this is the circus!"
I was a teenaged nerd back in their heyday, and the teenaged nerds at my school thought they were totally uncool! "Not a real band", we'd whine while they raked in the millions, "They're as fake as the Monkees were!".
I don't know who their fan base was, nobody at my school would admit to being a fan.
Sort of like the Taylor Swift of our time, minus the social media influence along with Tik Tok
shareMy late older brother (16 years older) was generally indifferent to them until he took me to see them in 1977, & he became a big fan afterwards.
shareKiss had a couple of years there, around 1977-78 - in which they were absolutely huge. From there it's been up and down, up and down, up and down for them. You have to give them credit though - they hung around for 50 years. Obviously someone aside from teenage nerds must like them.
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