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You and What Army?

1 January 2010 1,519 views No Comment BY Mark Stalcup

When they walked through the then-new Honey Creek Mall, gawky teens with painted faces, they were like nothing Terre Haute had ever seen, a rag-tag coalition of kids whose support for their favorite band became the first draft of the KISS Army.

“We were like Wayne and Garth, from ‘Wayne’s World.’ We were all nerds, and I’m not ashamed to say that,” Bill Starkey laughs, remembering the days before KISS was a household name, let alone inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Now in their 50s, Starkey and his pal Jay Evans have the last laugh. Not many self-described ‘nerds’ make it onstage with their heroes, or three decades later can brandish a banner signed by a legendary band. Nor do most teens come up with a marketing gimmick that ultimately lasts decades and makes millions, their fandom becoming a crusade of such note it merits a punch-line on “The Daily Show” and enlists U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

These days, some shops in the mall have sections devoted to the band’s memorabilia.

But in 1975, those were different times. Hulman Center, now turning 37, was then just two years old, a shiny new facility that drew frequent rock concerts. KISS were newcomers struggling for radio play, a far cry from the rockers whose songs are classic, and whose painted faces have become iconic. Starkey’s love of the band began with a simple ad in a Tribune-Star television supplement, where he saw KISS would be performing with his then-favorite band, Foghat, on “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.”

“In those days, we could only get Channels 2, 10 and, if we were lucky, Channel 4,” he recalls, laughing. Starkey stayed up late, catching the 11:30 p.m. show. Foghat’s music may have drawn Starkey in, but KISS kept him for life.

“Foghat wasn’t the most visual band,” he remembers. “And then here are these guys in platform heels and leather. I thought they had to be an English band, a cult band, because they were way too polished to be a new band. I was very much into glam rock at the time, and KISS combined every band I wanted to see.”

A father’s love did the rest. Starkey’s dad William worked in record distribution, and provided his son with the first KISS record. The band’s iconic make-up hadn’t even reached its final form as bassist Gene Simmons, guitarists Paul Stanley and Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss posed for its cover.

While his pop favored Sinatra, he also gladly took his son to Roberts Stadium on a snowy December Sunday, Starkey recalls well. He watched O.J. Simpson set NFL rushing records that morning, then watched KISS open for ZZ Top that evening.

“They just blew me away. Their KISS logo was off to one side of the stage, so it looked kind of strange,” he remembers. “But the show was amazing.”

He went to class at Terre Haute North High School the next day sleepy but enthused, a true believer in his cause who soon enlisted others. “We made bootleg tapes and passed them around,” Evans recalls. But the battle was just beginning, as their homemade KISS T-shirts drew fire. “We would always get ridiculed. People would say ‘KISS? KISS my ass!’ or ask us why, if they were so great, they weren’t getting played on the radio,” Starkey remembers.

Duly challenged, the teens aimed to change that. Avid rock fans, they began calling WVTS-FM to demand their favorite songs. “I think we called that station more than anyone, asking for music,” Evans enthuses.

The music the station played wasn’t a far cry from KISS. Many on its playlist became the band’s peers: Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. One major obstacle stood between KISS and the Terre Haute airwaves — the forming KISS Army’s mortal enemy, Rich Dickerson, then program director for West Terre Haute’s WVTS. “I really didn’t give Rich enough credit at the time for the start of the KISS Army, because I was just a punk kid,” Starkey remembers. For Dickerson, the reason behind the KISS-off was simple: “I decided, very arbitrarily, not to play them,” recalls the DJ, who’s since traded West Terre Haute for West Palm Beach, where he’s a talk radio host. “I was in the radio business. My job wasn’t to promote KISS or any other band.”

Ultimately, Dickerson recognized a good stunt when he saw it: His scorn for KISS would play itself out in a joking war of the words over the air. Evans, Starkey and their pals wrote and called the station repeatedly, identifying themselves as the KISS Army, a name Evans selected “because I thought Army sounded better than KISS Fan Club, a little less wimpy.” Starkey served as president and commander-in-chief, while Evans appointed himself field marshal, drawing a yellow, black and red “KISS Army” logo on a sheet that eventually would form the template for thousands of patches and T-shirts.

“We’d do things like call the station and say the KISS Army was going to blow it up,” Starkey laughs. “Some of the stuff we did, you couldn’t get away with today. They’d call it terrorism.”

Dickerson got the joke, and extending a good gimmick, frequently tweaked the teens. He joked about the IQ of the entire KISS Army being small enough to fit on a guitar pick, mocking the punctuation and spelling of the letters he read nightly.

“Rich will probably deny it to this day, but he said KISS was like a weaker version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive,” Evans recalls. Dickerson then began acquiescing to their requests — but only to the extent that he played the instrumental “Love Theme From KISS” as intro music to the news. “That made us scream when we heard it,” Starkey recalls. “We were so mad.”

Evans remembers the teens’ devotion to the band sometimes becoming so intense they’d call to make sure DJs identified the band when they finally began spinning its songs. “We were a little extreme about it,” Evans laughs, though the start of college in fall 1975 meant he handed the majority of the effort over to Starkey.

By then, they were getting noticed. As Terre Haute’s fan base grew, KISS and its management began contacting the station and the fans, encouraging the effort as they had a similar grassroots movement in Pontiac, Mich. “I knew (Bill Starkey) was a good kid,” Dickerson remembers. “He was just a little punk. And incidentally, the band knew what I was doing, and they loved it.”

By Nov. 21, 1975, KISS took the stage in Hulman Center before a sellout crowd, setting sales records. When their plane landed at Hulman Field, Dickerson guesses at least a thousand fans were there to greet them. Around 300 followed the band to the rural station, which Starkey remembers looked like a house from the front. “I’d like to meet the people who live there now,” he said. “I wonder if they know they had KISS in their basement?”

The band got the key to the city from Mayor Bill Brighton, bringing Starkey onstage during the show to present him with a plaque, echoed by a second plaque presented to the center. “I was brought onstage twice with KISS,” Starkey remembers. “They just don’t do that for anyone.”

At the show, Evans handed KISS his homemade banner, unsure what they’d do with it. He soon got his answer. “When Peter’s drum set came rising up out of the stage, it was draped across the front of it,” where it stayed for the whole show, each member signing it before returning it. Evans still has it. “Jay’s joked a few times he could probably put his daughters through college if he sold it,” Starkey said. It’s no exaggeration: The key to the city, now in the hands of a Lafayette, Ind., fan, sold for thousands of dollars. But Evans won’t sell. “Both my daughters are through college now, so there’s no danger of that,” he laughs.

The band’s visit soon was followed with massive success. Suddenly, the ragtag army exploded into something greater, becoming official with fan club forms placed in 1976’s “Destroyer.”
truggling cities like Terre Haute embraced KISS early in the 1970s. As gas shortages backed up lines of cars and a recession closed down factories, even Berry Gordy’s Motown Records left Detroit. KISS, however, embraced the Michigan city, using their Cobo Hall shows as the basis for their breakthrough concert LP Alive and name-checking “Detroit Rock City.”

Starkey, meanwhile, was getting access most fans could only dream of. He and Evans had chatted with the band at a party thrown in a Terre Haute Pizza Inn. In time, he’d be flown to New York, and eventually get to sell autographed photos of himself on the band’s Web site. “People tell me they see my autograph sold for a penny on eBay,” Starkey jokes. “It always seems to be the European fans who buy it, because they feel like maybe they won’t get the chance to meet me.”

He and Evans even saw the band unmasked at a time when fans clamored to see their faces, a sight they kept closely guarded.

For the kids of the 1970s, KISS left a lasting impression: Caterson Damon, 38, leads the Janesville, Wis., band Fatal Agenda, a thrash metal quartet which passes through Indiana often, their own painted faces tipping off a key influence.

“As a kid I loved the Beatles. KISS was the band that got me off the couch. They made me want to put a real band together, wear make-up and blow some shit up. That’s were I am today with Fatal Agenda,” he grins. “Without KISS, there would be no Fatal Agenda. I would be flipping burgers with no clue, listening to the Beatles.”

The band’s influence also stretched beyond music. Inspired by comic books, ultimately, the band would receive their own Marvel Comic, each member literally donating a pint of blood mixed into the red ink.

Terre Haute cartoonist Devon Massey, a triplet with his brothers Mitch and Morgan, loved the band and remains a fan of 1970s pop culture. The sibling artists sometimes still slip references to the rockers, along with an array of references to the ‘70s pop culture they still love, into their art.

Nor has the band forgotten the city, playing here numerous times through break-ups, unmaskings and reunion tours. Whether they will visit again remains to be seen.

During the original line-up’s extended final hurrah — at least for now — Massey attended the show in Hulman Center on Dec. 12, 1998. An estimated 4,000 attended that show, a far cry from the 10,000 who attended sellout 1970s shows.

“What happened to the KISS Army, man?” Massey asks, incredulously. “Nobody was wearing make-up. Nobody dressed up.” But a new generation was enlisting. Connor Fuzesi, 21, now a student at Ivy Tech, remembers the decade-old show he attended with his own parents, longtime fans, as the first concert he ever saw. “It was amazing,” he said, spurring him to paint his face like Ace Frehley on Halloween. “There were girls with bare breasts everywhere. That’s what I remember most. KISS always gets the girls.”

Starkey believes the economy, coupled with a show earlier that week in Indianapolis, may have played a part in the smaller crowd during the last local show. “I think the two drew from each other’s audiences.”

Even so, KISS Army was still on patrol. Starkey and Evans traveled to Terre Haute in 1996, meeting the band again. Starkey recalls two avid New York fans that made a point to see the band at that show, and to meet him. “I asked them why, and they said they had to come here, because this was what it was all about,” he said. “They told me this is Terre Haute, where it all began, and they had to see a show here. I don’t think this city realizes what it has.”

Still, Terre Haute may get another chance.

After nearly a decade of contending no new records would happen, KISS roared back to life in November with a two-CD, one DVD disc, “Sonic Boom.” The band now is composed of Simmons and Stanley with drummer Eric Singer and guitarist Tommy Thayer donning the make-up and replacing originals Criss and Frehley.

Starkey has seen them twice already on the latest tour. A lifer in the KISS Army, he’s sometimes rallied the troops to Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in an effort to see his heroes recognized.

This year, his dream finally comes true. While KISS has been eligible for induction since 1999, it took a decade for the band to make the cut, delayed honors Starkey attributes to the band’s early nay-sayers taking decades to admit they were wrong.

“It really doesn’t surprise me that they’re getting in,” Dickerson admits. “It surprises me that it took this long. They had a great gimmick.” That doesn’t mean, however, that the former DJ likes their music any better. Slipping into an old, familiar role, he tweaks the KISS Army one more time. “They played the same three chords, over and over again — and by the way, they still do.”

Starkey disagrees. “We didn’t start the KISS Army because of their make-up or stage shows. We did it because of the music, which was viable then, and still is,” he said.

For Evans, the first three studio records — “KISS,” “Hotter Than Hell” and “Dressed to Kill” — coupled with “Alive” were enough. Those records remain in his collection, only now they’re on CDs and digital copies, not the vinyl of decades before.

As the rest of America embraced the band with “Destroyer” and the ladies’ choice ballad “Beth,” he began college, and began moving on. “After ‘76, I really didn’t follow the band,” Evans admits. “After the first three records and the live album, I had as much as I needed to. Those were a really good opening salvo of raw rock-and-roll.”

Now a Jacksonville, Fla., computer programmer, Evans stays in touch with Starkey, and the impact of what they began sometimes still strikes home. “The most amazing moment for me was around 20 years ago,” Evans remembers. He was walking through Honey Creek Mall when he spotted a greasy-haired teen wearing the bright colors of a KISS Army T-shirt. “It really struck me that I’d started that, and that something I’d begun was still going strong, all these years later. There’s not too many things you can say that about in life: my kids and my marriage, certainly. But that was something I did which lasted.”

And on a warm fall day, Starkey stands in his Indianapolis classroom, now a teacher just as Gene Simmons once was. The urban schoolchildren that an Indiana State University professor once told him he’d have a hard time understanding crowd around him, asking if he’d please play the new KISS record, a band they know mostly from appearances on “Family Guy.”

He grins, then consents. An award-winning educator, the former teen rebel knows how to reach his classes. Then the music kicks in. Starkey smiles. And the KISS Army, gaining new members, goes marching on….