Farewell tours are one of pop music’s signature moves. But there’s reason to believe Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley are throwing in the towel for real this time.
When Kiss plays Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, it will bring down the curtain on the band’s End of the Road farewell tour, which began in January 2019. “We’re gonna go out on top,” the bassist Gene Simmons said last year during an interview with the Los Angeles radio station KLOS-FM. There will be no more Kiss tours, he’s vowed, not ever.
Yeah, maybe.
In show business, sometimes the curtain drops but then comes back up, and there’s an encore. And sometimes the encore lasts a long time. Kiss fans know only too well that in 2000, the group announced a yearlong Farewell Tour. “We’re the champs again, let’s retire on top,” the guitarist Paul Stanley said in an interview printed in the tour program. (At least they’re consistent.)
Music fans have a growing number of reasons to be wary and even weary of the industry’s income-generating trickery, starting with egregious ticketing fees and extortive parking charges. This year was the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s first retirement — “It’s the last show that we’ll ever do,” he proclaimed to a delirious crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, but he was back on tour less than a year later — and there have been plenty of subsequent examples of bands taking their bows, then pivoting and coming back for more.
Retirement announcements should be treated with skepticism, and some artists have had cheeky fun in acknowledging the widespread practice of going away but not staying away. In 2004, Phil Collins started his First Final Farewell tour, and in 2017, he called his true farewell tour the Not Dead Yet tour. (In 2021, he joined Genesis for its The Last Domino? tour.) In a nod to Raymond Chandler, Eagles are on the road with their Long Goodbye tour, which the band says will include “as many shows in each market as their audience demands.” It could easily become the “Cats” of farewells.
Depending on the artist’s age, a professed leave-taking tour might merit more or less skepticism. Bowie was 26 at the time of his first retirement, not an age when entertainers are usually willing to throw in the towel. Simmons is 74, and stomping around in seven-inch platform heels while spitting blood and blowing fire in a costume that weighs almost 40 pounds must get more difficult every year.
At some point, aging can start to undermine a band’s image. Simmons was 25 when he first sang, “I wanna rock ’n’ roll all night, and party every day.” Nearly 50 years later, that level of youthful bluster just isn’t as credible. (Simmons and Stanley are the band’s two remaining original members; Peter Criss and Ace Frehley were not part of the tour.)
“I do believe this is the end of the road, finally, for Kiss,” Doug Brod, author of the 2020 book “They Just Seem a Little Weird: How Kiss, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll,” said in a phone interview. And if it’s a ruse and a stooped-over Kiss comes back in 2028 for a We Were Just Kidding tour, Brod is OK with that. “If you’re a genuine fan, don’t you want to see the band you love as many times as you can? I don’t know why anyone would feel cheated.”
More than any previous generation, baby boomer musicians built sustainable careers, and in many instances, benefited from healthier touring circumstances. As a result, a lot of them are still on the road, including Paul McCartney (81), Mick Jagger (80) and Pete Townshend (78). The roll call of recent or current farewell tours includes Joan Baez, Paul Simon, the B-52’s, Foreigner, the Oak Ridge Boys, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dead & Company, Kenny Loggins, Ted Nugent, Gladys Knight, Aerosmith and Parliament-Funkadelic. Younger acts including the rappers Styles P, Scarface, Daddy Yankee and 50 Cent are also waving buh-bye.
Bowie didn’t invent the faux farewell. It’s a tradition that probably dates back to vaudeville, if not Elizabethan theater, and Bowie knew of a pretty recent bait and switch: Frank Sinatra retired in 1971, telling reporters he planned to “read Plato and grow petunias.” And, he said, “I don’t want to put on any more makeup,” a sentiment Gene Simmons might share this week.
But Sinatra returned two years later, to much ballyhoo and chart success, with the album “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back.” Bowie was paying attention. “David was a big Sinatra fan,” his former manager, Tony DeFries, recently told Mojo magazine. Bowie’s retirement was a ruse, DeFries added, to generate publicity and whip up demand for a headlining tour of big venues in the United States. It worked; in 1974, Bowie played arenas across the country, including two shows at Madison Square Garden.
Bowie’s exit was an opportunistic hoax, but other retirements may be sincere at the moment they’re made. In 1977, Elton John announced he was done touring while onstage at Wembley Stadium in London. Though he was back two years later, he talked repeatedly about retiring, and in 2014, he told a French crowd, “No more shows, no more music.” The next day, his representative assured a reporter, “Elton was only joking.” In September 2018, the singer started his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which ended in July 2023 and grossed $939 million, based on figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. So far, he hasn’t reneged.
Saying a dramatic goodbye is good business, and so is the Lazarus return. It’s easy to speculate that money is the chief motivation, but there are other reasons, too. “I’ve got a family I never go home to,” Ozzy Osbourne said when he retired in 1992. Three years later, he was back with a Retirement Sucks tour, leaving fans to speculate about how much or little he enjoyed getting to know his family.
The retirement ruse is common among hard rock bands (Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Black Sabbath), but other perpetrators of the old switcheroo include the Who, Cher, Meatloaf, Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Phish and LCD Soundsystem, who made a documentary about its farewell in 2011, only to return five years later. “I’d never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work,” Trent Reznor told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2009, when he sent his band Nine Inch Nails into that good night. After four years, he unretired, which gave them something in common.
After Bowie retired in 1973, then unretired in 1974, he retired a second time in 1975. A year later, the journalist Cameron Crowe interviewed him for Playboy and challenged the singer, asking how he could release a new album despite having retired twice.
“I lie. It’s quite easy to do,” Bowie replied. “I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
