Rock Bands Kiss and Blue Oyster Cult to Pump Up Decibel Level

Kiss and Blue Oyster Cult are the loudest New Yorkers of them all. Where heavy-rock bands are concerned, they are also among the longest-lived.

The two groups will be putting out most of the musical decibels in Orange County over the next few days: Blue Oyster Cult tonight and Friday at the Coach House, and Kiss on Saturday at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

As Gene Simmons, the co-founder and resident fire-breathing hedonist of Kiss, told the story this week from a tour stop in Denver, the two bands go way back together--back to Kiss’ first evening of notoriety.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1973, Simmons said. Blue Oyster Cult was headlining the show at Manhattan’s Academy of Music, and Kiss, with its Kabuki-style makeup and super-hero stage outfits, had bottom billing in a lineup that also included Iggy Pop.

The show won Kiss its first substantial press notices, Simmons said, and soon afterward the band went off on its first national tour, opening theater dates in the Midwest--for Blue Oyster Cult.

“We weren’t allowed to play encores. Usually our plugs were pulled,” Simmons said. But one night in Detroit, Kiss was able to go back on stage and answer the crowd’s cries for more--a demand that the new band, having already exhausted its meager song list, satisfied by repeating three numbers it already had played. As it turned out, Simmons said, the Kiss road crew had prevented Blue Oyster Cult’s road manager from pulling the plug by locking him in an equipment trunk. Kiss was booted off the tour on the spot.

It was the first of many times in the early days that headlining bands would refuse to share the bill with Kiss and its spectacle of makeup, props and pyrotechnics, Simmons said. But before long, Kiss was established as a headlining draw in its own right, launching a career that, according to the band’s own figures, has topped the 50-million mark in worldwide record sales. Most of those sales have been racked up with music built on a single-minded heavy thump, and a single-minded thumping is what Kiss has received from most rock critics.

Unlike many rockers who regularly get panned in the press, Simmons doesn’t downplay what he reads about his band, nor does he pretend to ignore it.

“It matters, and anyone who says it doesn’t is fooling himself. It matters more what fans think, but ultimately you want to be liked (by the press),” he said. That desire led seven years ago to the band’s one great departure from its blunt, bump-and-grind music and its coarse lyrical appeal to adolescent libido and rebellion against adult authority. The album, “The Elder,” had a symbolic yarn to tell, strings and chorales to embellish the music, and Lou Reed, one of the pre-eminent rock poets, to help with some of the songwriting. In short, it had little to offer Kiss’ legion of head-banging fans.

“It was a terrible disaster,” Simmons said. “Not critically, ironically enough. We succeeded with what we wanted to do. But the fans hated it.”

Kiss made a quick about-face--including removing the greasepaint from its collective face in 1982--and has merrily continued on, racking up gold and platinum sales with heavy-rock albums that are long on guitar solos and sing-along choruses and short on lyrical maturity.

Simmons believes that the best rock ‘n’ roll should serve the pleasure principle and ignore the intellect.

“It doesn’t mean I ignore the other realities of life. But I don’t want to hear music that brings me down. I think people are fooling themselves (when they ask for adult themes from rock). It’s sex with a back beat, modern strip music.”

Simmons, 36, didn’t dispute the suggestion that most fans who bought Kiss albums 10 or 12 years ago when they were teen-agers have outgrown the music.

But, he said, “I don’t think that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is about. It’s ear candy. It doesn’t matter to me at all if people remember it 10 years from now. It just matters that it lifts people up when they hear it.”

Blue Oyster Cult may lack the unflagging commercial clout that Kiss has, but it does have at least one song that figures to remain an artistically enduring and enduringly popular rock landmark--the 1976 hit, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.” Rooted in myths as old as myth-making itself and as darkly romantic as Shelley or Keats, the song personifies Death as a gentle, beckoning lover seducing his quarry out of the world and into eternity. It was the high-water mark for a band that made some dense, satisfyingly crunching blues-inflected albums in the ‘70s, but has lost its focus in the ‘80s.

After producing the 1981 hit “Burnin’ for You” in a musical vein similar to “Reaper,” BOC turned to undistinguished, high-gloss power pop in “The Revolution by Night.” The 1983 album bore the production stamp of Bruce Fairbairn, whose credits include “Loverboy,” Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet” and the latest Aerosmith album. “Club Ninja,” a 1986 album, was mostly bland heavy metal. In a phone interview from his New York home, singer Eric Bloom said Tuesday that Blue Oyster Cult performed little in 1987.

“We’re not as intense as when we were rowdy teen-agers. We hardly worked at all in ’87. I don’t think we played more than three weeks the whole year. Buck (lead guitarist Donald (Buck Dharma) Roeser) and I decided to semi-retire from Blue Oyster Cult” and pursue other interests. But offers for bookings continued to come in, Bloom said, and the band regrouped for a July tour of Europe and some club dates late in the year around New York.

An invitation to visit Greece with Blue Oyster Cult brought a third original member, keyboard player Allen Lanier, back into the band after a two-year absence, and he decided to re-enlist full time. The three longtime members have been joined by a new rhythm section.

An album called “Imaginos” is due out in June, Bloom said, although it is made up of material written and recorded some time ago.

“It’s more of a throwback to the ‘70s, a much more scaled down, back-to-rock ‘n’ roll type of thing,” Bloom said. “If by some wild stretch of the imagination it has a hit, I don’t know what will happen. It’s not pop material. There’s nothing Bon Jovi-esque about it.”

The Wild Cards, one of Orange County’s most highly regarded rock bands, is about to start work on the album it hopes will be its calling card to national success.

The four-piece group is scheduled to start recording this weekend in a North Hollywood studio, said manager Brian Condliffe. The timetable calls for two weeks of recording sessions with producer Jeff Eyrich, followed by an early June album release on Dali Records, a subsidiary of the Hawthorne-based Chameleon Music Group. The Wild Cards shouldn’t have much trouble getting their work out to radio stations, reviewers and record stores around the country: Chameleon recently signed an agreement to have its releases distributed by Capitol Records, one of the major labels.

Miller Beer also recently picked the Wild Cards as one of 26 bands from around the country in its Miller Genuine Draft Band Network. Besides providing free instruments and equipment, Condliffe said, Miller will help publicize Wild Cards’ appearances when the band begins to tour. (So far, brief trips to Arizona in November and January have been its only appearances outside California.) The group recently recorded a funk-flavored radio jingle for Miller, Condliffe said, but the band isn’t expected to go overboard in promoting the brewer.

“They’re not asking the guys to be beer salesmen. The band does not have to stand on stage and say, ‘Everyone run to the bar and load up on Miller.’ ” What is expected, Condliffe said, is that the band hang a Wild Cards banner bearing the Miller logo at its gigs and mention the sponsorship in passing during each show.

One sad note amid these upbeat developments was the death last Saturday of Richard Remijio, father of the Wild Cards’ lead singer, Adrian Remijio.

The Movement, a band from San Clemente, will be showcasing songs from its new, independently produced album, “Waiting for You,” Wednesday night at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.

KISS and ANTHRAX

Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

Pacific Amphitheatre, Orange County

Fairgrounds, Costa Mesa.

$18.50, $14.

Information: (714) 634-1300.

BLUE OYSTER CULT

Tonight and Friday, 8 and 10:30 p.m.

Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano,

San Juan Capistrano.

$18.50.

Information: (714) 496-8930.