It is a feeling that could never be captured on a MP3 file. Perhaps it can’t even be pressed into vinyl. It’s the slickness of the sweat soaked through your jeans. The ringing of your eardrums between sets. The arms and hands and elbows of people you’ll never meet but will eagerly knock you to the ground then lift you up and carry you all the way to the stage. It’s going to your first gig in your teens and finally finding a sound that beats through to your heart. That makes you want to roar with approval at the end of each song. When you find a band that gives you that feeling you’ll want to make them your entire existence.
For high-schoolers Hawk, Lex, Jam and Trip, that band is Kiss, the hard rock band that practically invented the genre of Glam Metal. The four leads of 1999’s Detroit Rock City are all literal card-carrying members of the Kiss Army. Sneaking the band’s albums into their parent’s Donnie & Marie records. Memorizing the band’s history, including the secret of Gene Simmon’s elongated tongue. Even forming their own Kiss tribute band ‘Mystery’, with the ‘S’ predictably stylized into a lightning bolt. These teenage boys embrace Kiss and hard rock to the level of a lifestyle, spending their nights drinking, smoking, tripping balls and playing their favorite hits long into the night.
Set over the course of a single day (either the 21st or 23rd of January if you're curious), the film follows the members of Mystery as they prepare to see Kiss play live at Cobo Hall, Detroit as part of their 1978 Alive II tour. When Jam (Sam Huntington)’s evangelical mother discovers that her son has tickets to hear ‘the Devil’s music’ she furiously burns them and literally drags Jam off to spend the rest of his teens at a Catholic Boarding School. Having lost their tickets and their drummer, his bandmates are dismayed until a stroke of luck leads them to bust Jam out and drive to Detroit, determined to scam, steal, and strip their way into the concert of a lifetime.
It’s an endearing film with a lot of funny moments and a killer soundtrack (in addition to Kiss the film features the likes of AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and The Runaways). However what Detroit Rock City does best, and indeed is the reason it has become a cult classic among the Kiss Army, is capture the juvenile instinct to make fandom one’s entire life. The first act is spent in at the quartet’s painfully average high school in Cleveland, Ohio. During which time you see how pathetic the non-Kiss parts of their life are. When they can be brought to heel by a conservative mother or forced to run in terror from an Elvis lookalike serving as a security guard. It’s only when they escape from these confinements of Americana are they able to take an active role in their lives. To rip-off a pizza delivery, drug a priest and lay the smack down on a pair of disco-loving wannabes.
The high school scenes serve to drive home the quartet’s need to see this band. To make you believe that missing Kiss is a threat that might as well be the end of the world to Mystery. It’s nicely woven throughout the film in areas like how cowed is under the oppressive thumb of his mother. After tonight he will likely never see his friends until he’s a legal adult. As the biggest burnout of the group, Trip (James DeBello)’s stupidity is primarily played for laughs. However there’s a tragic quality driven home by his boast that he’s simply going through the motions until he can drop out of High School. This plays no small part in allowing us to sympathize with him even as his tactic of entering the concert is the most thoughtless and crude. Planning to mug a small kid for his ticket. A plan that goes awry when his target (Cody Jones credited only as ‘Little Kid’) calls on his older brother, a towering homunculus named Chongo whose fists thoroughly punish Trip for his foolishness.
What such nuances make clear is that none of these boys have particularly bright futures ahead of them, stranded as they are in Middle America. Failing High School and with Mystery hardly likely to evolve into a professional band when they’ve only had one aborted gig. For Mystery, seeing Kiss live will probably be remembered as the high point in their lives. This is why being willing to mug small children or perform amateur strip shows seems more understandable than it should. Attending this concert is likely to be the closest any of them will get to living the rock star lifestyle. As a Ticket Scalper (the late Richard Hillman) describes ‘I'm talking about the most voluptuous women hanging out in the audience. I'm talking big breasteses, and tight vesteses, my friend! You're talking people passing around joints in the audience. You're talking about fuckin' Detroit Rock City, brother.’ The film makes you believe that the concert will finally allow them to access the, admittedly shallow, kind of world they dream of. Seeing Kiss genuinely means everything to these characters and so we accept the absurd lengths they’re willing to go to for it.
This is what elevates Detroit Rock City from being yet another gross-out teen comedy. The character’s love of Kiss and everything they represent comes from an incredibly earnest and relatable place. Some of it likely comes from the edgy feel of youthful rebellion. Enjoying how much the ‘Knights in Satan’s Service’ antagonizes conservative parents and disco loving ‘Stellas’ provides a certain illicit thrill. Almost on par with losing one's virginity in a confessional booth. The film ignores many of the superficial and commercial aspects of Kiss fandom that were popular in the era. By 1978 Kiss were already one of the most heavily merchandised bands with their name and image licensed to pinball machines, action figures, comic books and trading cards. A reality that would undermine the film’s depiction of Kiss as icons of the rebellious counterculture.
At the same time Detroit Rock City doesn’t avoid some of the more toxic elements of rock fandom, the objectification of women, homophobia and the hostile disregard for any alternative taste in music. Of all areas of toxic fandom this instinct towards gatekeeping is shown to be the most pervasive with Lex (Giuseppe Andrews) proving to be biggest offender of this. Frequently deriding the Stellas and regarding them lower than dogs. This hostility comes to a head during the drive to Illinois, when the quartet has a run in with a pair of especially macho disco freaks. Upon gaining the upper hand they proceed to beat the two men bloody with their various tools of rock paraphernalia (drumsticks, chains, and even Kiss-branded belt buckles). Perhaps inappropriately, the film frames the brutal assault as righteous payback set to Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’.
The Rock vs Disco dynamic may seem like a small part of the film however it speaks to one of the more pernicious aspects of rock fandom, one which can have devastating real-world consequences. Detroit Rock City is notably set in 1978, the year in which Kiss were arguably at the peak of their career. Their audience attendee figures were the highest they’d ever been and their merchandise deals were netting the band millions. This was also the period in which Rock music in general began to adopt an anti-disco sentiment that escalated to hostile and even violent extremes.
While Rock had the longer legacy, with its origins dating back to Chuck Berry in the 1950s, the younger, more diverse genre of Disco was derided as the more mainstream of the two. It was associated with colorful, chart-topping bands such as ABBA, The Bee Gees and The Village People (incidentally the genre’s popularity among gay men meant that a lot of anti-disco sentiment was driven by homophobia). The scene was the subject of the box-office smash that was Saturday Night Fever, led by a teen heartthrob named John Travolta. To fans of Heavy Metal bands like Kiss, Disco was everything they despised; shallow, inauthentic, commercial and flamboyant. Entire media personalities like DJ Steve Dahl, rose to prominence by adopting a militant ‘pure-rock’ fandom ethos that turned a music rivalry into a culture war.
This tension between Rock and Disco reached a tipping point in 1979 when Dahl organized a ‘Disco Demolition Night’ to promote a doubleheader baseball game at Chicago’s Cominsky Park. Offering fans discounted tickets if they brought a disco record to be blown-up between the two games. The event went awry when far more people showed up than the stadium could accommodate, forcing security to padlock most of the gates. Drunken attendees inside threw records along with fireworks and liquor bottles during the first game and security had nowhere near the manpower to police the event. When the actual explosion went off it was far larger than expected, tearing up sections of the outfields. The already rowdy crowd proceeded to storm the pitch, setting records alight and demolishing the stadium. Riot police had to clear out the crowd and the home team ended up forfeiting the second game.
As bad as the event made the Rock scene look it was Disco that paid the price. The genre went into rapid decline, with bands like The Bee Gees falling out of the charts in subsequent years. Record sales plummeted, resulting in major labels going bust and by the 1980s whatever was left of the US disco scene was adapted into the nascent electronic music movement. The opposition of the Rock scene and Disco Demolition could not take all the blame, but it certainly accelerated a trend that was already underway. With Reagan-era politics about to dominate the country and target both the sexually decadent Disco and the Satanic iconography of Rock.
With its setting in 1978, Detroit Rock City captures the moment in rock history when Rock was the outlet of choice for angry, disaffected teenagers. Socially and sexually stunted young men with an unchecked aggression towards the popular, colorful and camp new vibe sweeping the country. However, to its credit Detroit Rock City has the self-awareness to confront this hostility. Shortly after their roadside revenge, the boys pick up one of the disco freaks’ Stella girlfriends, Christine (Natasha Lyonne) and offer her a ride to Detroit. Partially out of concern for a lone woman wandering the freeway and partially hoping to win sexual favors from her. After sharing a joint they leave Christine passed out in the car only for it to be stolen with her in the back. Later, after trying and failing to sneak into the concert as a roadie, Lex comes across the car thieves. Having taken his Mom’s Volvo to a nearby chop shop where they intend to take full advantage of the attractive young woman now at their mercy. Crucially it is Lex then, the one who has shown the most volatile hostility towards Stellas, who ends up saving Christine. An acknowledgement of their shared humanity that far outweighs petty music rivalries.
In saving Christine, Lex proves that the various members of Mystery can move beyond their zealous worship of Rock. Hawk, Lex, Jam and Trip all begin the film with the same violent hostility towards the Disco scene along with a myriad number of other neuroses. In the process of doing everything they can to see Kiss they all end up expanding their horizons. Musically, psychologically, morally, and sexually, even physically with a last-ditch plan to beat each other bloody and claim to have been mugged for their tickets. At the end they emerge more experienced, possibly even wiser, and ready to face whatever the end of the 70s holds for them. Before that though they are rewarded, successfully scamming their way in to see Kiss and in the process getting revenge on Chongo and Trip’s pre-teen tormentor. On rushing into the concert hall, the titular track ‘Detroit Rock City’ blasts through the speakers and the experience is everything they could have hoped for.
A year after the Alive II tour, drummer Peter Criss would leave Kiss. Whether he was fired or quit remains a point of contention between band members. Two years later lead guitarist Ace Frehley would also go and the remaining members would proceed to ditch the bands iconic costumes and make-up. Kiss would never fully fall apart as many great bands tended to do, however from the eighties onward it was clear that their best days were behind them. In the decade that followed America would undergo sweeping societal change with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the moral majority. The hippies who had led the sexual revolution had grown up into conservative middle-class parents, keen to promote family values and Christian ideals. Emboldened by Reagan they led the ‘Satanic Panic’ a period of hysteric outrage against supposed Satanic influences in youth culture. Especially in bands like Kiss who happily exploited the fears of religious groups for publicity.
In getting to finally see their favorite band live, the four leads of Detroit Rock City get to enjoy one final hurrah. After tonight they will be separated forever with Mystery potentially never reuniting. It’s unlikely that they’ll ever see Kiss perform in their original lineup again and over the next decade Rock will change into something far beyond their narrow tastes. However, these are problems for the future. For this one night, this one moment in time they can thrash and drink and revel like the rock stars they want to be, all nite long.
