(Credits: Far Out / Michael Sears / Milwaukee Journal / Public Domain)
Tue 4 November 2025 19:00, UK
The entire appeal of Paul Stanley was never about him playing a million notes per second.
He was born to hone his rhythm skills rather than spending his time flying up and down the guitar neck, and judging by how far he took Kiss, his strength was more in being a songwriter than trying to make sure that every single song had a ripping lead throughout the whole tune. He never saw himself as being ‘demoted’ to rhythm, because as far as he could tell, the best players were the ones that didn’t need to be all that flashy.
It’s not like being a lead guitarist automatically makes you good, either. None of the members of Kiss claimed to be the best musicians by any stretch, but even in the era that favoured guitar heroes, not every shredder was necessarily setting the world on fire. There were more respected players in the field, like Rory Gallagher, but when listening to the bands that Kiss influenced, it’s not like an audience was going to be wowed by someone who could do a decent Van Halen ripoff.
There needed to be a song behind everything, and for Stanley, that all went back to the blues. Despite having a knack for writing the occasional pop tune, a lot of the biggest influences on Kiss tend to be the likes of Led Zeppelin and Cream whenever they wanted to make something a little more guttural. It’s not like they weren’t proud to wear their influences on their sleeve, but what Stanley was doing took the showmanship of Jimmy Page and combined it with the rock-steady rhythm of Keith Richards.
But for anyone willing to dig deeper, Free was the next place to go for something a little heavier. It’s easier for most people to picture them as the band that played ‘All Right Now’ and had half the members of Bad Company in the group, but when listening to Paul Kossoff play guitar for the first time, Stanley knew he was listening to something he had never heard before.
There had been the likes of Jimi Hendrix that reshaped the world, but what Kossoff played was so natural when he plugged his guitar in, with Stanley recalling, “I remember the first time I heard Paul Kossoff because it was extremely meaningful. I was in the car, and I was driving. But when I turned the radio on and heard Paul Kossoff playing on ‘All Right Now’, I had to pull over and catch my breath. His command of chords was deceiving in what appeared he was doing vs. what he was actually doing.”
It’s hard to think of a time when Kiss managed to have a song that bluesy, but Stanley’s occasional moments of playing lead have a lot more in common with Kossoff than most people realise. His work on his solo album in the 1970s as well as the times he and Ace Frehley would trade solos back and forth showed him to be far more riff-heavy, and even if he could throw in flashy moments, it was all done in service to the song.
But even if ‘All Right Now’ was the one that knocked him on his ass, the closest thing to a Kiss ancestor in Free’s catalogue is probably ‘Fire and Water’. It’s not exactly in shock-rock territory or anything, but looking at the way that Paul Rodgers approaches the vocal, the vocal leaps that he takes isn’t all that dissimilar to those early Kiss albums when Stanley reaches into the stratosphere.
Although Kossoff was one of a kind during his short time on this Earth, a lot of guitarists should take notes on the way that he played guitar. Not all of it might be the most impressive thing in the world, but if you’re looking to learn about how to tell a story with one instrument, very few hard rockers were able to make the guitar talk like he did.
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