Retro Video of the Week: "All Hell's Breakin' Loose" by Kiss

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, something terrifying, exciting, and historic happened on live TV.  For the first time, Paul Caravello, Vincent Cusano, Stanley Eisen, and Gene Klein relinquished their make-up and respective stage identities as the Fox, the Ankh Warrior, the Starchild, and the Demon, baring their actual faces to the world on MTV.


Let's not understate how big of a moment this was, not just for Kiss, but for rock and roll.  Kiss was a massive band in the mid to late '70s (and early '80s, to a lesser extent), and after they started in 1974, they had never made any public appearances without their famous makeup.  Many people had no idea what they looked like in real life.  Of course, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley were no longer in the band, so they could still go about their lives in relative anonymity.

The "unmasking" coincided with the band's release of the Lick It Up album, which kind of plunged the band squarely into the hair band genre and helped the band continue its success and stay relatively relevant throughout the '80s, reaching a new generation of rock fans before the big reunification of the original lineup and putting the makeup back on for a surreal moment at the 1996 Grammys.

As a child, I was terrified of Kiss solely because of their makeup (I hated clowns), so the unmasking helped ease some of that terror -- which isn't to say the guys in the band look better without their makeup on because that's always been a tongue-in-cheek debate.  Of course, now the thought of seeing the band without their makeup makes me physically, emotionally, and sexually uneasy.

Rather than going with the title track off of Lick It Up, I'm going with the band's other single from that album, "All Hell's Breakin' Loose."  This is one of only three songs in the Kiss catalog that was written by all then-current members of the band (the others being "Love Theme From Kiss" off of the band's 1974 self-titled debut and "Back to the Stone Age" from 2009's Monster).  The song is known for it's rap-rock first verse sung/rapped by Paul -- an early precursor to rap-rock and rap-metal, for better or worse.  On top of that, the video is ridiculous, hilarious, and so totally '80s.