(Mark Weiss)
SiriusXM host Luc Carl explains that a lot of the time, when you meet your rock heroes, they turn out to be dicks. Not so with the members of KIX: “They’re happy, and they’re nice.”
They’re not your typical hair band.
KIX went platinum with their 1988 album Blow My Fuse, but success apparently didn’t go to their heads. The band released seven albums through 1995 and then went on hiatus. In 2013, they went back into the recording studio (really, new bass player Mark Schenker’s house) to record for the first time in nearly 20 years. The CD/DVD set Can’t Stop the Show: The Return of KIX will be released on October 21, and they are celebrating with local shows this weekend.
Longtime bass player Donnie Purnell, who left the band in 1996, wrote most of KIX’s songs, so the decision to return to the studio was met with some trepidation. Fortunately, producer Taylor Rhodes signed on to help the band find their voice again, with Schenker contributing the lion’s share of songwriting duties as well as collaborating with all of his bandmates.
KIX was a hair band with a hair producer behind them. Rhodes, whose signature mane made him the Farrah Fawcett-Majors of the metal set, co-wrote some of KIX’s biggest hits, as well as Aerosmith’s “Crying” and Celine Dion’s … well, let’s not hold that against him, even though there’s a Celine Dion platinum record in Rhodes’ office.
The movie, directed by Steve Nerangis and Dale Jackson, is a fairly straightforward backstage profile that gets more interesting when you see Rhodes at work, trying to get the band’s new power ballad into shape and realizing that what it needs is acoustic guitars and a tempo like the Stones’ “Angie.”
The resulting album, 2014’s Rock Your Face Off, includes what may be your favorite 21st century power ballad: “Inside Outside Inn”. Singer and co-writer Whiteman dedicates the song to his wife of 31 years. How many other aging metal bands do that? And how many other aging metal bands still have their voice?
There’s a reason why Whiteman can still sing. Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale explains how much she learned from touring with KIX; Whiteman would exercise his vocal chords before each show, and thanks to a level of clean and healthy living that’s unusual in the rock world, Whiteman and his bandmates (though some of them may look a little longer in the tooth), are still skinny rock stars.
Can’t Stop the Show isn’t one of the great rock docs, but it shows that KIX still puts on as good a show as they did in their heyday. You can see them at Leesburg’s Tally Ho Theatre on October 14 and 15. Get tickets here.
Listen to a live version of “Can’t Stop the Show” from KIX’s upcoming CD/DVD set.
