On 13. May 1974, Kiss was duped into being photographed without their makeup for a CREEM Magazine photo shoot. To CREEM’s credit, they went throughout the 70s with some of the most sought-after pictures in the world, and did not print them until February 1981, after National Enquirer had bought a stolen picture and printed it in 1979.
Photo taken at Creem Office, Birmingham, Michigan, photo by Charlie Auringer.
Paul Stanley:
“Somebody said to us, “We just spoke to Bill and he said you should take some pictures without makeup.” And what do we say? “Oh, okay.” We were naive and we got duped. Afterwards we called Bill up and said, “We did the photo shoot and we did the pictures without makeup.” He was just aghast and in total disbelief. “You did what?” We said, “Well, we were told you said we should do it.” But that misstep really didn’t come back to hurt us. The visual of Kiss with makeup was so much more appealing than seeing us without makeup.”
– “Nothin’ to lose: The making of Kiss (1972-1975)” by Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and Ken Sharp.
Jaan Vhelszki:
“We liked them and they liked us. That was the beginning of our relationship with the band. After that, anything we asked their management for, they always complied. We gave them a lot of coverage when everybody else was treating them like a joke. To me it was a campy, bizarre, death-of-art, Warholian kind of thing. Why would we ruin their superhero kind of appeal by printing that photo of them without makeup? It never really entered our minds to do that. Okay, maybe it entered our minds, but we never had any intention of running that photo in Creem. At Creem we were really honorable; our word was our bond. But here’s how one of those photos got out years later.
I was living in Beverly Hills with my sister and I was away for a week working on a story. She had a friend named Gary Lewis who used to be a photographer for Rona Barrett’s gossip magazine. My photo albums were out and they were filled with all of the relics of my past, and that included Charlie’s photo of Kiss without makeup. When I got back into town that particular photo book with the picture of Kiss was gone. He had stolen the book and sold the photo of Kiss without their makeup to the National Enquirer, who printed it [in the January 30, 1979, issue]. Creem eventually published that photo in the early eighties [in the February 1981 issue], but that was long after that photo got out.”
– “Nothin’ to lose: The making of Kiss (1972-1975)” by Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and Ken Sharp.
