I saw KISS on this last tour and thought it was a great show. And, I’ll be honest, I’m partly ok with bands using extra or backing tracks in live concerts, to a point. In the studio its easy for bands to lay down lots of tracks to fill out a song, that would be physically impossible to play live with just 4 or 5 people in the band. Sometimes backing tracks, or even extra musicians on stage, are necessary to give the audience the full song experience they’re expecting.

This just hit today through Blabbermouth.net:

So I’m not sure where I stand on this newly resurging story. Mainly because some members of KISS are notorious for being vehemently anti-backing tracks in concert. We’re looking at you Gene Simmons. Gene is famous for saying in an Australian interview: ‘There’s nobody with a synthesizer on our stage, there’s no samples on the drums, there’s nothing. There’s very few bands who do that now — AC/DC, Metallica, us.  I can’t even say that about U2 or The [Rolling] Stones...I have a problem when you charge $100 to see a live show and the artist uses backing tracks…It should be on every ticket — you’re paying $100, 30 to 50 percent of the show is [on] backing tracks and they’ll sing sometimes, sometimes they’ll lip synch.  At least be honest.’

Well according to recent live footage from their concert in Belgium, that’s all BS. I’ll let Eddie Trunk break it down for you talking about a show from Osaka, Japan in 2019, then post the original videos he’s using so you can see for yourself, and the newest videos from Belgium.

And here are the recent clips from KISS’s opening Detroit Rock City with Paul off cue, and at one point he “sings” the line ‘everybody’s going to leave their seat’, except he’s nowhere near his microphone. Just watch 21 seconds of this and you’ll see it too.

There are also claims that Eric Singer was off in a few videos, and somehow the whole band, or the whole backing track, was off by a measure or two.

Of course none of this matters to many KISS faithful, and in many ways it doesn’t matter to me. But if you’re going to go on record blasting backing tracks, and then get caught, again, using them, that’s disingenuous at best, and hypocritical at worst. I don’t care if you use backing tracks. But don’t blast other musicians for charging hundreds of dollars to their fans and say its all fake because they use backing tracks, and turn around and do the exact same thing.

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