The band that made Creatures of the Night was not the band on its cover. When Kiss began recording their tenth studio album in 1982, the guitarist whose face would sell the record was already gone in every way that mattered. Ace Frehley, the spaceman with the smoking guitar, had drifted into alcoholism and addiction after a car accident, and he never played a note on the album. The sessions that summer were effectively a trio: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, and the new drummer Eric Carr. Kiss released Creatures of the Night on October 25, 1982.
The band that made Creatures of the Night was not the band on its cover.
A band in commercial freefall
That strange gap between image and reality was nothing new for Kiss by then. Their popularity in the United States had collapsed. The disco flirtation of Dynasty in 1979 had alienated hard-rock fans, and the concept album Music from "The Elder" two years later failed to even go gold. Kiss had promised the heaviest record of their career, then delivered something theatrical and confusing. Creatures of the Night was the correction, a deliberate return to the hard rock of their mid-1970s peak.
The album also marked the end of the band's first era in business terms. It was their final release on Casablanca Records, the label that had launched them, and it was dedicated to the label's founder Neil Bogart, who died of cancer while the record was being made. Kiss used a contract clause to leave Casablanca after his death and signed a multi-million dollar deal with Mercury Records. Creatures of the Night was a farewell delivered at maximum volume.
The uncredited guitar work
The guitar work on the album is a small mystery of its own. Vinnie Vincent played most of the solos as a session musician and co-writer, but he was not credited on the original release. Frehley's face stayed on the cover even though he never played on the record. Vincent officially replaced Frehley only after a promotional tour of Europe, stepping into the Egyptian ankh makeup designed by Stanley. The band that made the heaviest Kiss album was partly a ghost of itself.
The music itself was a deliberate act of aggression. Creatures of the Night was the heaviest Kiss record up to that point, with Carr's drumming pushing the band closer to the thunder of Led Zeppelin's John Bonham than to the jazzier swing of the departed Peter Criss. Stanley told the press that Kiss was a heavy metal band. The album's one ballad, I Still Love You, was darker and heavier than anything the band had done before. This was Kiss trying to sound dangerous again.
Critical praise, poor sales
Critics noticed the change. Kerrang! and Guitar World both placed the album at number five on their year-end lists for 1982. But the praise did not translate into sales. The record climbed to number 45 on the charts, better than the 75 of The Elder, yet it could not restore the band's commercial power. It took until 1994 for Creatures of the Night to earn a gold certification in the United States, a full twelve years after its release.
The songs, however, outlived the disappointing sales. I Love It Loud has been performed more than 1500 times, War Machine more than 900, and the title track and I Still Love You more than 300 each. Creatures of the Night became the most represented album in Kiss concert setlists of the 1980s and the fourth most represented overall. The record that failed to save the band's commercial fortunes became the one they kept reaching for on stage.
Forty-four years after its release, Creatures of the Night stands as a strange monument: an album made by a band in transition, credited to a lineup that no longer existed, and dedicated to the man who had built their label. It was a heavy, dark record, and it still couldn't bring back the crowds. But the songs stayed in the setlist, night after night, long after the makeup came off.