Paul Stanley Saved His Best Stage Banter For Connecticut

Love them or hate them, Kiss has just been announced as one of this year's Kennedy Center Honorees.

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I've been in both camps. I loved them in the 70's-90's. Kiss was an incredible force when I was just becoming aware of music in the mid-1970's. They were utterly fascinating to kids, I had the dolls, all the solo albums, I watched Kiss Meets the Phantom, and stuck with them through the era of unmasking, renaissance, retirement, re-retirement, and ultimate descent into holograms. Somewhere around the late 90's, I saw them as gimmicky, but I still paid attention and went to see their shows.

Paul Stanley's Stage Banter in Connecticut Was Gold

Have you experienced Paul Stanley's stage banter? It's amazingly brilliant gibberish. I saw them perform at the Hartford Civic Center, New Haven Coliseum, and Mohegan Sun many times. Here's a crash course in Paul Stanley's brilliance that I found from Joe the Ultimate Kiss Fan 2008 2.0 on YouTube

Stanley loved saying "Hartford!' and 'People!'. He said it maybe 100 times to us in a 90 minute stretch. My favorite greeting of all time went something like this:

"People! It's so good to be rocking with you here tonight in Hartford. You know people, let me tell you something people, we could have been anywhere else in the world tonight. We coulda been playing in Moscow in the middle of Red Square, we coulda been on the beach in front the good people of Rio De Janeiro, or we coulda jetted off to the Great Pyramids in Eqypt....But we wanted to be with you right here in Hartford tonight people!"

I remember looking around at my nearby Kiss Army members, and a few of us had the same puzzled look. Hartford Paul? Really?