Nothing screams “rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day” like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is why pairing blood-spitting rock elder statesmen KISS with that show that your grandma watches on Thanksgiving morning seemed like the perfect plan. Joining a lineup that included heartfelt lip-sync performances from artists like Meghan Trainor, The Vamps, and Nick Jonas, the Gods of Thunder were all set to bring the rock to your Turkey Day. But things didn’t go exactly according to plan, and now claims are being made that the band was somehow “screwed over” by the executive in charge of the parade.
In what was a surprising twist at KISS headquarters, this time it wasn’t Gene Simmons grabbing the headlines, but the normally sedate lead singer, Paul Stanley, who tweeted his frustration a day after the performance.
Stanley did not elaborate on how, exactly, the band was screwed over, but Simmons was apparently willing to tone down his sexually suggestive tongue-wagging for the parade audience, leaving some to speculate that it was poor camera work that angered The Starchild enough to force him to tweet it, tweet it out loud. Anyone watching the show was probably struck by the odd juxtaposition of a crowd of cheerleaders and giant Adventure Time balloons bobbling aimlessly to “Rock And Roll All Nite” before the band even appeared on the screen.
Still, the spectacle was enough for parade announcer Al Roker to declare it “one for the ages.” But realistically, expecting an earth-shattering miming performance, in the cold, on a parade float, from two 60-plus-year-old men also seems about as rock ’n’ roll as a themed coffeehouse.