And Detroit Rock City. No joke. The verse features one of the most unusual, idiosyncratic and identifiable bass lines/riffs ever played to a hard rock shuffle. It's not really intuitive, leaves lots of space in the shuffle beat, yet crams in a lot of notes where it can, quite complex, not easy to play, yet it characterizes the song (together with the neo-classical harmony leads in the middle). Strictly speaking it's not even a shuffle all the time because Gene plays something that is neither quite triplets nor quite sixteenths.
The bass line stems from Bob Ezrin who got inspiration from an old Stax recording. But I've never heard anyone play it quite like Gene does.
Of course, Gene is forever, albeit erroneously filed away as "
the bigmouth in make-up who can't play", so you can't really list him even though that one time he created something very special. Reportedly, he rehearsed it all night at the Destroyer sessions to get it right, the man has a work ethic.
When I first heard the song in 1976, that riff really floored me (in the context of a shuffle, I had never heard anything remotely like it before) even though back then I probably even couldn't identify whether it was guitar or bass (or really cared, it just sounded cool). I only started playing bass about a year later. Destroyer was the first album where Kiss to me didn't sound like a garage band (albeit one I liked) anymore (I knew Alive and Dressed To Kill back then), Bob Ezrin gave them that full-fledged Alice Cooper production grandeur.
