When KISS launched the Reunion Tour in 1996, The Detroit News ran this story, a look back at the KISS visit to Cadillac.
The Cadillac High School Vikings began the 1974 football season with big cleats to fill. The previous year's squad had gone 9-0, running the team's consecutive-game victory streak to 16. But the pressure to win proved too overwhelming and the gridders dropped their first two games.
Head coach Dave Brines knew his players needed a mental boost. He passed, however, on a win-one-for-the-Gipper speech, and handed off to assistant coach and avid rock 'n' roll fan Jim Neff.
"I had seen Kiss open for the New York Dolls in Flint, probably in 1973," says Neff, an English teacher at Cadillac High in northwest Michigan since 1971. "They were so dynamic and so different. They were a band you had to see."
"There's also a saying in football called 'K-I-S-S.' It stands for 'Keep it simple, stupid' and means coming up with a game plan that's easy for the players to learn and execute. It just all fell together."
After Neff began playing the glitter-rockers' albums in the locker room before and after practices and games, the Vikings won seven straight games and wound up conference co-champions.
By season's end, word that their music had inspired the team's turnaround had reached the greasepainted, fire-breathing, blood-spewing foursome.
The following year, Kiss came to Cadillac for Homecoming. The sleepy tourist town of slightly more than 10,000, roughly 40 miles southeast of Traverse City, has never been the same since.
"We always planned to turn this planet into Kiss World and Cadillac was the first proof that it was possible," says guitarist Paul Stanley, who will be playing Friday with his original bandmates -- bassist Gene Simmons, guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss.
Simmons agrees. "It's one thing getting into a band and making some money," he explains. "It's another seeing that a band can change people's lives; that it can instill a better sense of self-esteem in people; that it can help a football team win games."
Kiss' whirlwind two-day October 1975 visit to Cadillac began with a stop at the high school, where the band was greeted by the Viking players and the school's cheerleading squad. They popped into classrooms, signed autographs, posed for photos on the football field, and even tossed the pigskin around with players.
In the evening, flame-spitting Simmons helped start the school's traditional bonfire. The group then performed in the high school gym for roughly 2,000 students and their parents, many of whom had never attended a rock concert before.
The following day, the band's members breakfasted with city and school officials, all of whom wore full Kiss makeup. (The group had sent several makeup artists to Cadillac prior to their arrival to teach some students how to apply the Kiss look.) Then-Mayor Raymond Wagner proclaimed Oct. 10 "Kiss Day" in Cadillac and presented the group with a key to the city.
The band's visit concluded with the Homecoming Parade down one of the city's main thoroughfares, renamed "Kiss Boulevard" for the day. The group itself rode on a "Kiss" float equipped with a sound system that blared cuts from its 1975 album Alive! Other floats, named after Kiss songs such as "Dressed to Kill" and "Hotter Than Hell," followed behind.
After the parade, the band, accompanied by a full police escort, returned to the football field where the band boarded a waiting helicopter. Once aloft, band members threw thousands of fliers bearing the words "Cadillac High -- Kiss Loves You" and each member's signature.
"I thought, 'Oh my God, who's going to be responsible for picking up all this paper?'" then-Cadillac High School Principal John Laurent says with a laugh today. "But within moments, there wasn't one (flier) to be found. The kids had picked them all up."
The credit for bringing Kiss to Cadillac belongs to Neff, who has remained friendly with Simmons and Stanley over the past two decades. To this day, he remains disbelieving.
"It was surreal," Neff, now 49, says of the visit. "It was like I was in a dream. I couldn't believe what was going on."
A native of Flint who grew up in the city "when you could still get Bob Seger for a high school dance," Neff maintains it was Kiss' music, cranked up "as loud as we could," that helped the '74 Vikings start winning.
"It really did make a difference," agrees Brines, head coach at Cadillac from 1972 to 1985. "I loosened up, Jim loosened up, and the kids loosened up."
Harry Hagstrom, an offensive and defensive tackle for Cadillac from 1974-76, echoes Brines. "It took a situation where everybody was down and brought us back to life," says Hagstrom, now a 38-year-old car salesman. "It gave us a theme to rally around."
It was after the Vikings first few victories in '74 that Neff wrote to Kiss to let the band know how its music had inspired the team. Then one night, an unsuspecting Neff received a call from Simmons and Stanley.
"We thought it was such an uplifting story," says Simmons. "So much of what we hear every day is about defeat and misery. We've always been very up about life. We're very much for whatever it is that gets you over the hump."
Neff kept the band posted on the team's progress. The group, in turn, sent posters for the locker room and, after the season ended, gave Neff a dozen tickets to a concert in Detroit.
Midway into the '75 season -- the KISS defense remained intact that year and the team finished a respectable 6-3 -- Neff learned that Kiss would be playing at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, about 60 miles southeast of Cadillac. He contacted the band about a brief visit to the school and they readily agreed.
"Whether it's football or you-fill-in-the-blank, everybody sooner or later needs a pep talk because there are so many people around intent on seeing you fail," notes Stanley. Thus, he adds, "when we see people whose hearts and souls are in the right place, that's where we want to go."
Kiss ultimately agreed to visit the school and perform there as well. It was then up to Neff to obtain permission from school officials.
Principal Laurent, never having seen nor heard Kiss, green-lighted the show. Later, though, he was plagued by second thoughts. "I probably wouldn't have allowed it had I known who they were," he says, looking back. "I began thinking, 'What did I get myself into?' In fact, some of my fellow principals at the time thought I was goofy."
Other Cadillac residents had qualms as well.
"This is a very conservative community and some clergy and some parents had real serious concerns," remembers Brines.
For Kiss, this was nothing new. "People judge the book by the cover," says Simmons. "And even though we've always been so positive, people believe we're Satan worshippers or that Kiss stands for 'Knights in Satan's Service.'"
Bowing to local reservations, the foursome did tone down parts of their act. The night of the concert, I was standing in the locker room talking to Gene Simmons," recalls Brines. "Jim apparently had said something to him about my concerns about him spitting blood and he asked me about it."
"I said, 'I am concerned, but it's your show and you're our guests. You go ahead and do that if you feel it's appropriate.' He said he wasn't going to do it out of respect for us. That really impressed me."
Stanley, in turn, agreed to Neff's request to delete a reference to alcohol. "In the song, 'Cold Gin,' he used to say, 'Does anybody here drink vodka and orange juice?'" Neff explains. "We asked him not to say it and he said, 'No problem.'"
Some Cadillac residents who initially objected to the appearance were won over, too. "I was at the door that night and one woman came up and said she was one of the people who had complained," recalls Laurent. "I said, 'Why don't you go in and listen?' She did, and she never came out."
Twenty-one years after Cadillac High's one-of-a-kind Homecoming, Kiss' visit remains the stuff legends are of made of. "People still talk about it," says Neff, who acknowledges that it would be impossible to pull off a similar event today.
"It would be a logistical nightmare," he notes, citing, among other factors, insurance and security costs. (Back in '74, the school helped the band offset the roughly $20,000 cost of the visit by charging $2 per ticket to the band's concert.)
It's also unlikely the impact the band had on Cadillac will ever be repeated. "It brought the high school together," says Laurent. "For years, we had been trying to unite the student body and our faculty. Kiss accomplished that in one night."
Copyright 1996, The Detroit News
Copyright © 2001 by NeffZone. All rights reserved.