KISS was famous for their flamboyant, over-the-top theatrical stunts in the 70s. But a couple of times, those stunts got out of hand. In 1976, Ace Frehley nearly got killed during a gig in Florida. As the band came down to the stage, he took a hold of a metal rail to balance himself and was seized by the electric current, which made a circuit with his guitar. Thankfully he was able to let go before he got seriously hurt. “I got electrocuted in Florida and I survived,” Frehley recalled to Rolling Stone (via Ultimate Classic Rock). He took a break and shortly after came back on stage to finish the night’s set and was met with a standing ovation. The accident later became the inspiration for the song “Shock Me,” the first track he ever sang on a KISS album. 

Before Frehley’s accident, in 1973, during a New Year’s Eve show at the Academy of Music in New York City, KISS was an opening act for Blue Öyster Cult. Gene Simmons accidentally set his hair on fire during his fire-breathing theatrics, sending a member of the audience to the emergency room with burns on his head and face, Dangerous Minds reports. 

According to an FBI report, in 1980, a request was made to bureau offices in Texas regarding “civil unrest” at the band’s concerts. While reports came back that nothing out of the ordinary documented. However, reports did reveal that a southern religious group in Arkansas was campaigning against the rock band, believing KISS stood for “Knights in Search of Satan” and that the members of the band were devil worshippers. The strange face paint, long tongues, and the fire-breathing antics probably played a big role in it, but the rumor originally started as a result of an interview Gene Simmons gave in Circus magazine after KISS’ first album was released. “In response to a question, I said that I sometimes wondered what human flesh tastes like. I never wanted to really find out, but I was curious intellectually. Later on, this comment seemed to ignite the whole idea that in some way KISS was aligned with devil worship,” Simmons wrote in his 2001 autobiography Kiss and Tell (via Snopes). 

But, despite Simmons’ bizarre statement, the band’s name has nothing to do with the devil. “We just liked the name,” said Simmons. “It was a simple word that people understood all over the world.” But any press is good press, and while KISS denied any ties with Satanism, they also didn’t do anything to discourage them. “It created an aura of mystery around us, and mystery sells,” said Paul Stanley in Rock ‘n’ Roll Myths: The True Stories Behind the Most Infamous Legends. The irony is that Simmons was a theology major in school, and he was able to defend himself by quoting back the Bible to his religious critics, Cheat Sheet reports.

Peter Criss was fired from the band because of his drug addiction and wild behavior. According to Ultimate Classic Rock, on at least three occasions Criss deliberately sabotaged the band’s shows during their 1979 tour. Things had been heavy among band members for a while. During a show on December 8, when Paul Stanley gestured to Criss to slow down the tempo in the middle of a song, Criss took it personally. “What that says to everybody in the arena is that I’m the one f***ing up the band,” Criss wrote in his 2012 memoir, Makeup to Breakup (via Ultimate Classic Rock). 

What happened next is that Criss intentionally “slowed the song down to a crawl” in the middle of the concert. That wasn’t the end. Two nights later, during a concert in Jackson, Miss., Criss stopped playing for no reason during Stanley’s solo performance. Criss didn’t feel treated as an equal and had already expressed his desire to quit the band if things didn’t change. On the other hand Stanley and Gene Simmons couldn’t put up with him anymore. During a show in Biloxi, Miss., Criss hit Simmons on the back of the head with his drum stick and later threatened him with a broken champagne bottle in the dressing room, Live for Live Music reports. For Simmons and Stanley it was the final straw. In 1979 Criss was fired and replaced by new drummer Eric Carr.

Vinnie Vincent brought KISS back to fame in the 80s after replacing Ace Frehley. At the beginning, things seemed to be going smoothly. Vincent played lead guitar and co-wrote many of the songs on their subsequent albums. But when he consistently refused to sign a contract with KISS, keeping his employment unofficial, their relationship started to fall apart. 

Vincent was asking for fairer wages. “There was nothing. I never saw any royalties during the time I was in the band; it was just a paycheck, that I took home 550 bucks a week,” said Vincent in during an interview at an Atlanta KISS Expo (via Metal Wani). In 1984 KISS and Vincent split, and Vincent started what would become a 20-year-long lawsuit against his former bandmates over allegedly unpaid songwriting royalties. “It could have all been avoided. It was senseless, because there were millions of dollars in warranties,” told Vincent. “We eventually settled everything that we had between us, all the problems. … But I was in hell for 20 years, and it was my hell.” 

In spite of that, Vincent still holds a lot of respect for Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. “The magic that we have together never dies,” said Vincent, per Ultimate Classic Rock. 

“The tour was horrible. Constant Drudgery and misery,” Paul Stanley wrote in his 2014 memoir, Face the Music: A Life Exposed (via Rolling Stone). After years of clashes and disagreement, in 2000 the band saw its original members reunited. But what was meant to be a glorious comeback turned out to be a nightmare. “We never knew if we’d make it to a show on time, and once we got onstage we never knew whether we’d get through the show,” Stanley lamented. He was especially bitter at Ace Frehley and Peter Criss for finding excuses to skip rehearsals and for showing up at the very last minute. 

In August of 2000 things got tense when Frehley missed every available flight to get to Irvine, where KISS was playing a show, Ultimate Classic Rock reports. He was supposed to get there the day before and ended up showing up right before the concert. Even though the tour did well commercially, the general mood ended up affecting the band’s performance. “By the ‘farewell’ tour, I thought we were disappointing people. People may have loved the excitement and the novelty of seeing us again, but many nights we weren’t very good,” said Stanley during an interview on Talk is Jericho in 2014. “The ‘farewell tour’ was us wanting to put KISS out of its misery.” 

The last time all four original members of KISS performed together was the North Charleston, S.C., show in 2000, covered in Rolling Stone. The band, whose current lineup features Gene Simmons, Stanley, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer, has announced its final concert will take place on July 17, 2021, in New York City, Ultimate Classic Rock Rock reports.