By the late 1970s disco was in full vogue, and a lot of musical acts were jumping on the bandwagon. Examples from the rock world are almost endless – some undoubtedly great, others perhaps less so. Scraping the surface, examples include songs from The Rolling Stones (Miss You), Rod Stewart (Do Ya Think I’m Sexy), The Kinks (Superman), Uriah Heep (Whad’ya Say), Jethro Tull (Acres Wild), Electric Light Orchestra (Shine A Little Love), Grateful Dead (Shakedown Street), and even punk bands like The Clash, ever the experimenters, dabbled in the genre with The Magnificent Seven.
And then, of course, there was KISS.
1979 was going be “The Return of KISS” – as the huge media campaign for the new album and tour was billed in commercials, billboards, and advertisements. It had been two years since their previous studio album Love Gun, and that kind of break between albums was a small eternity in the 1970s.
The previous year had been spent releasing solo albums from all four KISS members, so there was an abundance of KISS-related music floating around. The movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park (or Attack of the Phantom as it was called in America), had also been released to an unsuspecting public.
In 1979, however, the mothership needed to be re-ignited. In addition to planning a new tour with many special effects, a new album called Dynasty was prepared. The first single was I Was Made For Loving You (referred to as IWMFLY from here on out), with a release in May – with enough time to take off and launch itself as a theme for the final summer of the 1970s.
American KISS superfan Thomas Kercheval shares the following memory from that time: “I’ll never forget hearing this song for the first time. I was in my room playing with Star Wars action figures while listening to the radio, as I often did. The DJ came on and said, “And now, something you’re not going to believe. KISS has gone …. DIIISSSCOOOOOO.” As he said that, there was all this reverb on his voice and it morphed into the opening of this song. I couldn’t believe it. Being a KISS fan was about to get really difficult at my school.”
While KISS got their share of criticism for “going disco,” it is important to point out that this was largely a one-song experiment. They certainly did not attempt a full album in that style. While the second single Sure Know Something (which I love, by the way) became another example of how KISS was moving away from their rock’n’roll roots, being a pop-ballad very much of its time, it can’t be called a disco song. They kept that to just the one song (IWMFLY) as an experimentation within that genre, but in return that song became so huge that it ended up more or less defining that late-70s version of KISS and to a large extent the Dynasty album.
So how did KISS end up considering that style at all? Paul Stanley shared the following in his autobiography Behind the Mask (2016):
“It started after a night that I spent at Studio 54, the famous New York nightclub. Studio 54 was a den of iniquity; it was sordid – to a level and degree that I wasn’t completely comfortable with. It was hardcore debauchery – sexual relations between everybody and anybody and drugs everywhere. It was beyond me. But I loved going there to dance. Nobody at Studio 54 wore a white suit and danced like John Travolta. I could go down there in jeans and a T-shirt and dance. Sometimes I’d go there on a Saturday night and not leave until the next morning.
“I had heard all these 126-beats-per-minute songs and listened to the lyrics and thought, ‘Gee, I can write that.’ I went home and set a drum machine to 126 BPM and sat down and started IWMFLY. […] The music at Studio 54 was all about living in the moment – about having a great time. And so my song began like that, too: ‘Tonight, I’m gonna give it all to you…’“
Originally titled Tonight, the resulting product had succeeded in capturing much of the essence of the disco era and all that it was about.
Paul Stanley: “It was a very big song around the world. Disco was so big. I listened to that stuff and said, “This is a cinch to write.” So it was kind of like a lark or a dare. I said, “I’ll write one of those songs.” It’s a real formula song. It was kind of like trying to make a point to ourselves that it’s not that hard to have a hit if you’re willing to really analyse something and pick it apart. We don’t do that very often.” (KISS: Behind the Music)
At the time, Paul was hanging out and had started writing song with Desmond Child, a musician whose band Desmond Child & Rogue was on the verge of splitting up (and did later in the year). They ended up working on IWMFLY together.
Paul Stanley: “Desmond and I started writing together soon after we met. I would take my guitar to his place, and he would sing along or play a keyboard. Desmond helped with the verses of the song, and eventually, when we went back into the studio to work on another studio album, Dynasty, the producer of that album [Vini Poncia] helped with the chorus.” (Behind the Mask)
Desmond Child: “Writing with KISS is something that just happened by accident. The first song Paul and I ever write together was IWMFLY. I was kind of pioneering a style of music, which was combining dance beats with music. That’s what I was doing in Desmond Child and Rogue. I thought it would be very cool to try that with KISS. We were at SIR Studios and they had rented a big grand piano. I sat down and started to play the chords for the verse. Paul contributed the chorus and was writing along with me and then continued writing the song with Vini. I loved the record. Paul is a really great lyricist, he loves wordplay, inner rhyming and double entendres. His writing is direct and clever.” (KISS: Behind the Music)
Paul Stanley: “Desmond is a really brilliant songwriter and great talent. He also has an amazing ability to get together with somebody and lock into what they’re doing.” (KISS: Behind the Music)
The song ended up being one of the very last presented at the recording sessions for the album.
Vini Poncia (producer): “When they brought IWMFLY to me, the verse had already been written. I wrote the chorus. I finished them in the tradition of the Brill Building. A lot of those things that sounded like pop influences in the songs were Paul’s idea, like Sure Know Something. The whole idea of ‘Dynasty’ was to show the business that this band could write better songs and make a better album than they had previously done. Not that Sure Know Something is a better song than Detroit Rock City but at that time those songs were considered lesser songs from a songwriting standpoint. ‘Dynasty’ was a great KISS album. If that album was a solo album for Paul Stanley or some of those songs like Magic Touch, those are good songs by today’s standards. We all had a great time making that album. They liked the whole process of pulling a song apart, building it up, I like ‘Dynasty’ because it was the first step for everybody in that area. It was the first time that Paul and Gene got involved in something that smacked of such commercialism but still had a lot of good emotion It came from the heart.“ (KISS: Behind the Music)
Contrary to popular belief (and Wikipedia), Gene Simmons would play the bass part on the song even though he was not particularly fond of the song. He recalled, “I’m still not crazy about IWMFLY. But that has nothing to do with it. I recognised that early on. He [Paul] came in one day and said, “Look, I’ve got this disco song, and it goes like this.” And he started singing like the Four Seasons, one of my favourite bands, by the way. I thought, “That doesn’t sound like KISS, but that’s precisely why we should record it.” (Rolling Stone)
Although Peter Criss appears in the video and on the single/album sleeve, he did not play on this track. In fact, he was not considered in good enough shape to drum on Dynasty at all, only ending up playing on his own track (Dirty Livin’). Instead, Poncia brought in session drummer Anton Fig who had worked with guitarist Ace Frehley on his solo album the year before.
Anton Fig: “I pretty much played the way I wanted to play on the album. Vini did get pretty specific on IWMFLY because that was one of the few songs we recorded with a click track. And we overdubbed the toms separately. I came up with the idea of the sort of gunshots in there. I got a lot of direction from Vini on that song.” (KISS: Behind the Music)
Paul Stanley: “When I heard IWMFLY being played back in the studio, I was blown away. Yeah, it wasn’t Detroit Rock City or Love Gun, but it was undeniable. Another band came into the studio while it was playing, and they love it, too. It was universal, something that grabbed you the first time it heard it.” (Behind the Mask)
The record company (Casablanca) also loved the track and got fully behind it. They decided to give the piece the full extended disco treatment and released it in the popular 12’’ single format, which resulted in the track growing to 7:54. It would go on the rule the dance floors throughout the summer of 1979.
The song would end up ruling the airways as well. The song was inescapable that year and gave the band their second Gold single, reaching that plateau in the US (selling over 1 million copies), Canada, Netherlands, Italy and Japan. Chart-wise it reached #11 in the US, and went all the way to #1 in countries such as Canada, Belgium, Netherlands and New Zealand, as well as #2 in Australia, Germany, France, Switzerland and South Africa. It was also one of the band’s few singles to chart in the UK in the 1970s, although it only peaked at #50. It performed well in the Norselands, reaching #10 in Norway and #19 in Sweden.
Despite the chart success there was an element of backlash from rock fans, particularly in America. KISS were seen as a rock band, and songs like IWMFLY moved the band into the mainstream, which made it hard(er) to be a KISS fan. Those who always had criticised KISS got more ammunition, including claims of “selling out.”
American fan Thomas Kercheval remembers well how it was to be a fan back then: “Well, it WAS a big hit for them. It was just the wrong song at the wrong time, and many of the people who liked the song weren’t really big KISS fans. All my friends were starting to get into British metal, and meanwhile KISS was going in the totally opposite direction, so serious fans started departing in droves. That song won them a battle but lost them a war. By the time 1980 came along, the KISS Army was like the Night Watch from Game of Thrones. And I was still right there, lol. I remember being made fun of a lot for wearing my Dynasty tour shirt. I also remember going to a religious program talking about the evils of rock music in 1980/81. When the pastor started talking about KISS, some girl said, “No one cares about KISS anymore. KISS sucks.” It’s amazing they outlasted all that and clawed their way back.”
In the rest of the world, including the Norselands, the popularity curve was a few years delayed compared to America. The band took off later, and it took similarly longer before that curve started going down. This meant that when KISS released IWMFLY, they were still very popular and considered the beacon of coolness. The song was embraced as a big hit, even managing to increase the fan base – to the point that the following album Unmasked (1980) still is the highest charting KISS album in Norway and several other European countries. The band even started taking off in territories like Australia, where they were welcomed like kings when they visited at the end of 1980.
RELATED ARTICLE: The story behind “Is That You”, the Unmasked album, and the European/Australian tour in 1980
Paul Stanley: “Was IWMFLY calculated? Yeah. Was it calculated to succeed? Yes, ultimately it was. But was that a bad thing? It started as a challenge to myself to see whether I could write in that style instead of meat-and-potatoes rock’n’roll. It was no different from the challenge I gave myself with Hard Luck Woman. The only difference was the style. No apologies for a hit that people worldwide still want to hear and sing along to.” (Behind the Mask)
The song has indeed become a concert staple over the years, albeit often with a new ‘rock’ arrangement that de-emphasises the song’s disco elements, as exemplified by the version the band performed on the live album Alive III (1994).
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