Farewell tours have lately become more like pauses than permanent goodbyes. Bands announce them with grand fanfare, only to quietly reemerge a few years later, or, in some cases, never truly step away at all.
But the first Farewell Tour from Kiss, which spanned 2000 to 2001, carried a different kind of weight. It felt like something was unraveling within the group itself. According to Paul Stanley, the emotional and creative undercurrents of that tour weren’t just off, they were actually corrosive.
During a conversation on The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan (via Ultimate Guitar), Stanley opened up about what made that particular tour such a difficult chapter: “The music was erratic at best. There was no sense of camaraderie or joy.”
Those words cut deep, especially coming from a founding member of one of rock’s most theatrical and enduring acts. Stanley also reflected on an experience that gave him pause in a way nothing else had before.
“I don’t care about bad reviews, but when I agree with them, that’s, ‘Houston, you have a problem.’ It’s like, you read something, you go, ‘They’re right.’ It’s different when you go, ‘They have their heads up their asses, or, they want to attack what you’re doing.'”
“But when you read things and go, ‘This is right, and I’m really unhappy.’ So it really felt like, ‘Let’s put the horse down. Let’s just shoot it.’ And it went against everything that we had always believed, and that’s that the band is bigger than us,” he added.
Behind the scenes, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss were drifting away from the fold. Criss didn’t even play all the Farewell Tour dates, with Eric Singer stepping in for drums. Eventually, Singer would take over Criss’ role full-time, and Tommy Thayer would replace Frehley for the tours and albums that followed.
And then, something unexpectedly human happened after the dust had settled.
“I remember, after that Farewell Tour, being literally at a car wash. And somebody said to me, ‘Oh, I saw the Farewell Tour. It was amazing. Are you going to do the 35th anniversary tour?’ And I was like, ‘We can come back? You still want us?’ We were only gone because we decided to be gone. Nobody wanted us gone.”
Fast forward to December 2, 2023, Kiss played what was billed as their final show at Madison Square Garden. But fans who’ve learned to take rock farewells with a grain of salt weren’t entirely surprised when the band recently announced their next appearance: a three-day event called Kiss Army Storms Vegas, scheduled for November 14 to 16, 2025.
