Following is an excerpt from an interview with KISS frontman Paul Stanley, due to appear in the April 2014 issue of Guitar World (which can be ordered here):

Q: By the turn of the '80s, Ace and Peter were on their way out, and Gene was off trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Did you feel like you were on your own in KISS?

Stanley: "Totally. Absolutely. I didn’t feel it. I was. There wouldn’t have been a band without me. Because when your partner is off doing all kinds of questionable side projects and not only taking time but also involvement away from the band, sure. For me it ultimately came down to, I love what I do; I don’t want this to end. So I decided to bail water, for my own survival."

Q: How did that make you feel?

Stanley: "It certainly was more lonely and more stressful to know that the only person who was going to get us through the icebergs was me. But I didn’t mind that. I only minded the fact that I was still splitting the income and royalties as though I had a partner. That bothered me. The fact that I was running things? Honestly, that’s probably what got us through that decade."

Q: As far as navigating the icebergs, as KISS’ popularity declined, it was your idea, in 1983, to take off the makeup in order to reinvigorate interest in the band.

Stanley: "I didn’t see any other choice at that point. And I take my hat off to Gene that, although he was uncertain about it and maybe less comfortable with it, he came to realize that it was the right move. Or at least he saw that I was very committed to the idea. I felt that we had diluted everything the band was to the point where it was becoming a farce. What happened was, we kicked Peter out of the band—'we' meaning Ace, Gene and myself.

But rather than saying, 'We’ve built these iconic figures together and we’re going to continue on with what we built,' we bought into the idea of, 'We have to have a new character.' That watered it down. Some people may argue with me, but I feel that Batman is Batman whether he’s played by George Clooney, Christian Bale, Val Kilmer and on and on."

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