Mel Kiper's Big Board: Ranking All the KISS Unmasked Songs

Mel's Kiper's Big Board: Ranking the KISS Unmasked Songs

The Unmasked draft is set. On Sunday February 18 in Cobo Hall in Detroit, six teams will be drafting songs from the KISS non-makeup era. Lick It Up to Revenge. Ping pong balls were pulled last week and the draft order is:  1) Matt Walters 2) Scott Carr 3) Mike Lovins 4) Jeremy Porter 5) Colin Gawel 6) David Martin.  Click here to learn more about the teams and the draft process .

To get you primed for the event we asked ESPN draft guru Mel Kiper Jr. to give us his expert opinion on how he sees the draft working out. Remember, his Big Board is NOT a mock draft and does not reflect what team needs must be addressed specifically. It's an overall assessment of how he values each song. Once again, this is NOT the actual draft, just an expert's best guess. The real draft results will be posted Thursday February 22nd at Pencilstorm. 

Take it away Mel Kiper Jr!!

1 - Unholy / Revenge:  The clear number one, the best Gene song by a country mile

2 - I've Had Enough / Animalize:  Probably the best written, hardest-rocking Paul song of the non-makeup era   This song can make all the throws.

3 - Heart of Chrome / Revenge:  My favorite Vinnie co-write and my favorite song on Revenge .

4 - Fits Like A Glove / Lick It Up:   Such a great Gene song, even if it was overplayed live

5 - Tears Are Falling / Asylum:   Maybe the best pure Paul song of the 80's

6 - Domino / Revenge:  Even if it was ripped off of a Black & Blue song, it still rips

7 - Lick It Up /  Lick It Up:   Great, even after a million times   This song ran a 4.3 at the Kiss combine.

8- Heaven's On Fire /  Animalize:   Same as LIU  

9 - Not For The Innocent /  Lick It Up:  An excellent LIU chestnut

10 - Thrills In the Night / Animalize:  Such an astute piece of writing for a great album of Paul material

11 - Get All You Can Take / Animalize:   Love this song, even with the over the top "fucking"

12 - Thou Shalt Not / Revenge:  A return to form for the demon, a heavyweight in topic and music

13 - A Million To One /  Lick It Up:  One of the greatest Paul power-ballads ever.

14 - Every Time I Look At You / Revenge:  Such a delicate song - no doubt heavily influenced by Ezrin

15 - King of the Mountain / Asylum:  Such a great opener - is there a better Carr drum track?

16 - Hell or High Water / Crazy Nights:  Underrated CN nugget from the Demon. Might be Kulick's best co-write.

17 - Turn On The Night / Crazy Nights:  Who doesn't love a little Diane Warren cheese?

18 - I'll Fight Hell To Hold You / Crazy Nights:  A great song in the vein of the other hardest Paul tracks from the 80's

19 - God Gave Rock and Roll To You / Revenge:  Just a great song and a great cover choice.

20 - Who Wants To Be Lonely / Asylum:  Might be the best melodic song on Asylum

21 - Reason to Live / Crazy Nights:   The song that saved Crazy Nights. Great chorus.

22 - Forever / Hot In the Shade:  Not my favorite, but hard not to rate it up there.

23 - Crazy Crazy Nights / Crazy Nights:  Just a great anthem.  Makes big plays in big games.

24 - Gimme More / Lick It Up   Another LIU classic.

25 - Young And Wasted /  Lick It Up:   Fond memories of Carr singing this one live.

26 - Under The Gun / Animalize:  Rounding out Paul's big 5 from Animalize

27 - Exciter / Lick It Up:   Not the greatest opener, but still a great song.

28 - And On The 8th Day / Lick It Up:  Might be the best closing track of all the 80's albums.

29 - Take It Off  / Revenge:  It's cheesy, but it slams.

30 - Good Girl Gone Bad / Crazy Nights:  I've always thought this Gene song was underrated (and his CN material holds up better than Paul's)

31 - Hide Your Heart / Hot In the Shade:  A well-written song with a great chorus. Of the times, but it still works. 

32 - Betrayed / Hot In the Shade: I've always thought this was an OVERRATED song by KISS fans simply because HITS was a bad album

33 - Paralyzed / Revenge:  I like this tune, but it doesn't rate that high because I like so many others better.

34 - Dance All Over Your Face / Lick It Up:  I've liked this song better than I probably should. It's just a typical Gene sleazefest.

35 -  Just Wanna / Revenge:  I don't really dig this song, but it really worked live and is well- written despite the Summertime Blues-isms

36 -  All Hell's Breaking Loose / Lick It Up:  I've never liked this song. The Paul rap thing doesn't work for me. 

37 - Thief In The Night / Crazy Nights:  This song isn't bad, but it just doesn't really have enough for me.

38 - Tough Love / Revenge:  An interesting song that needed a better chorus. Sounds too much like a worse version of Heart of Chrome

39 - Little Caesar / Hot In the Shade:  I think this isn't bad, but I've never thought it was that great. I think because it's Eric's vocal debut it's overrated

40 - Rise To It / Hot In the Shade:  Maybe the most overrated song ever. It's so funny how retro rock briefly became this terribly white blues in 88-89. It's good, but…..

41 - Cadillac Dreams / Hot In the Shade:  I LOVE this song, but many hate it. It's not great but I love Gene's solo because he took these kind of chances, so…...

42 - Any Way You Slice It / Asylum:  It's not as awful as it could be. The end is atrocious, though. Any time a song ends like that it's gets deducted major points

43 - Trial By Fire / Asylum:  Pretty good song for its placement, but not a winner

44 - I'm Alive / Asylum:  Not a bad song, but a milquetoast Paul thrasher. Essentially Under the Gun II      Talent pool is deep at this position, no need to reach. 

45 - Love's a Deadly Weapon / Asylum:  Not a terrible song either, but kind of forgettable

46 - Uh! All Night! / Asylum    I hate this song because the chorus sucks to me. I get it, but I'm not onboard.

47 - Secretly Cruel / Asylum:  The Double Virgo cover makes me like it more than I would without that reference point…...

48 - King of Hearts / Hot In the Shade:  Average HITS song but that's not saying much

49 - Prisoner of Love / Hot In the Shade:  Another average HITS song - some days I love it, some days…...

50 - Silver Spoon / Hot In the Shade:  Apparently this is the part of the list where average HITS songs go to die. I like the message better than the execution.

51 -  When Your Walls Come Down / Crazy Nights:  There's nothing that says we're getting close to the bottom like Crazy Nights filler

52 - The Street Giveth / Hot In the Shade:  This is a great idea for a song, if not the best song. I tend to like it more than not because I like Bowie

53 - Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell / Hot In the Shade:  Firmly in the not bad category, but not good either.

54 -  Spit / Revenge:  The Spinal Tapisms just don’t' work for me at all

55 - You Love Me To Hate You / Hot In the Shade:  Too whiny

56 - Lonely Is the Hunter / Animalize:  You know what else is lonely? The bottom of the rankings   Really hurt itself with a terrible performance at the East/West Shrine game.

57 - You Make Me Rock Hard / Smashes Thrashes & Hits:  I can't do the Smashes Thrashes and Hits tunes

58 - Let's Put the X in Sex / Smashes Thrashes & Hits:  see above

59 - While the City Sleeps / Animalize:  I try to make this song good because I want it to work. It really doesn't

60 - Love's A Slap in the Face / Hot In the Shade:  Just kind of there

61 - Carr Jam '81 / Revenge:  Not really a song

62 - Radar For Love / Asylum:  Paul gets embarrassing

63 - Murder in High Heels / Animalize:  Gene really took a shit on Animalize, didn't he?

64 - Burn Bitch Burn / Animalize:  A song I truly struggle not to skip - Off field problems raise a red flag. 

65 - Boomerang / Hot In the Shade:  Laughing out loud at this song moved it up a few spots from the bottom

66 - My Way / Crazy Nights:  Paul the Eunuch

67 - Read My Body / Hot In the Shade:  So I dub thee Unforgivable

68 - No, No, No / Crazy Nights:  No, No, No is right.

69 - Bang Bang You / Crazy Nights:  The Unforgivable II

Mel Kiper Jr. may or may not actually be Matt Walters. If you read this to the very end, you deserve and have earned the truth. 

Unmasked - The First KISS Non-Makeup Fantasy Draft

Regular readers of Pencilstorm know when it comes to covering the band KISS, we do not shy away from controversy. (Click here for 12 stories) But when Scott Carr and myself started discussing ways to evaluate the KISS non-makeup years, we knew we had to do better than a standard ranking by one guy.  Remember that Cheap Trick list that one guy did? It was fun, like, 5 years ago, but times change. People deserve more in 2018. Hell, just the other day, some guy drove an electric car into space with most of its expensive booster rockets returning to Earth without crashing. That's some mind-blowing Jetsons stuff. Or as the Scientologists say, "Progress.". 

So with fantasy baseball season coming up fast we thought, what if six guys had a fantasy draft pulling songs from the KISS records Lick It Up through Revenge, plus the two unreleased songs from Smashes, Trashes and Hits? Now, that would be interesting. Something never attempted before by mankind. How would random folks value this period in the band's history? Or shall I say......KISSTORY!!!

Hold on KISS Kruisers, I can hear you bitching....yes, we left off Carnival of Souls because everybody knows that's not a real record. The two people who have listened to that record can do a draft and we will be happy to publish the results on Pencilstorm. 

Anyway, in pursuit of the truth, we set out to find a diverse group of owners. And when I say diverse, I mean it in the RUSH rock n roll definition: a bunch of white guys who don't spend five nights a week together in the same bar.  Let's face it, white guys are pretty much the only demographic that sat through all of Hot in the Shade. After a lengthy vetting process conducted by a search committee, the following players were invited to join the league:

Matt Walters - I was christened a KISS fan at 3 in 1977 while living on Long Island by my then-16-year-old badass babysitter Donna Knappie. I would never be the same. After Peter and then Ace left, I lost interest, and I never really listened to the albums in the '80's until way later. The non-makeup era definitely has some of my least favorite albums, although I've grown to appreciate many of the songs on those albums over the years. I've seen KISS six times, including the Kiss Kruise III first night, considered one of the greatest and most surprising set-lists in KISStory. My KISS war-room is now in Oak Park IL, just outside of Chicago, complete with an acoustic guitar, KISS Alive Forever, and my trusty Ace solo album poster.

Scott Carr -  You may know me from numerous music-related stories that have been featured on Pencil Storm, many of them about Kiss. I also play guitar in Radio Tramps, a very active cover band from Columbus, OH. When I'm not doing gigs with my band you can usually find me at Lost Weekend Records, an indie record store in Columbus. 

My Kisstory dates all the way back to my youth when I first saw Kiss in concert during the Destroyer tour in July of 1976. From that day forward I have been a fan. The good, the bad and the ugly.....I've been there for it all. I saw Kiss a total of five times during the original make-up years and then numerous times during the non-makeup and reunion/farewell years. I've met all four original members of Kiss at different times over the years and have also met Eric Carr, Bruce Kulick and Eric Singer. I am hoping to meet the elusive Vinnie Vincent in June at a Kiss Expo in Nashville. 42 years om, I still love talking about and defending The Hottest Band In The World....KISS!

David Martin has seen Kiss perform live nine times and once asked Ace Frehley to autograph an empty McDonald's sack. He lives in Kansas City.

Colin Gawel - decided to give up a promising career in business for a nomadic life of rock n roll after being exposed to KISS Alive at the young age of 6. He thinks Paul Stanley's solo record is better than Ace's, saw every tour of the non-makeup era and is known to hijack random facebook threads and steer them into KISS conversations. He founded Pencilstorm for precisely this purpose. 

Mike Lovins - plays in the band Bava Choco. Spends his spare time taking pictures of people wearing Vinnie Vincent t-shirts.  Once spotted carrying a copy of Hot in the Shade around mid-town Manhattan for no apparent reason.

Jeremy Porter - KISS was the first band I discovered on my own, not through perusing my parents' record collection.  Alive! was the first record I bought with my own money. Ace Frehley was the first rock star I ever wanted to be. My interest waned as the original four lineup dissipated and I discovered punk rock, but some 25 years later I found myself sucked into the Kiss "Unplugged" episode and I saw that there was greatness in the post-makeup era too, albeit a bit more diluted than on those classic albums. Fast forward another 23 years and I'm locked in my home office, picking songs in this fantasy draft, and remembering that time I spotted Bruce Kulick literally across the terminal at LAX and rushed over to introduce myself.  "Who?" my wife asked innocently, trying to keep up.  My drafting war room is in Detroit where I will be researching with my band: Jeremy Porter and The Tucos.  

Up next: The draft lottery will be held Saturday February 10th at Cobo Hall in Detroit to determine the order of the draft. Stay tuned KISS nerds. - Colin Gawel

Summer In The City reprint series, part one: A Somewhat Organized List of 1980's Comedies - by David Martin

Like most of Continental Europe - which does not have the benefit of central air conditioning -  the Pencilstorm offices largely close down during the dog days of August.  It was especially bad this year, since Ricki C. took home the Koolerator box fan he brought in from a West Side yard sale and Colin "borrowed" the Kenmore window A/C unit he scored at a St. Agatha's swap meet "temporarily" for his second bedroom and never brought it back. 

As such, for the next week or ten days, Pencilstorm will be running a reprint series of our favorite blogs from our regular writers and some of the ringers we've solicited pieces from over the past three years.  This is part one:  

A Somewhat Organized List of 1980's Comedies - by David Martin  

New York magazine did an interview with Steven Soderbergh that's worth reading. Among other things, the director talks about avoiding disaster film clichés ("Can’t show the president. No helicopter shots"), the gentle spirit of the Ocean's franchise, and the darkness of Saturday Night Fever.

Soderbergh's a good dude, and he makes good movies. But he said one thing I disagree with: He called the 1980s a "terrible decade" for American films.

Hmmm... Raging Bull, Blade Runner, E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Vietnam movies, Aliens and Amadeus—those are some pretty good mainstream movies. Die Hard is arguably the best action movie ever. If you can look past the shoe-sized cell phones and dated eyewear, Wall Street holds up really well.

Comedies, it seems, were especially strong. Now, I was teenager for most of the '80s, and I'm sure that colors my thinking. But if nothing else, comedies of the '80s were more varied than they are today, when everything is basically a variation of Old School (and, to a lesser extent, Office Space). Here's a list of movies I found entertaining and maybe you did, too.

This Is Spinal Tap
One of the amazing things about Spinal Tap was the fact that hard rock had not yet reached the apex of its stupidity. “Big Bottom” preceded “Cherry Pie” by six years. 

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
Hollywood Shuffle
ketchy.

Raising Arizona
My first and favorite Coen Bros. movie. 

48 Hrs.
Trading Places
Beverly Hills Cop
Raw
Coming to America
I think Cop was the first R-rated movie I saw in theaters. Eddie Murphy was huge.

Fletch
I met sportswriter Rick Reilly early in my writing career, and he was kind to me. But it was once said of him that he gives off the impression that he wishes he was the guy who wrote Fletch. It was not meant as a compliment. Still, good movie.

A Fish Called Wanda

Modern Romance
Lost in America
Both movies feature really funny scenes of Albert Brooks interacting with an older man (the sound engineer, the casino boss) who finds him annoying. 

Brazil

Airplane!
I realized after reading this essay that I’m not a big fan of joke-driven movies. I don’t think I ever paid to see a Naked Gun movie. I’ve never seen Space Balls or Top Secret! But Airplane!? Real recognize real.

The Princess Bride
When Harry Met Sally…
Rob Reiner is the Don Mattingly of directors—a guy with a great peak who couldn't sustain it over the course of a long career.

After Hours
Something Wild

Caddyshack
Stripes
Tootsie
Ghostbusters
Scrooged
Ghostbusters II
Yeah, yeah, Tootsie is Dustin Hoffman’s movie. But it looks cool in this list of Bill Murray efforts. The ’90s got off to kind of a rough start for Bill (Quick Change). But by decade’s end he had appeared in several memorable roles: Groundhog Day, Ed Wood, Kingpin and, of course, Rushmore.

Bull Durham
Major League
In addition to these two successful comedies, The Natural, Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams also came out in the ’80s. Bull Durham loses steam toward the end but is still probably the best sports movie ever. 

Splash
Bachelor Party
Big

Midnight Run
In this tribute to Run, TV critic Alan Sepinwall notes that it came out within five days of Die Hard. “If those two aren’t the best example of their respective sub-genres, they’re at least in the discussion.” (Sepinwall endorsed Hitless Wonder, by the way.)

Mr. Mom
National Lampoon’s Vacation
Sixteen Candles
The Breakfast Club
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
I think these are John Hughes’s five best movies. (He wrote but did not direct Mr. Mom and Vacation.) Your list might look different, because he made a lot of good movies. Vanity Fair contributor David Kamp wrote a piece about Hughes after his death that's really sharp. My first real girlfriend and I went to see Ferris Bueller on our first date, I think. 

Night Shift
Beetlejuice
You can see a rough outline of the Beetlejuice character in this obnoxious version of himself that Michael Keaton played in a short film for a prime-time Letterman special.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

The Blues Brothers

Roger and MeA documentary, yes, but still funny.

Broadcast News

She’s Gotta Have It
Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing, Broadcast News and other movies on this list would fall in the "dramedy" category.

Moonstruck

Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Say Anything
Heathers
Summer School
Clueless (1995) is an honorary ’80s movie.

Diner
Tin Men
ain Man
James Wolcott’s memoir conveys how fresh and exciting Diner and Blue Velvet were when they were released. I’m with Wolcott in that I felt more “pummeled” than intoxicated by Velvet, but I appreciate its originality. 

Hannah and Her Sisters
Crimes and Misdemeanors
“If it bends, it’s funny…”

Three Amigos
Roxanne
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Parenthood
I saw Parenthood with Mike "Biggie" McDermott and others. Toward the end of the movie, when everything’s wrapping up in that Lowell Ganz-Babaloo Mandel way, Biggie whispered, “Gil likes the roller coaster, too.”

Used Cars
Overboard
Used Cars is essentially an R-rated Bad News Bears. Kurt Russell was a good Elvis, too. 

Back to the Future
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Assembling this list, I see that things started to break down a little bit toward the end of the decade. Big and Parenthood are fine in their own right, but they portended the navel-gazing that I associate with comedies of the early and mid ’90s—City Slickers being the archetype. One problem, I think, is that baby boomers were becoming a little too grown-up to work effectively in the genre. Harold Ramis, for instance, was pretty much done after Groundhog Day (1993).

David Martin left the newspaper business before it had a chance to tell him his place in the industry was no longer available. Follow him on Twitter: @david2martin.