Mark Bennett: Hautean KISS Army founder relishes moment in rock history as band's finale nears

Mar. 2—With a raucous sellout crowd cheering, Bill Starkey walked onto Hulman Center's stage in the fall of 1975.

Little did he know that episode would earn a niche in the history of rock-and-roll music, and Terre Haute itself.

"I've got to say, it's one of the most unique moments in my life," Starkey said Wednesday.

He was a teenage Terre Haute North Vigo High School student on Nov. 21, 1975. New York City-based rock band KISS was riding a wave of national popularity from a hit single "Rock and Roll All Nite," particularly in the Midwest. The destinies of Starkey and KISS intertwined.

Starkey got wowed by KISS after his parents took him to concerts in Evansville and Indianapolis. He found friends with the same outlook, and they started pestering local radio station, WVTS, to play KISS records all year. They finally persuaded the station's programming director Rich Dickerson — who'd refused to play the platform-heeled, face-painted band's records — to relent.

The teenagers' campaign, organized in Starkey's family's basement, to get their favorite rockers' music played led to the formation of a fan club — the KISS Army. Their tenacious fandom led KISS to present a plaque to Starkey onstage in Hulman Center, where a sellout crowd turned out for the band's 1975 concert, the first of eight in that facility.

Yes, the KISS Army was born in Terre Haute.

Nearly a half-century later, KISS has announced its final performances as a group will occur this December, according to a statement from the band to The Associated Press. The last two concerts will be Dec. 1 and 2 in New York's Madison Square Garden. It will cap the group's End of the Road Farewell Tour, a goodbye journey that actually began in 2019 but got disrupted by COVID-19. Apparently, the band really means it now.

Starkey, now a 66-year-old school teacher in Indianapolis, believes this is it for KISS.

"I really do, as far as wearing makeup and performing together," he said, "but that doesn't mean they won't perform" separately. Band founders and lead singers Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have performed with their own groups through the years.

The band's retirement isn't startling. Simmons, KISS's bassist, is 73. Stanley, the rhythm guitarist, is 71. They're the lone remaining original members still touring alongside lead guitarist Tommy Thayer, 62, and drummer Eric Singer, 64. Original guitarist Ace Frehley, 71, and Peter Criss, 77, left the group in the early 2000s.

In announcing their plans and the final shows in NYC, the current band told The AP, "KISS was born in New York City. On 23rd Street. Half a century ago. It will be a privilege and honor to finish touring at Madison Square Garden, 10 blocks and 50 years from where we first started." Their slate of concerts on the Farewell Tour runs from April 12 in South America to those Big Apple shows. It includes a Nov. 25 concert in Indianapolis' Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Tickets for the tour go on sale March 10 online through livenation.com.

There's a gaping, unsentimental omission in their list of 17 shows in North America this year — KISS isn't playing Terre Haute.

The band should add a stop here. The city's role as the birthplace of the KISS Army is significant the group's legacy. In fact, the 2021 A&E network documentary "Biography: KISStory" included an interview with Bill Starkey, clips from Terre Haute and audio of a WVTS radio broadcast from the 1975 saga.

After all, the KISS official website still prominently features a KISS Army fan element. And, through the years, the band has maintained an embellished historical memory of the club's formation. The mythical birth of the KISS Army contends that Starkey and nearly a thousand other Terre Haute fans surrounded the WVTS studio — which was located in the woods of West Terre Haute, no less — and refused to leave until the station played KISS.

Quite dramatic and revolutionary. But untrue, alas.

In reality, Starkey, co-founder Jay Evans and their friends wore down Dickerson and the WVTS DJs with relentless phone calls to the station's song request line, a letter-writing campaign, and the proliferation of KISS's album covers on T-shirts made by KISS Army member Rob Smith in the Terre Haute North High's print shop. They wanted WVTS to play the band's music, as other stations were already doing.

"They've always been a band you had to fight for," Starkey said. "[The KISS Army] started because of the music."

Their loud, power-chording, arena-style brand of rock didn't win over many music critics, but sold wildly — 14 of their albums were certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, and 30 went gold. The group didn't get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until 2014, 41 years after they formed.

Their shows were spectacles, nonetheless, packing arenas like Hulman Center in the 1970s. It was a time of "five-dollar tickets and KISS playing at 120 decibels and you didn't know if you'd come out of there alive," Starkey quipped.

He did, though. Today, he's still teaching youngsters at Indianapolis Public School 109 as an interventionist handling kids with special situations. It's an inner-city school, with many of the kids living in apartments. Starkey teaches the kids about the outdoors. Like KISS, Starkey intends to be retired in 2024. His students, and likely their parents, are too young to know of the band, though they know Starkey does a music podcast on YouTube.

Starkey hasn't seen KISS in concert since 2012. Digital platforms make it easy to see live music performances these days, he explained. "If they ever need me for anything [related the band's history], they can always reach me," Starkey said. He plays guitar himself, but doesn't go home and play KISS records all night.

He's not decided whether to go to KISS's December finale concerts in New York, or the Indianapolis show in November. "I hope they film it," Starkey said. "Will Peter and Ace join them? Will other people join them? I don't know."

One thing Starkey does know is that his grassroots corps of teenagers in Terre Haute, Indiana, got the attention of a chart-topping rock band in the 1970s, and almost every nostalgic retrospective of that era includes his recollections. He wishes his hometown would permanently recognize its place in rock and roll lore, via the KISS Army.

"You've got the [Grateful] Dead-heads. You've got Jimmy Buffet's Parrot-heads. But the KISS Army rocks," Starkey said.

In that spirit, maybe a new generation of KISS fans, or sentimental older folks, will flood the KISS website, demanding the band play Terre Haute one last time. It worked once, right?

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.