"It's a younger generation running the show, and I miss the generation we had in the '70s. They were really very honorable guys, like Neal Bogart and Bill Graham, people who will never be around again"
About this Quote
Nostalgia can be a power move, and Peter Criss knows it. When he frames today as "a younger generation running the show", he is not just lamenting age; he is calling out a shift in who gets to define legitimacy in the music business. The line draws a hard border between then and now: the '70s as a rough-edged but principled era, the present as an industry managed by people without the same code.
Name-checking Neal Bogart and Bill Graham is doing heavy cultural work. Bogart, the Casablanca Records operator who helped turn rock into a flamboyant, risk-taking spectacle, and Graham, the promoter who built arenas into cathedrals for counterculture, function here as mascots for a specific kind of power: personal, tactile, reputation-based. Criss is praising "honorable guys", but what he really misses is an ecosystem where relationships, instincts, and larger-than-life gatekeepers could make you overnight - or break you with a phone call.
The subtext is grief with an edge of indictment. "People who will never be around again" isn't literally true; it's an accusation that the current system rewards different virtues: metrics over gut, brand safety over audacity, and interchangeable executives over singular characters. Coming from a KISS founder - a band that mastered commercialization while selling rebellion - the quote also reads as self-defense. If the industry feels colder now, it's not just because he's older; it's because the romance of the deal has been replaced by dashboards, contracts, and content pipelines. Criss is mourning a kind of honorable chaos that made room for myth.
Name-checking Neal Bogart and Bill Graham is doing heavy cultural work. Bogart, the Casablanca Records operator who helped turn rock into a flamboyant, risk-taking spectacle, and Graham, the promoter who built arenas into cathedrals for counterculture, function here as mascots for a specific kind of power: personal, tactile, reputation-based. Criss is praising "honorable guys", but what he really misses is an ecosystem where relationships, instincts, and larger-than-life gatekeepers could make you overnight - or break you with a phone call.
The subtext is grief with an edge of indictment. "People who will never be around again" isn't literally true; it's an accusation that the current system rewards different virtues: metrics over gut, brand safety over audacity, and interchangeable executives over singular characters. Coming from a KISS founder - a band that mastered commercialization while selling rebellion - the quote also reads as self-defense. If the industry feels colder now, it's not just because he's older; it's because the romance of the deal has been replaced by dashboards, contracts, and content pipelines. Criss is mourning a kind of honorable chaos that made room for myth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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