Parenting & Family Quote by Peter Criss

There’s a particular kind of nostalgia that doesn’t feel like bragging; it feels like a man taking inventory. Peter Criss frames the past in three quick moves: progress (“more controlled now”), innocence (“we were kids”), and damage (“our own demons”). Then he lands the plane with “It was insanity,” a blunt, unpoetic word that works precisely because it refuses to romanticize the chaos.

Coming from a rock musician whose career is tied to an era that sold excess as a lifestyle, the line reads like a correction to the mythology. “Controlled” isn’t just about tighter performances or sobriety; it’s a claim of adulthood, a boundary set against the old expectation that rock bands should be combustive to be authentic. By insisting they were “kids,” Criss smuggles in both an excuse and an indictment: the industry profits off immaturity, then calls it legend.

The most revealing phrase is “each had our own demons.” It’s communal and isolating at once. He doesn’t pin the wreckage on one villain, one feud, one headline-ready scandal. He implies parallel private battles that collided in public, turning a band into a pressure cooker. In that context, “insanity” becomes less a punchline and more a diagnosis of the machinery around them: fame as accelerant, touring as deprivation, and ego as both fuel and wound. The intent isn’t to rewrite history; it’s to make it survivable.