Kiss announces End of the Road World Tour, with front-row seats priced at $1,000 each
Kiss will go out with an extended bang, starting in January, when the hard-rocking, pyro-heavy band kicks off its second farewell tour of this century.
Billed as both the End of the Road World Tour and The Final Tour Ever, the first leg of Kiss’s upcoming world tour will cover much of North America but skip Mexico, at least for now. It’s set to begin January 31 at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena and conclude April 13 in Alabama at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex. Initial concert dates and cities were announced Monday morning.
Kiss bassist-singer Gene Simmons recently told a Swedish interviewer that the tour will stretch over three years and stop on “all continents.”
Fans should expect to pay big bucks for the best seats for the tour. Ticket prices for the Los Angeles show range from $320 to $1,000.
The top ticket price for Kiss’s other California dates are as follows: $997 in Fresno; $996.44 in Sacramento; $996 in Anaheim and $1,000 in San Diego. The $1,000 price for each front-row ticket also applies to the band’s farewell tour shows in Dallas, Chicago, Detroit and some other major cities.
This may well be a record for tickets for any tour by any rock act.
Beyond potential record-setting top ticket prices for an arena concert, the big question for longtime fans is a simple one.
Namely, is this really the final Kissoff? Or will another reunion tour follow sometime in the next decade by the band, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012?
In 2000 and 2001, the four original member of Kiss embarked on what was billed as the band’s farewell tour, but wasn’t. That farewell tour followed the 1996-97 reunion tour by the four original members of Kiss: Simmons, singer-guitarist Paul Stanley, drummer Peter Criss and lead guitarist Ace Frehley.
Criss left the band in 1980, followed by Frehley in 1982. Their roles has subsequently been filled by a number of other musicians employed by Simmons and Stanley.
In a 2000 San Diego Union-Tribune interview to preview Kiss’ farewell tour, Stanley explained: “It’s out of respect for Kiss, and our fans, that we have to stop. I’m a big believer that it’s better to leave early than stay too late, and to quit while you’re still on top.”
But more tours followed that farewell tour by Kiss, minus Criss and Frehley.
Kiss did not address the impetus for its decision in the Monday morning statement announcing the End of the Road World Tour.
The statement reads: “All that we have built and all that we have conquered over the past four decades could never have happened without the millions of people worldwide who’ve filled clubs, arenas and stadiums over those years.
“This will be the ultimate celebration for those who’ve seen us and a last chance for those who haven’t. Kiss Army, we’re saying goodbye on our final tour with our biggest show yet and we’ll go out the same way we came in ... Unapologetic and Unstoppable.”
Will Frehley or Criss be invited back by Stanley and Simmons to perform at any of the Kiss farewell tour shows? That remains to be seen.
– The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS