KISS's geography is a hard-rock career drawn in two cities and one dressing room. It begins in New York: a tiny Queens club called Coventry on January 30, 1973, where the four of them played their very first concert in full make-up. Downtown, Max's Kansas City was the room they orbited — the same Park Avenue South scene that produced the New York Dolls and the proto-punk crowd whose theatrical instincts plainly bled into what KISS became. Both rooms are gone now; Max's closed in 1981.
The second city is Los Angeles, and the story shifts from origin to ascent. The Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip was the proving ground, the Rainbow Bar and Grill a few blocks east was the hangout. Through the Casablanca Records years Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were Rainbow regulars, and the bar functioned as an unofficial industry meeting room. The pattern is consistent: a small club to play, a louder bar to be seen in.
By the late 1970s the venues stop being clubs and start being hotels — the natural geography of a band big enough to need a press strategy. KISS arrived in Tokyo on March 18, 1977 on Pan Am 801 and decompressed for two days at the Hotel Okura, the luxury tower near the US Embassy. Three days later they held their first Japanese press conference at the Tokyo Hilton in Nagatacho before flying to Osaka the same evening. Both buildings have since been demolished and rebuilt; the Okura reopened in 2019, the Hilton site became the Capitol Hotel Tokyu in 2010.
Australia got the same treatment in November 1980. The Sebel Townhouse in Elizabeth Bay — Sydney's great rock hotel, the place that had hosted Bowie, Jagger, and the Clash — was the band's base. On November 2 they appeared on the balcony of Sydney Town Hall to a crowd of around 6,000, returned to the Sebel for a press conference, and were memorably gatecrashed by comedian Norman Gunston ("Which one of you is the construction worker?", confusing them with the Village People). Fans camped outside the hotel around the clock. The Sebel closed in 2000.
The later locations are commerce and family rather than touring. In April 2012 Simmons and Stanley opened the flagship Rock & Brews in El Segundo near LAX — American comfort food in a rock-and-roll setting, with partners Michael Zislis and Dave and Dell Furano; a second international location followed on the Cabo San Lucas marina in December 2014, and the chain has expanded to dozens of restaurants. The personal counterpart is Café Nitza in Haifa, a 1947 bakery café where Gene's mother worked after emigrating from Hungary. Simmons returned for the first time in over fifty years in 2011, filmed for Gene Simmons Family Jewels — the smell of the place revived childhood memories.