In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough’s remarkable biography of Neil Young, Young says his archives - in the works forever - wouldn’t just have his best work, but a lot of bad stuff as well. “The pieces of shit should be there, too,” Young said. “So you know the difference...That’s what a fuckin’ archive is about, not ‘Here’s Neil Young in all his wonderfulness...’” You have to wonder if Kiss has the same open-minded attitude about their notorious 1981 album, (Music From) The Elder.

In the movie world, titles like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar have become synonymous with disaster, and it’s a wonder why The Elder doesn’t have the same cachet in the music business. It’s an album that came close to de-railing Kiss’s career, and in hindsight it’s a fascinating failure. Like St. Anger, The Elder captured the sound of a band completely lost. But unlike St. Anger, it’s also unintentionally hilarious to listen to.

After Pink Floyd’s masterpiece The Wall, a number of bands tried to follow up in their footsteps with epic concept albums (Kilroy Was Here, anyone?). (Music From) The Elder was Kiss’s big bid for legitimacy, and it had Bob Ezrin - the genius producer of The Wall and Kiss’s 1976 masterpiece Destroyer - at the helm.

“We actually did The Elder for the critics,” Gene Simmons told writer Ken Sharp. “You should never go for respect, because on the day that critics and your mom like the same music you do, it’s over.”

Like he did for The Wall, Ezrin wrote a screenplay for The Elder outlining it as a Tolkien-esque story of a young warrior fighting against the forces of evil. And there were indeed plans for an Elder movie, which would follow after the release of the album as part of a “multi-media” concept.

But Ace Frehley knew this was trouble from the get-go. He refused to come to the studio and work on the album, and Ezrin said Frehley was “dead right. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Kiss and we should have figured that out.” What little Ace performed on the album included a handful of terrible guitar solos and the song “Dark Light,” which he sang and recorded in his home studio, which was dubbed “Ace’s Bomb Shelter." Frehley even pleaded with the band not to release the album, but was outvoted.

At the time of The Elder’s release in 1981, music was in a state of flux and a lot of bands didn’t know where to turn. Metal was still several years away from its comeback with the success of Quiet Riot and Motley Crue, disco crashed and burned, and punk, which many thought was the wave of the future, was too extreme at the time for mainstream success. Kiss tried a “New Romantic” look for The Elder’s release, but it didn’t matter how they tried to repackage their image. The album was such a disaster there was no Elder tour, and the proposed movie never moved beyond the drawing board.

Years later the fact, Simmons sent a CD copy of the album to Ezrin, and half-way through listening to it, Bob told his wife, “You know something? I should have been killed before being allowed to finish this. This is one of the worst crimes that’s ever been perpetrated on music!”

Still, success is often taken for granted, and without making mistakes you’ll never do anything great. The band certainly learned their lesson, and followed up with Creatures of the Night, a great album that still holds up very well. Listening back to The Elder reminds me of what somebody once said about Brian DePalma’s disastrous adaption of Bonfire of the Vanities: “You gotta be a genius to make a movie this bad.”