Picture the beginning of a song. The guitars are quiet. There are no power chords, no pyrotechnics, no walls of amplified noise. The drum stool is empty. Instead, a single voice rises, accompanied by piano and strings, and carries the whole performance on its own.

For most people who knew this band’s reputation, none of that made sense at first. But the voice belonged to the last person many listeners expected to step forward.

The singer is KISS drummer Peter Criss, and the song is “Beth,” released in 1976 on the Destroyer album. It became one of the most unlikely ballads in rock history — and one of the most enduring.

The Earlier Song Called Beck

Before “Beth” existed in its final form, there was an earlier version called “Beck.” The origins of that demo are part of a story that has been retold in different ways by different people over the years, and it is worth saying plainly: the accounts of who wrote what, and when, are genuinely disputed. Published album credits list Peter Criss, Stan Penridge, and Bob Ezrin as the songwriters, but how each of them contributed — and how much — has been described differently depending on who is speaking.

What most accounts agree on is that the core of the song predates KISS’s involvement with producer Bob Ezrin. Criss and his longtime collaborator Stan Penridge had worked on an earlier composition together, and that earlier piece carried the name “Beck” — reportedly a reference to someone connected to Penridge’s life at the time, not the solo artist of the same name. The emotional center of the song, a musician away from home and the voice calling him back, was already present in some form before the song was reshaped for the album.

How much of that original demo survived into the final recording, and how central Penridge’s role was compared to the credits that reached print, remains one of the small, unresolved debates in KISS’s catalog. Readers who want to go deeper will find Criss’s own memoir and various interviews with Penridge offer their own versions of events. No single account should be treated as the last word.

What is not disputed is that the song evolved significantly once Bob Ezrin entered the picture.

Bob Ezrin Reworks the Arrangement

Bob Ezrin was already known for his work with Alice Cooper by the time KISS brought him in to produce Destroyer. He had a reputation for finding the architecture inside a rock song — the places where strings, piano, and careful arrangement could do things that guitars alone could not. That instinct would define what “Beth” became.

Ezrin recognized something in the bare version of the song. Whether he heard it in a demo, in rehearsal, or described to him in a meeting depends again on which account you read. But the decision to reshape the arrangement — to pull the song away from a standard rock band setting and build it around orchestration — was central to what Ezrin brought to the project.

For the Destroyer sessions, Ezrin contributed piano to the recording. Dick Wagner, the guitarist who worked extensively with Ezrin and Alice Cooper during that era, played acoustic guitar on the track. Together with string orchestration layered over the top, the final production placed Peter Criss’s voice in a setting that no KISS track had occupied before.

It was a risk. KISS at that point was known for volume, stage spectacle, face paint, and fire. A slow orchestral ballad with the drummer on lead vocals was not part of the brand. The band reportedly had mixed feelings about releasing it as a single at all.

Peter Criss Records the Lead

Whatever the internal reservations may have been, Peter Criss delivered the vocal. His voice on “Beth” is soft, slightly weathered at the edges, and entirely without the theatrical armor that defined KISS’s public image. There is no Catman persona in the performance. There is simply a singer and a microphone.

That plainness was part of the song’s power. Criss’s voice did not try to be larger than the material. It sat inside the arrangement naturally, as if the orchestral backdrop had been built around his range rather than asking him to reach for something beyond it. For listeners who only knew KISS from their louder recordings, the performance was genuinely surprising.

It is worth noting that Criss had a background in softer pop and jazz-influenced music before KISS. He was not purely a hard-rock drummer who happened to wander into a ballad. The vocal style heard on “Beth” came from a real place in his musical history, even if the KISS context made it feel like an anomaly.

Piano, Acoustic Guitar and Orchestra

One of the reasons “Beth” holds up as well as it does is the restraint of the production. Ezrin did not fill every available space. The piano lines are simple and deliberate. The acoustic guitar sits underneath the vocal without competing with it. The strings arrive at moments where they expand the feeling of the song rather than overwhelm it.

For a band whose live show involved smoke bombs and full theatrical productions, the studio recording of “Beth” is almost modest by comparison. There are no electric guitars in the track. The drum part that might have been expected from the band’s drummer is essentially absent — Criss is at the front of the room, singing, while the orchestra fills the space behind him.

That contrast — the drummer standing away from the kit, voice forward, instruments soft — is part of what made the song memorable to people who heard it for the first time in 1976. It was not what anyone expected KISS to release, and that unexpectedness turned out to be exactly why it worked.

The production quality of the Destroyer album as a whole was a step forward for the band, and “Beth” benefited from the care Ezrin brought to that project. But “Beth” also succeeded because it was genuinely different from everything around it on the album, and from most of what KISS had recorded before.

The Band’s Highest-Charting US Single

“Beth” was initially placed as a B-side. The A-side of the single was “Detroit Rock City.” Radio programmers made a different choice. Stations began playing “Beth” instead, and listener response followed quickly. The song climbed to number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976, making it the highest-charting US single the band had produced to that point.

Peter Criss won a People’s Choice Award for the song. For a period, the quiet track on the back of a single became the face of KISS for a significant portion of the listening public — people who may not have owned the albums, may not have attended the concerts, but who heard “Beth” on the radio and remembered it.

That reach matters when thinking about what the song accomplished. KISS had a devoted hard-rock audience before “Beth.” The ballad introduced the band to a different kind of listener: people drawn to melody, to a human voice in a gentle setting, to the specific emotion of a song about distance and longing. Those listeners came from somewhere outside the KISS fanbase and stayed.

The song has continued to appear on compilations, in documentaries, and in discussions of the band’s catalog for nearly five decades. It shows up on classic rock radio with a regularity that has nothing to do with its genre fit and everything to do with the fact that it is simply a good recording that people want to hear again.

Some songs belong to a particular moment. They define a year, a tour, a specific chapter in a band’s story. “Beth” has done something more durable than that. It has become one of those recordings that listeners return to not because they are thinking about KISS’s history, but because the song itself still does something to them when it comes on.

The drum stool was empty. The voice came forward. And the loudest band in the room made something quiet enough to last.