How Bruce and Bob Kulick Teamed Up for Their First-Ever Kiss-Themed Concert

In what he calls "a gig I'll never forget," former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick recently teamed up with his brother Bob Kulick for a first-ever concert celebrating their respective contributions to the group's history.

The younger of the two guitar-playing brothers, Bruce played with Kiss from 1984 to 1996, while his older brother Bob co-wrote or secretly played on several songs by the group in the late '70s and early '80s. They joined forces to perform a full set equally drawn from those two eras on this year's edition of the Kiss Kruise.

"There was one Kiss expo where we did a few songs, and that's the only time we've played together. This was much bigger," Bruce tells Ultimate Classic Rock. "The fans would always ask, 'When will you be on the cruise?' My answer was, 'When they ask me.' It's not like I control the situation. I know I was requested many times."

At first, the brothers were originally slated to only be a part of a Q&A panel. "I was poking around, asking, well, wouldn’t they want me to play?" Kulick recalls. "And they’d say, 'Yeah we’ll figure that out. Are you available?'

Luckily, when the green light did arrive, the elder Kulick had a band ready. "The phone lines were burning between my brother and I," explains Kulick. "He just finished putting out his first solo album ever, Skeletons in the Closet. He had two talented guys from Las Vegas, where he lives, on that album -- Brent Fritz from [Bruce's post-Kiss band] Union, who is currently Slash’s drummer, and Todd Kerns, Slash’s bassist and backup vocalist, who’s a solo artist as well. Bob was hammering those guys. I said, 'If you can get Todd and Brent and the cruise people to commit to us playing together, I’ll be very happy.'"

Making up a set list was fairly easy. "The choice of songs was pretty obvious to Bob and I," notes Kulick. With five studio albums, "I could do an entire set of Kiss songs, Bob probably almost could -- there are other songs he co-wrote that he didn’t play on. The band currently doesn't do a lot of songs from my era, or a lot of the stuff Bob played on. So we just went back and forth -- 'Wouldn't You Like to Know Me' into 'Domino,' that kind of thing -- it was just a celebration of what he and I have contributed to Kiss."

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