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Guitarist John 5 amassed a trove of Kiss memorabilia. A lucky few can take the tour

April 30, 2025

In a Sears department store during the summer of 1977, rock guitarist John 5 first saw the album cover that would change his life.

“My first one was ‘Love Gun,’” he says of the Kiss record display that stopped him on that shopping trip when he was 7. “I saw that – and because I loved monsters and I loved guitar – went, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’

“My mom bought me the record and that’s where it all happened,” says John 5, whose rock and roll career includes long runs as lead guitarist for acts such as Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, and currently Mötley Crüe.

What happened was this: John 5 became obsessed with the hard rock band Kiss and the costumed personas of singer-bassist Gene Simmons, singer-guitarist Paul Stanley, guitarist Ace Frehley, and drummer Peter Criss.

Guitarist John 5 at his Kiss museum in the San Fernando Valley on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. He has an extensive collection of Kiss rock and roll memorabilia and will open the collection for public viewing in May for a limited time. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

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Forty-eight years later, John 5 has compiled one of the world’s largest private collections of Kiss memorabilia, more than 2,500 pieces created from 1973 to 1983, the first decade of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band’s career.

And now, John 5 is opening the doors to his Kiss cache in May for a limited number of tours of the museum he’s calling Knights In Satan’s Service, a name that overly excitable parents in the ’70s, frightened that their kids were enamored of their kabuki-faced super-villain stage look, were certain was what the letters in the name KISS secretly stood for.

He will conduct the tours himself, offering stories and sharing memories about any piece of memorabilia in the collection, as he did on a recent day for a visiting reporter and photographer.

“You could point to anything and there’s a story about it,” John 5 says as he leads his visitors into the secured room where his collection is displayed. “And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces.”

The walls are covered in Kiss posters, mirrors, promotional signs, and special event publicity banners. In the center of the room are record store bins filled with multiples of Kiss albums from different record-pressing plants in the United States, as well as versions made for countries around the world.

Shiny glass display cases hold more treasures. The platform boots Gene Simmons wore on the Destroyer and Rock & Roll Over tours. Boxes of unopened Kiss Halloween costumes from the ’70s. The drum head from the kit seen on the cover of Kiss’s “Alive!” album. A packet of Kiss typing paper with the $1.19 price tag on its unopened shrink-wrapped plastic.

“I was obsessed with the dolls,” John 5 says as we approach a glass case filled with multiple variants of miniature Genes, Pauls, Aces, and Peters he longed for as a boy.

“I vividly remember being in Toys “R” Us looking for an Ace and a Peter,” he says. “Thumbing through all of them, going, ‘God, it’s all Gene and Paul, Gene and Paul, Gene and Paul,’ but I would find Ace and Peters every once in a while.”

We stop at the next case and point to what looks like a small black animal pelt, perhaps a piece of roadkill or a thick clump of cat hair.

John 5 laughs. “That’s … OK, true story,” he says.

But let’s come back to that in a moment.

Kiss ‘n guitars

As a boy named John Lowery growing up just outside of Detroit, John 5 says there were only two things he cared about – playing guitar, which he got serious about by the time he was 7, and following Kiss via albums, magazines, comic books, and other merchandise.

And he was very good at both things, which came together nicely when, as a middle schooler, he started to play guitar professionally in local clubs.

“My mom was so cool because she let me play clubs starting at like seventh grade,” John 5 says. “She knew I didn’t drink or smoke, so she was OK with it. She was like, ‘As long as you get up for school, you can play.’

“And I’m glad I did because it was all just experience,” he says. “You grow up fast, you know? You see all this weird stuff that happens on a Wednesday, Thursday night at one in the morning, in Detroit in seventh or eighth grade.

“I would play with grown – what I thought were grown men at the time. They were like 24, 25, and I was so little. They had to put a wig on me, a long black wig on me, because I was so little.”

Somewhat surprisingly, his earnings didn’t all go to Kiss merch.

“Talk about demystifying,” he says, when revealing what he was actually spending his hard rock-earned cash on. “What I bought with the money was – because I grew up in Grosse Pointe, which is very highfalutin – I would buy Ralph Lauren stuff, like, Polo stuff.”

After he moved to Los Angeles at 17 to work as a session guitarist, his career started to pay more than just the basic bills. So he started spending much more on his Kiss collection.

At times, in the early days poring over collectibles listings in the Penny Saver, and later on eBay, John 5 says he relied more on fate to help him find things he did not yet have in the collection.

“I was in Virginia, in a pawn shop, and I was on the phone,” he says. “I’m just talking. I’m like, ‘Yeah, dude, OK, let’s do it.’ And I went, “Wait a minute. Hold on a minute.’

“And I saw that little Kiss Pop Rock Amp” – a kids’ toy amp sold in the ’70s – “covered in dust. It hadn’t been moved in this antique store or whatever it was. It had been there a zillion years.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘This can’t be what that is,’” John 5 says of the item, which one Kiss fan site describes as “the Holy Grails” of Kiss collection, along with the Kiss record player and Kiss pinball machine. “That this is worth so much money, like 7,500 bucks, and I got it for 30 bucks.”

That’s the exception, he adds, the rare item he got for a steal.

“Because everybody knows me now,” John 5 says of his reputation as a Kiss collector. “They’re like, ‘Oh, let’s jack up the price.’ So I have people call and bid for me, because they take such advantage.”

Boy meets band

Sometime after his guitar chops brought John 5 into the rock and roll fraternity, he started to meet the Kiss members. Today, he considers them all friends, and he’s played with all of them but Gene now.

“Peter, we played ‘Georgia on My Mind’ on my record,” he says. “I played on a number of Ace’s records. He’s a good friend of mine. Played on Paul’s record. The only one I haven’t played on is Gene, and I’m close with Gene.”

Simmons, in a separate interview, said he and John 5 exchange emails frequently and see each other at different musical events.

“He’s got a lot,” Simmons says of John 5’s collection. “Probably more posters than anybody out there.

“But this is the great thing about America,” he continues. “How magical is it for John to be a kid and be a fan and collect all the stuff. And that’s appreciated; we love that.

“And then to actually become a musician and actually get to play with everybody from Roth to Mötley Crüe,” Simmons says. “And good for him. You know how he got there? Hard work.”

Simmons was actually the first member of Kiss that John 5 ever met, back in Detroit when he was about 14. It did not, he says, laughing, go as he’d hoped.

“It’s a great story, really funny,” John 5 says. “I skipped school to go meet my heroes. My friend Cool Breeze, not his real name, took me down there, and we’re waiting. I had my Polo and my khakis and penny loafers on. I had my booklet from ‘The Originals’ [a repackaging of the band’s first three albums] and Gene comes walking by.

“I was like, ‘Gene, could you sign this?’ He walked right by me. I’m a little kid. I was like, I can’t believe you just walked by. And I’m like, I’m not gonna blow this chance because I’ve got to get home.

“So I get in the elevator with him. Wouldn’t sign in the elevator, just like this. [He demonstrates Simmons with arms crossed, staring straight ahead.] The elevator door opens. He goes, ‘Do you want me to sign that?’

“I said, ‘No, it’s OK.’ True story. And he didn’t sign it.”

Years later, friendships blossomed with all of the original members, but especially with Frehley and Criss. Which brings us back to that strange black fur-like object in one of the cases.

“So Peter was here,” John 5 explains. “He goes, ‘Hey, where can I get my haircut?’ I say, ‘I’ll make an appointment,’ and his wife takes him. They come back, and Gigi goes, ‘Oh, I brought you Peter’s hair for your museum.’ I go, ‘OK!’

“So that’s Peter’s hair. How funny is that?”

Sharing treasures

The collection continues to grow steadily as John 5’s Instagram page @knightsinsatanservice, has helped fans with Kiss memorabilia to find him more easily.

Just before our tour, he’d received a package with a “Now in Stock” record-store display for Kiss and a bumper sticker advertising Kiss’s first Canadian tour. Through a complicated series of trades and negotiations, he also scored a promotion matchbook on which the cover announced the release of Kiss’s 1974 album “Hotter Than Hell.”

Asked if he has a Great White Whale, some piece of Kiss memorabilia that he’s dying to acquire, John 5 hesitates and then nods.

“Absolutely. But you have to stop recording,” he says, explaining that if his interest is known the asking price will skyrocket. “I’ll tell you what it is, but you can’t print it.”

We agree to his terms. And it really is something unique and very, very cool.

It’s difficult, of course, for him to pick a favorite out of the collection, but when pressed to do so, he finally offers up a pair of the rarest items he owns. Simmons’ stage costume from 1974, the only one believed to exist, is one. And a fan-made flag, which gave the Kiss fandom its name.

“When Kiss was starting out, these kids in the photo here were holding this flag outside of a radio station, demanding they play Kiss,” John 5 says. “They called themselves the Kiss Army. Kiss didn’t think of the Kiss Army, these two kids did.

“Kiss heard about it and invited them to the show, and said, ‘We like that name. We want to use the name,’” John 5 says. “They’re like, ‘Great!’ So this is the original banner that they did.”

It’s that purity of the passion of the fans that convinced John 5, who has always been a Kiss fan first and foremost, to open his museum for limited tours in May.

“There’s some great collectors out there and they won’t even send me a picture of the stuff,” he says. “That’s how rare and exclusive this stuff is. I was like, ‘God, that seems so odd to me.’

So I thought, hmm, OK – and these people are dying to see this stuff, you know?” John 5 says. “Meet and greets last like 30 seconds. I said I’m going to do a museum and I’m going to spend time with the people, talking about it.

“These are people that really want to come and they’re coming from all over the world. I thought, ‘Would I like to do that?’ And I absolutely would. I would totally want to do it if there was like a Rolling Stones museum, and, I don’t know, the guy from whatever band is showing up. I’d be like, ‘That’d be rad. I’d like to see that.’ It’s that simple.

“It has taken a lifetime to do this,” he says. “So why not share it and make some people happy?”

Knights In Satan’s Service museum tour

What: A two-hour tour of rock guitarist John 5’s collection of Kiss memorabilia. Only six people are allowed per tour. All tours will be led by John 5.

When: May 5-9, May 12-16, May 19-23 and May 27-30, with a possible expansion of future dates.

How much: $500

For more: See John5store.com.

Guitarist John 5 amassed a trove of Kiss memorabilia. A lucky few can take the tour Orange County Register

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Guitarist John 5 amassed a trove of Kiss memorabilia. A lucky few can take the tour

Kiss ‘n guitars

Boy meets band

Sharing treasures

Knights In Satan’s Service museum tour

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