I was eager to see Brian Adams step into the ring representing Kiss, although I was wondering how will he do that with all the gear and the props like the giant sarcophagus. For example, would it just be left by the entrance after he enters? Would he walk to or appear in the ring? It was a little over a month after he made his next appearance, and the character, like the entire WCW, was in disarray and his progress in suspended animation. In the beginning of September, Eric Bischoff, WCW's chairman and its very successful writer since mid 90's, who co-developed the character with Kiss, was relieved from his position. WCW was in a Twilight Zone for a while before they revamped again and decided on a new writer. October of 1999 was that period when Bischoff had just been fired and many things which were started by him were kind of floating there not knowing what to do. That was the case with Kiss' character.
However, it was Brian Adams' absence in September that for me added tremendously to his mystique, and elevated this character for me to the whole new level of almost mythical and mystical proportions. He was that much more fascinating, especially for a life long comic book fan like myself. His costume reminded me of Todd Mcfarlane's Spawn, and the whole eerie vibe and mystique tied perfectly to McFarlane's horror Psycho Circus Kiss comic series and mythology. Still, building anticipation and mystique is one thing, but after a week passed by, then two, then three, then a month I did start wondering what is going on.
On October 4, 1999, at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, Brian Adams finally reappeared on Nitro quite unexpectedly.
Half an hour into the show, a stock rock music theme started playing (a pretty cool one though), that I did not recognize as belonging to any wrestlers I know
and through the entrance appears Brian Adams in his Kiss pants and hairdo, but with nothing else!
I was flabbergasted when Adams appeared though. Mainly because I did not expect him at all so suddenly, and since he and his union with Kiss was such a monumental event, I expected some prep and hype before his next appearance. It was so out of the blue and low key, as if nothing ever happened. Also, after over a month, I started to doubt if he's gonna reappear at all. It was so surprising that it seemed like all the hype around him had been dropped, and tremendously, tremendously disappointing. All that mystique and hype made for the character, the grandeur of it all, was killed right there and then when Brian Adams entered like this. I was devastated. It was such a bummer. I figured "Well, ok, at least I have another guy to root for, but damn”. I assumed his still the Kiss guy, but without all the "flash". And since I was not yet familiar with the Kiss music catalog (and did not yet know they actually "exist"), I assumed the theme rock tune that played during his entrance was Kiss'.
While that's what I assumed, it wasn't really the case. The character was in Twilight Zone so to speak, and nobody really knew what's going on including WCW.
So Brian Adams appears, and his theme is not God of Thunder but some generic music. His title card also calls him Brian Adams, but I never thought he'd be called anything differently anyway, just that he was representing Kiss now. And he did have his Kiss costume on, although stripped to the bare bone. No cape, no belt, no upper body harness, no gauntlets, no shoulder pad, boots didn’t have their shin guards and knee pads. Again, down to bare bones
One might say that maybe he didn't have any other costume ready yet, but that's silly because there was plenty of generic spandex pants around, not to mention trunks and pants could be manufactured within days between the shows. And he still had his non-descriptive nWo black spandex wardrobe. So it wasn't a lack of choice, it was something different. It was never explained to this day why Brian had the Kiss costume on at that point. Going by history, my guess is he simply liked them and decided to keep em for the time being. That’s how it was with Dustin Rhodes, who, very briefly, played a horror character called Seven which he dropped right after its introduction. When he came back to just being his normal self, he was still wearing Seven’s leather jacket simply because he liked it.
Either way, this was quite a match for Brian Adams for the first time after being "knighted" by Kiss. This was a fight reminding everyone that Adams is in big league now either way. It was a fight for US Heavyweight Championship, and against none else than Sid Vicious, who at the time was the main A list villain in WCW and would soon win WCW Championship.
Vicious was the second largest guy in WCW (behind Kevin Nash), and Brian Adams was right behind him being the 3rd biggest guy. Both colossus' looked fierce and mean. They started off with intimidation facing each other and suddenly, hits followed.
The fight was full of energy and power with those two giants in the ring, and Adams seemed to completely wipe the floor with Vicious. It was literally a one sided fight, as Vicious was taking hits after hits.
Adams whooped Vicious in every possible way, even lifting him up!
and he even knocked him out of the ring.
After Adams knocks Sid around the ring for a while, he throws him back in. He knocked him around so hard Vicious was already down for the count till Rick Steiner, Vicious' goon, interfered.
Adams got up and kicked his ass too and for a while there he was fighting both and knocked them both out!
However, when Adams focuses on Steiner, Sid gets him from behind and then both him and Steiner got better of him this time. Vicious won but barely and only with lot of help.
The commentators make no mention of Kiss, so this last appearance of Brian Adams is looked at as him being halfway out of the character. Literally, since he only had half of his gear on.
All they say during Adams' entrance is:
Tony Shiavone: "Big Brian Adams, one of the toughest men in our sport". And then they talk about Vicious and comment on the fight.
Unbeknown to me, Adams was actually released from the character just a week after his last appearance according to Kissonline.com. That is the same date Eric Bischoff was released from WCW
Eric Bischoff: “I got shitcanned in September, the payperview never happened, and the whole deal fell apart” (Metal Injection Podcast)
As for why Brian Adams was released from the character, some articles claim that Adams got a wind that WCW will not continue the character in the A league and will try to bury him to make Bischoff look bad since it was his writing/creation. Excerpt below from grunge.com
And sportingnews.com
What did happen for sure is that Adams suggested to WCW a relative newcomer with only few matches on his resume, Dale Torborg, who was a hardcore Kiss fan from young age and wanted to be this character from the very beginning when there was a talk about it.
Eric Bischoff was asked about Adam's exit on '83 Weeks Podcast' unfortunately did not remember the reason why. But he did refer to Dale Torborg for answer:
83 Podcast: At the end of that concert (in August) we do reveal the Kiss Demon - it's Brian Adams, one half of Kronic (a tag team he was a part of later in his career), eventually we know it's gonna switch to Dale Torborg. Why the switch? Did you think originally it would be Brian, or did you not have Dale yet and just needed somebody to sort of fill out the suit? Do you remember how that came to be?'
Eric Bischoff: "I do not. You know, we'll have to reach out to Dale"
Dale gave few reasons. First, Brian told him that he doesn't know much about Kiss and he's not the right person to be the character.
Dale Torborg:"[Brian said]'I just called WCW and I bailed out of this character'. He said 'I'm not a Kiss fan, I don't get it, I told them they picked the wrong guy to begin with and there's only one guy that should do it and it's you'"(3 Sides Of The Coin Podcast)
"Right from the get go you could tell he was not so sure that he made the right decision. He called me and said 'Dale, WCW is going to be calling you because I told them this is not for me. I made a mistake, you should have gotten it from the start. You know what you're doing, it's you'" (Major Wrestling Figure Podcast)
Second, he didn't like the fact that he was to make no money off of the merchandise with his character (per deal with Kiss).
Dale Torborg: "Part of what Brian didn't like is, part of the merchandising deal with this whole thing was that the wrestler wasn't gonna get merchandise money (...) The deal that Eric cut with Kiss, wasn't Kiss' fault, it was Eric just kinda saying 'Here, yeah, we're gonna give you everything and the wrestler gets nothing'. And so Brian's like 'I wanna do my own thing and I don't get this'" (3 Sides Of The Coin Podcast)
That merchandise issue that Adams had had been confirmed by himself, as evidenced below. But what about the character himself? You can't just scrap a deal and contracts based on not liking the person who signed them and discarding his ideas in spite. So clever suits at WCW devised a plan to try to renegotiate the contracts, therefore successfully putting the character out of commission for quite some time
Digging around, it seems like Adams' exit from the character, and the character's existence and storyline was scrapped (for the time being) due to contractual problems (stemming from Bischoff being fired thus losing creative power to suits who didn’t like him and his characters). This has been confirmed by two sources. First, from September 1999, was from an insider on KissinUk website, along with a rumor that WWF might pick up the idea.
This all could be dismissed as just a rumor, but it was actually confirmed by Brian Adams himself on a radio show in November of 1999. While the radio interview has been long lost with time, fortunately its description at the time isn't (via KisinUK)
Still, to me at the time, without knowing all this and just going by what's onscreen, that was simply Brian Adams first (and as it appeared, last) fight representing Kiss. But it seems like with each successive appearance, large chunks of his Kiss persona were being chipped away. Brian Adams would appear one more time on WCW Thunder ten days later in newly designed, non-Kiss related pants, and back to his pre-Kiss feud with nWo, fighting Horace Hogan. Only the boots from his Kiss character remained, the last remnant of the original Kiss Demon on him.
This underlined his complete exit from the character. Adams then disappeared for months.
So October 4 is when I saw him coming out without makeup to fight Sid Vicious. After a month passed, I started to realize he's gone and the whole thing is gone as well. I was so bummed. It was exactly then, in November, that I found out that Kiss is a real existing band. It’s a funny story how. I was watching an episode of a cartoon series called Rocko's Modern Life (kind of a Ren and Stimpy type, cheeky cartoon) one evening, specifically an episode called "Gutter Balls". In it, one of the characters, Heffer, appears in a Bowling place with huge platform boots. Asked where he got them from, he said one of the customers left them there. It then cuts to a character (all characters in the series are animals) who is unmistakably Kiss' Gene Simmons, asking for his boots. I recognized that makeup right away. You can imagine my surprise!
So the next day I went to several large music store chains to see of Kiss is an actual band that exists and to my great surprise, here they were on the shelves in one of the places. I bought a cassette after casette, sold my entire Comic Book collection to buy as many albums as I could and over two and a half decades later I’m still a diehard Kiss Army member.
After about 7 months Brian Adams reappeared packaged differently the following year as a part of a powerful duo called Kronic (Alternatively sometimes spelled Kronik).
He did keep the hairstyle in the beginning and jet black hair color
Kronik became very successful and popular and earned World Tag Team Championships twice
In 2001 WCW planned to release a figure of Brian as part of its Ring Rage series (although it wouldn’t be the first or last time he had a figure based on him)
As for The Kiss Demon character, newcomer Dale Torborg would pick up the cape and makeup and bring the character back nearly 5 months later to WCW after the contract battles ended, but still required to have the character for certain period of time after all. So the character will be brought back months later but in a very different way.
The original incarnation of The Demon was gone just two weeks after his birth.