Want a little Kiss? Stick around after the original group plays to get a taste of mini tribute band

“This electricity that happens between the fans and us,” he said, then dissected the word fan, which is shorthand for fanatic.

And that’s where you find the Kiss Army of die hard fans and Kiss Nation, the fans who turn their love for the band into a tribute band.

Simmons and fellow founding Kiss member Paul Stanley never really imagined the rock band they formed in New York City in early 1973 would inspire tribute bands comprised of fans willing to spend hours painting on the trademark Kiss masks, don the heavy, hot leather costumes and impossibly high boots, primp, tease and spray their hair or wear hot wigs that influenced 1980s rock ’n’ roll big hair. And they certainly didn’t think Kiss tributes would morph into their own genre.

“The only honest thing I can say is we’ve always been given, and I have, much more credit than I deserve in terms of this grand master plan,” Simmons said during a phone call from home in Los Angeles. “... It’s gone way beyond anything anybody ever imagined except us.”

Kiss is not the first rock band to attract imitators, but it is arguably the most recognizable.

“If somebody did a U2 tribute, how would you know it’s U2? The visual stuff doesn’t work for anybody (but Kiss),” said Simmons. “You can be anybody and if you sort of transform yourself and become Kiss, that is iconic, that look. They are the four most recognized faces on planet Earth.”

Enter perhaps one of the most unique Kiss tribute acts — Mini Kiss, a quartet of little people who don the get-ups, play their own instruments and run through a Kiss greatest hits set list with inspired passion. The group plays a show at Casino del Sol Monday, July 4, after Kiss’s AVA show.

The whole Mini Kiss thing started as a goof in 1995, said manager Louis Fatale, whose brother, Joey, created the concept that year.

Joey Fatale was a drummer and played guitar, and he wanted to be a rock star, his brother explained. But at 4-foot-4, “he knew his height would be a big obstacle,” said Louis, who is of average height.

To make a living, he said, Joey did what a lot of little people entertainers did to make money: He took roles as an Oompa Loompa or a leprechaun in New York clubs and at private parties.

In 1995, a club in Manhattan asked him to come up with a different show, so, inspired by a Kiss album cover, he struck on a plan: little people dressed up as Kiss.

He recruited three other little people, put on the makeup and took the stage in street clothes and no wigs.

“It was just a goof,” Louis recalled, but the next day the club owner called his brother and said he had gotten a lot of calls from people asking about the “mini Kiss” band.

“The rest is Kisstory,” Louis joked.

The band has done tribute shows around the country in the years since and in 2010 appeared with Kiss in a Dr Pepper Super Bowl commercial. The band also appeared on Simmons’ A&E reality show “Gene Simmons Family Jewels.”

“My brother never expected a following like this,” said Louis, whose brother died in 2011 from a heart attack. He was 46 and had been Mini Gene in the band.

Former Tucsonan Zachary Morris replaced Joey a dozen years ago. For the past eight years, he’s been trying to get the group to play a Tucson show.

“It finally happened,” Morris, 33, said from home in Spokane, Washington. “It’s going to be amazing.”

Morris, who has a day job working in fast food, said the closest the band has come to Tucson was a show several years ago in Phoenix.

Tucson also has ties to the only all-female Kiss tribute act — Priss. Drummer Judy Cocuzza lives in Tucson, although the band is based out of Los Angeles.