KISS is a family affair in this house

“(My dad) had taken me into Goldenrod music on North Main Street, which was like a head shop (and) record store. He was going into the head shop side, where you really weren’t supposed to bring kids. So he told me, ‘Go find a record and I’ll buy that for you,’” Wells remembers. “The album cover artwork was so bright, so colorful, so striking.”

But his parents divorced when he was just 3 years old, sending his home life into turmoil.

“I bounced through stepparents and had a really abusive stepdad. A lot of alcoholism in the family,” he explains. “I felt suicidal as a little kid.”

By the time Wells was 5 years old, he had attempted suicide.

That’s when another KISS album, Alive!, became his panacea-- a way to escape, albeit temporarily, from his troubles.

“The thing that could pull me out of that was putting on Alive!,” Wells says. “I could have just been made to feel like the biggest piece of crap ever-- told I was weak and gay and fat and everything else. Then I could go into my room and put on KISS Alive! and I wasn’t there anymore.”

He was too young to understand the sexual overtones of many of the songs, but Wells understood the joy hearing those songs and taking in the album artwork gave him.

“I was in this in this different world and it was all positive. And that’s every KISS song. That’s every Paul (Stanley) rant between songs!” Wells jokes.

So he took that inspiration and positivity and ran with it, eventually becoming one of the area’s most respected and sought-after tattoo artists, and opened Wells & Co. Custom Tattoo.

“They became the sort of guiding principal of quality for everything that I would get into. They’re not the world’s greatest songwriters or musicians, but they have a way of packaging the thing. That visual aesthetic of being slightly dark, slightly sexy -- that’s carried through in everything I’ve done,” says Wells.

That includes his own songwriting for the band Cricketbows on their 2015 release Diamonds. Wells sings of that relief KISS brought him as a child on the track “Kiss Alive,” while reminiscing on the good things in his life at the time.

“I smell my mom’s and my grandma’s cooking. I see the weird greens and browns of the '70s (that were in) everybody’s houses,” he laughs. “It really takes me back.”

http://youtu.be/2Hgz-q76KtQ

And Wells has paid respect to his heroes in other ways.

“Kiss is a big part of the reason I started drawing,” says Wells, who has classic lineup members Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley on his right and left hands, respectively.

“Simmons is on my right hand because he was the reason I wanted to pick up a pencil and make marks on paper. I had to draw those eyes. Ace was the reason I picked up a guitar.”

Wells’ work has even impressed the infamously-outspoken Simmons himself. The bass player recently retweeted a tattoo of his likeness created by Wells.

Now he is a father of two girls. The oldest is a KISS Army vet, but the 6-year-old will report for duty for the first time when the band plays the Nutter Center in August.

“She’s over the moon. If I had played KISS music for her (before), she didn’t care. But when she found out she’s going to the show, now she’s a KISS fan,” Wells says smiling.

So, believe it or not, KISS—the band once rumored to be Knights In Satan’s Service--has become a family affair today.

“Our house is a KISS house in the same way our neighbor’s is a Buckeye house and the other neighbor’s is a Browns house,” Wells explains.

"It's like the family sporting team."