After 40 years of being influenced by these guys ... finally saw them live for the first time in Nashville.
Let's hear your stories, PE!
http://www.musiccitynashville.net/fi...04-10-kiss.php
After 40 years of being influenced by these guys ... finally saw them live for the first time in Nashville.
Let's hear your stories, PE!
http://www.musiccitynashville.net/fi...04-10-kiss.php
NOW SEEKING: "ARTIST PATRONS" & "EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS" for Band Support!
I got into Kiss when Dynasty came out; I got the cassette. Double Platinum was my second cassette, so that was a good intro to the prime masked era. I think the Alive II LP followed. Have loved Kiss since then, although the early stuff way more than the unmasked stuff.
The first time I saw them live was on the reunion tour with Ace and Peter at Madison Square Garden. To see them perform my three favorite Kiss songs—Black Diamond, She and 100,000 Years—was awesome. I've seen them four times since that show.
No matter what some people say, they put on the best live show period.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and... clever" -- David St. Hubbins & Derek Smalls, Spinal Tap
That's because the original makeup era stuff was the best music they ever made. They had three strong songwriters in the band, 3 or 4 good lead vocalists, and rocked mightily.Originally Posted by paythesnuka
But then Gene and Paul let Bob Ezrin con them into doing a concept album, Ace left the band, Gene decided he wanted to be an "actor", and that's where it went south. There's some good songs on the post-Ace records, but there's a fair amount of filler too.
Yeah, I saw them on the reunion tour, July of 1996, I think, and it was a gas to hear them play a bunch of my favorite songs: Strutter, Do You Love Me, 100,000 Years, Cold Gin, Firehouse, and best of all, Shock Me (complete with Ace's smoking pickup, levitating guitar, and rocket launcher cadenza). I saw them again when they came back through town the following October (for which my mom made me a Love Gun era Ace costume), and that time they had added Let Me Go to the set. I saw them after that on the Psycho Circus tour (good, but not as the reunion tour shows) and the first farewell tour (when they started the show by coming down out of the lighting rig, playing the beginning of Detroit Rock City).The first time I saw them live was on the reunion tour with Ace and Peter at Madison Square Garden. To see them perform my three favorite Kiss songs—Black Diamond, She and 100,000 Years—was awesome. I've seen them four times since that show.
I don't know about "best", but they definitely put on a great show the four times I saw them. But I got off the bus when the lineup started to shift again. And I got real sick really fast of Gene perpetually dissing both Ace and Peter every chance he got. Dude, shut the frell up! It was the work you did with Ace and Peter that put you in that big mansion you live in, not the tribute band you're currently threatening to retire.
No matter what some people say, they put on the best live show period.
Peter's still one of my favorite drumming. I love what he does on those first six studio albums.
I've told this a number of times on here; first time I saw Kiss, was on January 17, 1975, at the Long Beach (Ca) Arena.
Kiss (with all their pyro-gimmicks) OPENED for Camel and Wishbone Ash and played for 1 hour.
After Kiss played, some of their fans/relatives left, and we moved up to the 2nd row, to watch Camel (played 45 minutes) and Wishbone Ash (played 1 hr, 50minutes w/encore).
Tickets were $5.50 (Still have my ticket stub in a folder that I kept back then)
People forget just how huge those guys were in the mid to late 70s. I had several of their albums and saw them for my one and only time on the Dynasty tour. It was quite a spectacle, rivaled only by Pink Floyd and The Orb in my concert-going career in terms of spectacle. And yes, it was a great show.
My first true 'rock concert' experience. Kiss and Uriah Heep, January 1977. My buddy and I were 15, and my parents drove us 2.5 hrs each way to make the show. I remember not knowing anything about UH, but enjoying their set in spite of the fact that we were super stoked to see the headliners. It was the beginning of a run of three to four years when I saw dozens of amazing concerts. By the end of that run I had moved on from Kiss into other musical directions, but as they say, you never forget your first.
David
Happy with what I have to be happy with.
Ha! I saw that tour. Rock & Roll Over tour. UH was touring Firefly at the time. I loved Kiss then, having been first exposed to them right when Alive 1 came out. Saw them a couple more times after the first & jumped off the bus around Alive II. Now I DID enjoy their unmasked period too.
Call me crazy, but Unmasked is one of my favorite Kiss records. In the first place, you've got all those cool Ace Frehley songs. OK, so there's only three, but I happen to think they're all aces (pun intended). I used to not like Torpedo Girl, but then someone pointed out that the bass line (which Ace played himself, btw), was similar to Elephant Talk, and for some reason finding out what the real words to the chorus, made me reevaluate that one.
And if you start with the drums, Torpedo Girl makes a good song to segue out of just about anything, if you're doing a radio show. I once segued from side one of Henry Cow Concerts (the BBC recording of the Beautiful As The Moon... suite) into Torpedo Girl. I thought it worked perfectly.
And I love how Ace essentially put his own spin on the Patented Keith Richard Open G guitar riff with Talk To Me (think about it: the verse is essentially the same riff as Brown Sugar, Start Me Up, You Can't Always Get What You Want, etc).
The rest of the record is great too. I always loved Tomorrow, Is That You?, and You're All That I Want. Gene once said he thought that Kiss shouldn't have done She's So European, but I always thought it was a cool song, even if I'm still not sure what it's actually about.
BTW, I'm probably the only person who likes Kiss who has never owned Alive!. I borrowed it from the library once, when I was about 10, for some reason, I didn't copy it onto cassette (I copied Hotter Than Hell and Unmasked, though...come to think of it, I'm sure I borrowed most of the studio albums, other than Love Gun, from the library, but those are the only two I remember copying onto cassette...).
So I don't actually remember much about it, except the intro to Cold Gin, with Paul's "I know some of you like a little taste of al-co-hoool!" schtick. I remember the first time I heard it, it sounded to me like every time Paul was getting pissed at Peter for interrupting his spiel with those little mini-drum solos, like when he says "Alllll-RIGHT!" it sounded to me like he was giving Peter the evil eye as he was saying it.
The other thing about that versino of Cold Gin is when they come down heavy on that first power chord and Ace does the pickup switch thing, where you flip the switch back and forth between the neck pickup with the volume turned down and the bridge pickup really fast, you get that sort of Morse code effect. That was probably the first time I heard that, though I know Townshend, Hendrix and probably a few others had done it before Ace.
I do hae a bootleg video of them performing in Detroit on the Alive! tour, the night Gene set his hair on fire at the end of Firehouse (come to think of it, it's the same show that's on Kissology Vol. I, isn't it?). One thing at that show I do not like is the version of She, which segues into Ace's guitar cadenza, which I don't think works too well. They go from the breakdown bit into the guitar riff that leads into the cadenza, it's something like "The power is within her/As she takes off her clothes...", Peter hits this fill, and suddenly the launch into the riff, which is a totally different tempo and feel, and it really doesn't sound right to me.
I think it worked better on the Hotter Than Hell tour, where they tacked it onto the end of Watching You (as on the b&w Winterland video) and the Destroyer and Rock & Roll Over tours, where it was tacked onto the end of Cold Gin (as on the video of the Budokan show that HBO aired way back when).
As for Alive II, that was the second Kiss album I owned, I had it on 8-track (I think it was given to me for Xmas...'78 or '79, it would have had to have been). Hearing it now, the live portions seem a bit lackluster, but I still like the studio cuts, particularly Rocket Ride (another great Ace song) and Any Way You Want It (my introduction to the Dave Clark Five, though I didn't know it at the time).
Kiss and I go way back. I grew up in Detroit and Detroit is Kiss' home away from home. In spite of that I still took a lot of shit for liking them. I became a fan after seeing them on "In Concert" or "Midnight Special" while I was a high schooler in the mid-to-late 70's.
My first Kiss purchase was "Alive". I soon picked up the first three albums from a classmate for $2 each. I stayed with Kiss thru "Love Gun" but eventually bailed when the merch went bonkers and their fan base had a solid kiddie contingent. Although the phrase "jump the shark" was not in use then, I felt Kiss had jumped the shark. It was also around this time I discovered Frank Zappa and I went bonkers for Zappa -- quickly forgetting all about Kiss. He remains my favorite artist to this day. My affair with Kiss was rekindled when the original 4 reunited. I saw two shows on the reunion tour -- the debut show at Tiger Stadium Detroit, MI and a later show at the Palace of Auburn Hills, MI. My first Kiss show was January '77 w/Uriah Heep at Cobo Arena in Detroit, MI. I caught them a year or two later at Olympia Stadium w/The Rockets in Detroit, MI. I also went both nights of the "Alive 35 - Living Legends" tour at Cobo Arena. That makes a total of 6 Kiss shows for me.
I missed them on this recent final tour. I had little-to-no-interest in seeing them as Paul's voice was shot on the "Alive 35" tour. I found it had not gotten any better when I listened to the Whiskey L.A. broadcast on Sirius XM. They also added a bunch of Gene songs so Paul wouldn't have to sing as much.
I have fond memories and will leave them that way.
If you started around the time of Alive, then I would imagine it would be the Midnight Special appearance, which was around the time of Dressed To Kill/Alive. They did In Concert around the time of the first album, in fact, it was their first TV appearance.
I saw them on one of concert TV shows in 1974. It didn't work for me. By then I was long into Zeppelin, Santana, CSN, CCR.
Kiss backing up Sabbath on the Sabotage tour 8/2/75 @ Baltimore Civic Center.... I wasn't there to see Kiss! Here's some comments from the Sabs on that tour from Wiki
Kiss supported at a handful of dates on the first and second North American legs.[1] "I don't particularly like Kiss," said Tony Iommi the following year. "They're not my type of band at all. Their stage show was done long before by Arthur Brown." "They're laying down what they want to lay down," conceded Bill Ward. "What they're laying down, I don't particularly like. We're not in competition though. We're not out to say, 'We're better than you, Jack.' We did six years of that."[2]
Way to perpetuate the stereotype, Bill!
The frell is that supposed to mean, anyway? "They're laying down what they want to lay down". Sounds like a line out of This Is Spinal Tap. I wonder if Bill also thinks you can't do heavy metal in Dobly.
(BTW, I say all of this, with utmost respect for Bill as a drummer, he's one of my favorites from that era, but that comment really does back up the joke about drummers being people who work with musicians)
On November 8, 1975, I saw KISS for the first time. The Alive tour. I was kid. It was my first concert.
My last KISS concerts were a double shot of the Love Gun tour. Sept. 4 and 5, 1977, in Fort Worth. I had 5th row both nights. Styx backed up Kiss. Styx had just released Grand Illusion album. Three friends and I spent all night in line, buying 40 tickets. We sold the tickets at school. Back then, Paul Stanley would smash his guitar and toss the pieces out into the audience. On the second night, Paul smashed his guitar and threw two pieces into the audience. One piece hit a teenage guy hard in the chest. A guy, I sold a ticket to. The dude ended up suing Kiss for doctor bills, pain, and anguish. After that, Paul's smashed guitar stayed on stage. I still regret selling that dweeb a ticket- (and he was a dweeb, a dork, a twit)
Last edited by Crawford Glissadevil; 04-28-2019 at 01:15 PM.
Not true. There's lots of video footage from after 1977 where you can see Paul handing his guitar into the audience.
But that does bring up a point, you see guitarists throwing picks in the audience, drummers throwing drumsticks into the audience, etc. I wonder how many people have sued either because they got hit in the face with something, or caught in a melee as everyone around him/her lunged for Ace Frehley's guitar pick or whatever.
Ya know, Stryper used to throw Bibles into the audience, I wonder if anyone got hurt by one of those.
But you remind me of a couple stories I remember hearing ages ago, one about Kiss, the other about Blue Oyster Cult:
1. When I was a kid, I heard that Gene had supposedly accidentally set someone on fire while doing the fire breathing thing. Well, if you count himself, yeah, he did. At least a couple times. He admitted it took him awhile to figure out he had to stop wearing hairspray if he was gonna breathe fire.
But there was something I read about how New Year's Eve '73 show, where they did their first "big production" show. One gag involved throwing flash powder into a candelabra he had on his side of the stage, and the flames ended up hitting someone in the front row of the audience. Bill Aucoin said he thought the guy was going to ream the band in court over it, but apparently he was a good sport about getting his eye brows singed. I wonder if the story I heard when I was a kid wasn't a combination of those two things combined together.
2. At a Blue Oyster Cult show sometime in the 70's, supposedly, someone got hit in the face with a laser, and teh guy had to go to the hospital, etc, and they had to "tone down" the laser show after that. But I think Eric Bloom said once that what happened was the FDA or some similar branch of the government basically lowered the boom on them, because they were supposedly doing some seriously unsafe things with the lasers, apparently.
After coming off a three year Alice Cooper jag, I bought Kiss Alive when it was released in 1975 and loved it long enough to buy Destroyer.
It was around this time when they blew up, and little kids had KISS lunchboxes that I grew out of them.
Eighth grade .
A couple years later, friend had an extra ticket to see them at MSG on the Love Gun tour.
I was sitting next to grade schooler's and their moms.
It was like a circus, really loud, but definitely entertaining. Fireworks everywhere.
On a side note, KISS drummer Peter Criss bought a house in Greenwich Ct down the street from one of my buddies.
We would sneak onto his property and watch the shenanigans. lol!
no tunes, no dynamics, no nosebone
My very first concert ever, KISS! I remember being blown away by the volume and the pyrotechnics. Unforgettable really.
This was the main reason I bailed off the Kiss bus. The last show I saw back then, there were lots of parents there with little kids & all. Many of which were dressed up like Halloween. My friends & I were typical stoners of the day & were like "is somebody going to rat us out to the cops if we fire up during the show?". I think that show was on the Alive II tour. And that god awful Kiss movie was the last straw for me. Didn't hate the band or the music so much, just had the attitude that I was too cool for that shit.
My brother right after me was a huge KISS-fan probably starting around 76-77. He had most of the albums and, of course theie bicentennial poster. He played them constantly, both on the famous boomboxes we hadd and the killer stereo my dad bought when it was like 330 yen to the dollar. Quadraphonic Marantz receiver, Bose speakers, technics turntable and probably a TEAC double cassette deck. Wish I had that now in addition to a huge house with acres to blast it. Anyhow, I was really embarrassed how bad they were as a band and how bad they sounded as an American-band. Yes, the look was cool and they sold alot of product. My favorite tune is their disco-tune. Anyhow, ine year I had my face done up as Paul at the carnival and crashed my parents' party. Years/ decades later, my best friend's brother gave me a free ticket. Sadly when I went, I knew every word to every song thanks to my brother years ago. He wasn't all bad as he got me into The Scorpions with Intrance, and I became a huge metalhead, and then a YES-head shortly after.
Reading one of the other stories, Gene and Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister were not so much into the show and the music, they just seemed to overdo it fucking with the patents in attendance. You've got to fi something when you aren't very good. ;-)
Interview with Paul on NPR of all places
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/10/72182...-years-of-rock
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
THIS was the KISS concert I wanted to attend. Unfortunately, I never was able to get to a show of theirs in the 70s.
This footage was just released moments ago!
Rob Halford- the voice of Satan for many of the old farts who listen to NPR was the most surprise guest to me promoting Painkiller years back. My father had just arrived back home to ths states after working in Swaziland, then retired to South Africa with his third wife. We were driving out to Annapolis and I tried to find something on the radio we both could listen to. Half was Rob being interviewed, the other half, all Painkiller songs, on NPR of all places. Who would have ever thought? ;-)
Destroyer was one of my first albums as a young teen - Detroit Rock City is still special to me, and I still wonder how they got away with such flimsy drum production... Kiss Alive was another milestone, despite the annoying audience sound through all the songs! Has never been interested to see them live, but I remember one show here in the 90s where the majority of the audience consisted of boys up to 10y and their dads, with and without makeup! True unifiers of generations ...
My Progressive Workshop at http://soundcloud.com/hfxx
I never liked them much, but when their first album came out when I was in junior high, there was a kid who was obsessed with them and he'd spend all his free time drawing their pictures, and he inspired me to try to start drawing, but my primary subject was drawing hockey players.
then there is this:Not true. There's lots of video footage from after 1977 where you can see Paul handing his guitar into the audience.
But that does bring up a point, you see guitarists throwing picks in the audience, drummers throwing drumsticks into the audience, etc. I wonder how many people have sued either because they got hit in the face with something, or caught in a melee as everyone around him/her lunged for Ace Frehley's guitar pick or whatever.
Ya know, Stryper used to throw Bibles into the audience, I wonder if anyone got hurt by one of those.
But you remind me of a couple stories I remember hearing ages ago, one about Kiss, the other about Blue Oyster Cult:
1. When I was a kid, I heard that Gene had supposedly accidentally set someone on fire while doing the fire breathing thing. Well, if you count himself, yeah, he did. At least a couple times. He admitted it took him awhile to figure out he had to stop wearing hairspray if he was gonna breathe fire.
But there was something I read about how New Year's Eve '73 show, where they did their first "big production" show. One gag involved throwing flash powder into a candelabra he had on his side of the stage, and the flames ended up hitting someone in the front row of the audience. Bill Aucoin said he thought the guy was going to ream the band in court over it, but apparently he was a good sport about getting his eye brows singed. I wonder if the story I heard when I was a kid wasn't a combination of those two things combined together.
2. At a Blue Oyster Cult show sometime in the 70's, supposedly, someone got hit in the face with a laser, and teh guy had to go to the hospital, etc, and they had to "tone down" the laser show after that. But I think Eric Bloom said once that what happened was the FDA or some similar branch of the government basically lowered the boom on them, because they were supposedly doing some seriously unsafe things with the lasers, apparently.
http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/fly...d-get-charged/
"Alienated-so alien I go!"
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