KISS 1975: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the spandex…

Headed For Commotion…

he album cover is tectonic. You feel it shudder like those bad camera effects in 1970’s earthquake movies. If the San Andreas Fault formed a band, this is what it would look like. Lightning bolts on the guitarist’s body run in perfect action lines, like shockwaves turning his guitar upside down from the earth-shaking joltage. Shot in a studio setting and not – as it would seem – at a live performance, the “Status Quo pose” (as Gene Simmons calls it) perfectly conveys the blistering heat of the double live album within – Alive!

After failing to make a major dent in the music industry with their first three albums (even though all three went Gold), hard rock band KISS returns with a fourth offering – a risky double-live record, not the norm in 1975 – that would become a landmark not only for the band (as it wrenched their record company out of the red and into the black) but also for the industry, which then exploited the market for double-live albums.

The first thing you hear is the crowd. Raucous, loud, constant. (Only years later would we hear the behind-the-scenes confessions of the crowd being tweaked to enhance the excitement.) The song selections are the best of the best from the first three KISS albums, Kiss, Hotter Than Hell and Dressed To Kill. Invigorated, rejuvenated, uncastrated from their boxy production, and shot at us with guns.

Undressed to Kill. Another of the infamous R-rated KISS photo shoots that daddy won’t let you see.

If the San Andreas Fault formed a band – this is what it would SOUND like!

Over that crowd, the MC yells: “You wanted the best and you got it! The hottest band in the land – KISS!” Guitar riff. Explosion. Bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons growls into Deuce. Insistent, driving, dirty. Then rhythm guitarist/vocalist Paul Stanley yelps a short greeting: “Whoa! How y’doin! Aww-yeah! Looks like we’re gonna have ourselves – a rock and roll pawdy tonight!” Band launches directly into Strutter, which sounds ever so “polished” compared to Deuce. (Did these guys just go from thrashing about in daddy’s garage to an international act?)

Three more Stanley-vocal songs would round out this Side One of Four: Got to Choose, Hotter Than Hell and Firehouse. These are not just dutiful recreations of album tracks; these are savage renditions of crowd-rocking stompers.

Over the decades, KISS songs and riffs have been sampled innumerable times by other artists, and I make note of this live version of Hotter Than Hell (to be specific, Stanley’s distinctive shouted intro) because of its massive popularity with raucous, brain-aneurysm EDM artists: “I tell y’all – I got this feelin’- tonight’s gonna be one o’ those hot nights! – We’re gonna get this place – hotter than hell!” Various truncated versions of this intro became widespread in the early 90s, especially the phrase, “We’re gonna get this place–.” To date, the most sampled KISS byte. 

Drummer Peter Criss and lead guitarist Ace Frehley round out what sounds like a well-oiled battalion rather than a band. Criss’s drumming is solid (with a featured drum solo during 100,000 Years that is all the more amazing as it continues unabated under Stanley’s audience-participation rap) and Frehley’s memorable solos are meticulously crafted and mixed clean enough to hear every note. The freneticism that was missing from the original recordings is at last captured by producer Eddie Kramer. It’s The Rolling Stones meets Led Zeppelin, all falling into the San Andreas fault…

Again, years later – confessions: even the vocals and instruments were “augmented.”

Not meaning to be a KISS apologist, but who doesn’t augment their live album, publicity photos, resumé, recorded works, etc.? Alive! happened to be one of the first of its kind; no one had established what was right, wrong, ethical or forbidden. KISS were crossing lines that were not yet drawn – which is why these revelations would only come “years later” when some of the “rules” to this game had been tacitly agreed upon.

The songs are energetic, fresh, boppy and heavy at the same time. Songs like Nothin’ to Lose, 100,000 Years, Watchin’ You, would truck along with a renewed vigor, while songs that already had great hooks and sounded good on record – Strutter, C’mon And Love Me, Rock Bottom, Rock And Roll All Nite – now sounded GREAT! Parasite is like a train that leapt the tracks and is heading straight for you. And She is downright scary.

KISS closes Alive! with their tried-and-true kicker Let Me Go Rock n’ Roll, rather than their now-infamous anthem Rock And Roll All Nite, being a “newer” song from their last album. Yet this live version of Rock And Roll All Nite would be released as a single – kicked into outer space with a lead guitar solo where none existed on the record, and ended with the final figure of Getaway (from Dressed To Kill) – and become the canonical anthem that has wormed its way into social memory and closed a million stadium singalongs.

Alive! would go gold, platinum? double platinum? quadruple platinum? Terminology and statistics vary from myriad sources; suffice to say it charted for 110 weeks and peaked in the Top Ten in many countries. It was, and remains, a behemoth. After manager Bill Aucoin had kept KISS touring, exploding, eating and spadexing for three albums by raping his American Express card, just before a hit was put out on Casablanca Records and Aucoin Mgmt, this album that “captured the essence of the band live” paid off in demon spades.

END