Alive! - Kiss (1975)

a selection of live albums I love

So I had a good friend the last couple years of grade school and the first couple years of junior high. He was a neurodivergent music obesessive like I was, the only other one I knew at the time. So even though we didn’t listen to much of the same music, we bonded over our love of it.

He suddenly became a Kiss obsessive. Ironically, the catalyst seemed to be the release of Crazy Nights, one of the band’s least-loved records, but we don’t get to choose what clicks for us. This is to say that a lot of what I know about Kiss is filtered through that relationship more than me actually ever being a big fan myself.

To my ear, the early Kiss studio albums are clunky. Kiss were pure showmen–depending on whom you ask, more showmen than musicians. Maybe they didn’t quite get how the studio recording process worked. Maybe it was that they were on Casablanca, basically a disco label. But those first 70s studio albums are only interesting to me in theory.

The band were always an electric live act, and they had the good sense to get that on tape. To accomplish it they enlisted Hendrix and Zeppelin engineer Eddie Kramer as producer. The result was Alive, a record on nearly any list of greatest classic rock live albums.

There’s still nothing remarkable about these songs, except that here you get them the way the band conceived them as brash showpieces. Attitude, interplay, and swagger had made Kiss a successful act, and now they finally had a record that communicated that to people who hadn’t been to a concert.

Tracks I Liked

Strutter - a signature tune and a good summary of the band at this moment.

She - if anyone doubts that Kiss was the inspiration for the River Bottom Nightmare Band from Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, you and I are gonna throw hands. And this track will prove me right.

Cold Gin - Guitarist Ace Frehley was the most talented musician in the band, imo, but he only got a couple of his compositions on this record. This is a favorite of mine.