Any Kiss Fans?

Kiss is my guilty pleasure from childhood. Having said that, they last got money from me on the 1996 reunion tour. That was a fun time but nothing they’ve done since has appealed to me with several “last tours.”
 
Sprained my eyeballs rolling them so hard many times at those guys. To each their own...
I've found that most people I've talked to that had this opinion never moved beyond the visual presentation to the actual songs.

It's a bit of a holy war discussion, I know.

KISS was the first band that I was ever a fan of and I owned a number of their albums before any other band.

But they have many songs that hold up as well as any of the other classic rock bands.

And they put on a hell of a show!

These days I could care less as I've been turned off by the focus on money and merchandise, but I can't deny that the music is in my blood.
 
The reason I wanted to learn how to play guitar was that I wanted to be able to play the solo from Parasite on Kiss - Alive! after my older brother brought that home in 1975. Nothing was cooler then Ace Frehley with his tobacco-burst Les Paul when I was a kid (well, maybe Star Wars when it came out in 1977 heh).

Loved those guys up until around 1979 and they lost me after that. Their reunion in 1996 was a cool blast of nostalgia but I've largely been indifferent to them for decades.

Still love the Space Ace though...he made the most with the tools he had in hand and his solos in the prime Kiss years were great; I love his loose, loopy, behind the beat lazy bends and vibrato. Instantly recognizable and, to me, that is a mark of a great guitar player, irregardless of technique.
 
Still love the Space Ace though...he made the most with the tools he had in hand and his solos in the prime Kiss years were great; I love his loose, loopy, behind the beat lazy bends and vibrato. Instantly recognizable and, to me, that is a mark of a great guitar player, irregardless of technique.
I'll probably regret this, but point me at a few of those great solos please, would like to check them out.
 
I'll probably regret this, but point me at a few of those great solos please, would like to check them out.
Check out Kiss Alive1 - Classic Ace Frehley at his best - I was obsessed with it in 1976 at age 15 and I think that album still sounds totally fresh today - as suggested above, Ace may not have been the most technically proficient player but he had so many unique riffs and little nuances played in his totally unique style - instantly recognizable.

Here's an extended solo from that period - I saw one of their shows on this tour - second concert I ever attended (1st was Boston about a year earlier) - remember being blown away by it - but it was all over for me in 78 when I became a Rush freak - lol!

 
I'll probably regret this, but point me at a few of those great solos please, would like to check them out.

As has been mentioned about, "Alive!" is Ace at his arguable best...simple, inventive solos that very much served the songs with his unique feel and phrasing all over.

"Got To Choose", "Cold Gin", and "100,000 Years" are cool solos from "Alive!" IMO; simple, melodic, and memorable.

"Love Her All I Can" from "Dressed To Kill" is another that quickly comes to mind (nice arpeggiated parts in the breakdown then the solo), as is "Strange Ways" from "Hotter Then Hell".

Again, we are not talking about Uli Jon Roth levels of technique and musical mastery, but Ace has personality stamped all over his solos (particularly in the 70's) and got the most out of what he had to work with.
 
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Ace is why I started playing guitar. 9 years old they were like superheroes.

Same story here. The cover of Alive made me want to play. In particular I wanted that guitar Ace had. I had no idea what a Les Paul was or anything— it just looked so cool to my young eyes.

So funny to learn later that cover photo from Alive was staged and not actually a still of them playing. Kind of appropriate for Kiss!
 
That whole "live" album itself apparently was massively overdubbed, according to them, according to wikipedia. Produced by Eddie Kramer, who's done some other stuff too, shall we say ;)
There's been lots of criticism of the Kiss Alive1 album over the years, mainly regarding post editing, which to some people, means the album is somehow comprimised. Personally I think this is total bs, not because it's not probably true, but because I'd bet it's true of lots of other live albums that don't get the same criticism, and besides - who cares - if it sounds good - it's good - Kiss Alive1 stands up as one of the best live rock albums ever done. Back in the day, with no internet and 2 channels on tv, people argued that Kiss were not musicians and could not even play instruments. Ace Frehley never claimed to be a virtuoso - there was a window there at the beginning (before it all went sideways) when Ace was flying high for sure.
 
So funny to learn later that cover photo from Alive was staged and not actually a still of them playing.
Which is weird, since, as we can see in lot's of old live footage, the photo on that cover is exactly what they were live - fans came out of these early live shows in shock never having seen anything like this. It later became a circus, but in the beginning they really had the cool factor going on.
 
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A fond memory I have of grade 9 gym class (76) - We're all seated cross legged in lines of 5 or 6 on the gym floor at the beginning of class, ready in required red gym shorts, white T, and white runners. My classmate Tony arrives late dressed in his usual red Kiss T-Shirt, bell bottom jeans, black 7in heal'd Kiss style boots, and Ace Frehley replica hair. He slowly walks accross the gym floor and, with some difficulty due to the high boots, sits behind me. Within a few seconds, our gym teacher shouts our way: "Tony"...<pause>..."Get Out!" - at which point Tony slowly gets up and slowly marches out on his Kiss boots with a smirk on his face. Shortly after I find Tony in shop class, working on a wall of guitar speaker cabinets he was building and for which the shop teacher let him use the tools for whenever he wanted (probably because it's the only thing that was keeping him in school).
 
To understand Kiss, you’d have to have been there in the mid-70s when there was nothing like them, and then there they were. That sort of total showmanship and commitment to living the image 24/7/365 was unheard of, and we who were teenagers at the time ate it up.

Masterful musicians? No. But did they get the maximum mileage from every gallon of gas they had? You betcha! Still a fan of the Kiss Alive era.
 
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