I watched the four hour Kiss Biography documentary on A&E last week, and really loved it. A trip down memory lane.
To be honest, after Destroyer I didn't really listen to them anymore. But at age 14, Kiss was really THE band that started me wanting to trade an acoustic guitar for an electric guitar (a Kort Les Paul it turns out, into a Kustom solid state 1X12 amp combo, with a Ross Distortion pedal - ah, early tools!).
I learned my first barre chords from Kiss Alive and their earlier records, slowly lifting that needle and putting it back on the turntable, and my first rudimentary rock pentatonic leads from Ace Frehley as well.
This was the era of Creem and Circus magazines and me and some school buddies would buy them, cut out photos of our heroes and make our own "scrap books." Ha!
It was marketing genius what they did - they monetized the f** out of their brand.
But the reality was, on the first five albums, all the songs were quite good Rock and Roll - still are I would argue. Some tunes are stronger than others to be sure, but they really knew what they wanted to do.
From there I discovered Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Montrose, Hendrix, Pink Floyd and too many others to write out before evolving into listening to the "tasteful" players Jeff Beck and Albert King (pre Stevie Ray Vaughan) and Larry Carlton.
But I recently listened to Kiss Alive again closely, and the Marshall plexi guitar tone was (and still is) simply glorious!!! Eddie Kramer really did a great job recording them on that.
Love this thread, for the memories it brings back.