By Steve Newton
Fifty years ago today–on September 10, 1975–Kiss released its fourth album, a double-live LP called Alive!, and I had to have it.
I was big into Kiss at the time. Earlier in the year me and a bunch of my underage teenage buddies drove in from the Fraser Valley to see them in a Vancouver bar called the Commodore Ballroom while they were touring behind their second album, Hotter Than Hell.
Gene Simmons came very close to setting the venue’s red velvet curtains ablaze with his fire-breathing act, and the more enthusiastic fans at the front of the stage took off their t-shirts and used them to sop up the fake blood he’d recently spit up.
My 18-year-old mind was blown.
I stopped buying Kiss records two years later, after the release of Love Gun, and by the ’80s had lost interest in their music altogether, but my duties as a rock journalist had me interviewing Simmons and guitarist Ace Frehley years later, so I got them to autograph my copy of Alive! for old time’s sake.
And for eBay’s sake too, I guess. The fact that my copy comes with the autographs and the original eight-page “booklet” might make it worth something, I suppose, although it helps if your name is STEVE.
The vinyl itself is in great shape, too, if you’re interested.
To hear the full audio of my interviews with original Kiss members Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley–and my 1984 interview with former drummer Eric Carr as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.