For the second week in a row, a live album tops our countdown chart. This week on MGK’s Thursday Top 10 Countdown, we spotlight the classic Kiss live album that isn’t really live!
On paper, a live album is fantastic idea. It can almost capture the feeling of being there in person. Man, there have been some incredible live albums released over the years. James Brown Live At The Apollo, Frampton Comes Alive, The Allman Brothers’ Live At the Fillmore and Cheap Trick’s Live At Budokan are some classic examples. In the mid 70s, almost everyone I knew had a copy of another classic live album, Alive! by Kiss. As we’ve come to find out about that LP, barely anything about that album was “live.”
How “Alive!” Came To Be
By 1974, Kiss’s record label, Casablanca Records, was having some financial difficulties. A Johnny Carson double album, featuring highlights from his “Tonight Show,” was a bomb, and the label lost a ton of dough.
Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, Casablanca Records needed cash. Label head Neal Bogart, in what was considered a rather desperate move at the time, arranged for the release of the first KISS live album. Granted, the label couldn’t even pay to have the shows recorded. KISS’s manager, Bill Aucoin, had to foot the bill himself, at a cost of over a quarter million dollars.
Aucoin had enough money to record four of KISS’s shows during their Dressed To Kill tour in the spring of 1975. One of the shows they recorded was in Wildwood, NJ of all places, at the Wildwoods Convention Center. They also recorded KISS concerts in Detroit, Cleveland, and Davenport, Iowa.
Is It Live, Or..?
In listening to the tapes, it was quite clear an album couldn’t be released in its current form. While KISS shows were certainly full of onstage action and excitement, it didn’t make for very clean recordings. The band and label brought in legendary producer Eddie Kramer (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, etc.) to help. And help he did. He brought the band into Electric Lady Studios in New York City, where they worked on repairing the unusable parts. The stories have changed over the years, but it’s generally understood that only Peter Criss’s drums are actually from those live shows. The rest were all overdubbed at Electric Lady with the band and Eddie Kramer. Even the crowd parts were changed. Kramer would take the loudest crowd cheers and mix them in throughout the songs.
So, while Alive! is the classic Kiss live album that isn’t really live, it’s hard to argue its success. For one thing, it helped save Casablanca Records from going under. After that album, disco hit big, and the label made a boatload of money. KISS’s Alive! tops our Thursday Top 10 Countdown for January 18, 1976.
