Tag: Every Time I Look At You

Kiss – ‘Unplugged’ – Album Review (The Kiss Bootleg Series)

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I have been doing a Kiss Bootleg Series for years. You get a review every time I add a new one to the collection. Well, after buying 38 Bootleg CDs from John Humphrey’s personal collection, I figured let’s jump right back in and do a whole lot of reviews on the Bootlegs. Oh, if you don’t know who John Humphrey is, you need to know he is a massive Kiss collector. And he is the drummer of the band Seether. John decided to sell off his entire collection…sort of…he kept all the vinyl (like 4,000 of them). He did it through an auction at Backstage Auctions and I had to have a piece of it…and I did wind up with somethings.

As it says in the liner notes, Kiss has done numerous acoustic performances over the years on radio and TV (excluding MTV unplugged). This compilation takes those performances and puts them in one disc. It covers the time periods of 1990-1994 which makes most of it having Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Eric Singer and Bruce Kulick. But we do get Eric Carr and Ace Frehley tracks as well. The sound quality if actually pretty good and we get 12 fun and exciting tracks and wildly good time as it shows the humor of the guys as well as these are very loose and crazy performances.

The first track is from The Howard Stern show on February 25, 1993 and you can hear Howard and Robin joking it up with Paul and Gene. They play “Detroit Rock City” and Gene is a cut-up throughout the whole thing. I love it when he points out where all the explosions would be when they play it live. Paul sounds relaxed and vocally is on point. I love seeing the lighter side of the band.

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Kiss – ‘Revenge’ (1992) – Album Review (The Kiss Review Series)

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The lack of success for the band’s last album, ‘Hot in the Shade’, had them at a crossroads again as to what to do. They were asked to record a song for Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in February of 1991, so they brought Bob Ezrin back to record it although Gene was a little hesitant about it after the debacle of ‘Music from the Elder’. But they recorded that song, which was “God Gave Rock And Roll To You II”, and then nothing for awhile. Paul was writing songs with various people, Gene was writing with Bob Dylan (sort of – you can read about that in The Vault series), and then the tragedy of Eric Carr happened. As we discussed in the last post, Eric had heart cancer and died on November 24, 1991 and he had been sick for some time. It was a dark day in Kisstory.

Eric Singer was brought in as the drummer full time now and Kiss went back in the studio in December 1991 with Bob Ezrin back at the helm as the producer probably in part that the Bill & Ted song did so well. The band sought help from an old friend at this time to help with the songwriting. That old friend was Vinnie Vincent. Actually, I think Vinnie reached out to them, but it doesn’t matter. Vinnie had turned over a new leaf and wrote some great songs with both Gene and Paul. And then Vinnie turned back in to Vinnie and tried to renegotiate a contract with them, sued the band and then lost. And Vinnie was again on bad terms with the band. Oh well, at least they tried. There was another Kiss connection on this album as the boys from the band Black ‘N Blue were brought in to help with backing vocals. They would be Jaime St. James and Tommy Thayer. Tommy is now the current Kiss guitarist for the band. This brings the count to 7 Kiss members that worked on the album…Gene, Paul, Eric S., Eric C., Bruce, Tommy and Vinnie. Pretty cool!

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