The video is up now for Episode 6 of The Collection. When you have older siblings, their music taste can influence what you like and my brother, Gary, was a huge Kiss fan and that spawned me being one as well. From about 7-8 years old all the way til now at 55, I am still a Kiss fan.
For Part 4, we are tackling my Kiss Bootlegs that I have on vinyl. We put it in chronological order for the year the album or songs were recorded, not when they were released. We start with Wicked Lester and go up to a 2010 show from L.A. We have over 20, so sit back and enjoy.
I hope you enjoy this episode which goes “live” right now…Monday night, April 15th at 8pm. Please do leave a comment and I promise I’ll address them as soon as I can! Don’t forget to click “Like” and “Subscribe”. Thanks for watching.
The video is up now for Episode 6 of The Collection. When you have older siblings, their music taste can influence what you like and my brother, Gary, was a huge Kiss fan and that spawned me being one as well. From about 7-8 years old all the way til now at 55, I am still a Kiss fan.
For Part 3, we pick up with Kiss after the reunion and start with Psycho Circus and go all the way up to today and their latest Anniversary releases. We even through in a few Kiss Adjacent Vinyl. I was surprised by how many were still sealed. And I was surprised by how upset I got on some of their packaging choices. I give my honest opinion and don’t hold back.
I hope you enjoy this episode which goes “live” right now…Monday night, March 25th at 8pm. Please do leave a comment and I promise I’ll address them as soon as I can! Don’t forget to click “Like” and “Subscribe”. Thanks for watching.
The video is up now for Episode 5 of The Collection. When you have older siblings, their music taste can influence what you like and my brother, Gary, was a huge Kiss fan and that spawned me being one as well. From about 7-8 years old all the way til now at 55, I am still a Kiss fan.
This week is Part 2 of the Kiss on Vinyl series we have going now. We go from 1983’s Lick it Up all the way to 1997’s Carnival of Souls and everything in between. Find out which tour was my first Kiss concert, which album might be their worst and what 12″ singles and picture discs do I have. All that and more…
I hope you enjoy this episode which goes “live” right now…Monday night, March 18th at 8pm. Please do leave a comment and I promise I’ll address them as soon as I can! Don’t forget to click “Like” and “Subscribe”. Thanks for watching.
In 2014, Kiss was celebrating their 40th Anniversary. To celebrate they did a huge tour with none other than Def Leppard. I caught the show in Charlotte, North Carolina with Leppard opening and I will admit that Def Leppard blew Kiss off the stage, but that is another story. Kiss decided to celebrate with another Greatest Hits compilation titled ‘Kiss 40’. It was released on May 23, 2014 and contained one song from every Kiss release giving them 40 tracks…well, 36 tracks and they stuck 4 other tracks on their for good measure and put out on a 2 CD set.
In Japan only, there was another release of Kiss 40 that was only a single disc edition. It had only 20 tracks and a few different ones then you got on the 2 Disc Set. And for that reason you had to have both sets. And being a Japanese Edition, you also got an OBI strip but this one was bigger as it actually covered the entire back of the CD case as well. The set also included a booklet in both English and Japanese with the lyrics to the songs. There is a new song on the set called “Samurai Son” that was done with the Japanese girl band Momoiro Clover Z and as a result there is a little picture card of the band with Kiss. The last thing is the CD booklet itself which is full of bright, vivid color pictures of the band from throughout the years. It includes every member of the band.
The opening track is “Samurai Son (U.S. Mix)” with the band Momoiro Clover Z. This song sounds like nothing you have heard before with Kiss…well except for Paul’s vocals sound like Kiss. The drums are immense, Momoiro Clover Z does some of the backing vocals and even Gene joins in as well. It is a modern sounding rock song and I think it sounds really cool. Paul hasn’t sounded better, the Japanese sounding drums are cool and there is killer riff included. The song is worth the price of admission here easily.
The ‘Lick it Up’ album, which came out on September 23, 1983, garnered way more attention than it’s predecessor ‘Creatures of the Night’ for one main reason. The band finally took off the make-up which is something they had been talking about doing since at least the ‘Music from the Elder’ era. They finally did it and the big reveal was on MTV during primetime. I remember this vividly as this was event TV for me as I was a lifelong Kiss fan at the time (and still am today). I remember seeing each member in make-up and then without and I remember thinking, “PUT IT BACK ON!!! OOOOH THE HORROR!!!” No, it really wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty cool. And just like that Kiss was back in the public eye and they had some songs that could back it up.
Now, 40 years later, Kiss was rumored to be releasing another Box Set like say ‘Creatures’ or ‘Destroyer’, but those plans were squashed probably due to the fact the other box sets didn’t sell out…but who knows why. Instead they released a new Japanese Edition with a lot of little extras (but no extra discs or music) and a Picture Disc box set for ‘Lick It Up’ that included two 12″ Singles that were picture discs as well. They were limited to 3,000 copies and my copy is 1,729. This was way better than what happened to the Japanese edition which instead of #’s, a lot of them just showed XXXX…man, that would piss me off. The box is a heavy duty cardboard box embossed in silver rather than the white of the original album. It is quite nice.
I have already reviewed ‘Lick It Up’ in great detail which you can click here and read…Kiss – Lick It Up (1983). For this post, we are only going to show off the new picture discs and packaging for the box set. I hope you enjoy.
I have done a few of these already on the Best & Worst songs from every Judas Priest, Cheap Trick and Whitesnake albums. I really enjoyed doing those so I thought I would continue that process and this time we would go through every Kiss studio album (including the 4 solo albums) and see what is the best song and the worst one off each album as well. Kiss has 24 studio albums to go through so sit back, grab a drink and take it all in. Now, let’s preface this with the fact that these are my choices and not necessarily yours as we can have different opinions. My worst song could be your favorite and this is okay. We all like different things or this would be a very dull world. I hope you enjoy the list!! And we will go chronological if you were wondering.
‘KISS’ (1974)
THE BEST SONG – “BLACK DIAMOND”: On an album with so many ‘classic’ Kiss tunes, it was hard to pick. The album ends with one of the band’s best songs, “Black Diamond”. The song was written by Paul and he does sing on it, but is mostly sung by Peter. The songs starts off with a 12-string acoustic guitar and Paul sings the opening line and when he screams “Hit It!”, the song turns in to a blistering rock song with Peter taking over vocals. The song was written about New York and those ladies working on the street that they would fantasize about. Peter’s gravelly vocals gave the song such a powerful edge and he put so much heart and soul in to those vocals. Towards the end of the song, there is a brief musical interlude with Ace tearing it up on guitar and Peter laying down some fills all accompanied by that nasty bass riff from Gene before Peter lays down a final barrage of drum fills and then the song slowly, distortedly comes winding down to an end. It is dark and foreboding and so metal.
THE WORST SONG – “KISSIN’ TIME”: The worst is a cover of the Bobby Rydell Song “Kissin’ Time” which was written by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe. It was recorded two months after the release and added a couple months after that to the album. The band was not happy about this at all, but they were pressured into recording it. Paul, Gene and Peter all sang on the song and it is just a shit song. It has that whole 50’s, early 60’s style and is not a wrong song. It is easy to hear that they didn’t want to be there singing this crap and that is why I want the original version so I don’t have to hear that song anymore.
As I said a few weeks back when I reviewed the 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition Box Set, 1982 was a pivotal year for Kiss. After the disaster of their last album, ‘Music from the Elder’, Kiss were in a do or die situation. They needed to get back to their hard rock roots and show the world that Kiss was still Kiss. Producer Michael James Jackson was brought in to produce the album and Kiss new they needed to rock. Heck, Eric Carr was telling them that all the time…and he was right. To celebrate this pivotal album, Kiss delivered the 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition Box Set, but that set was only CDs (and a lot of goodies). They also released a 3-LP Deluxe Edition Vinyl set to commemorate the album as well. And that is what we will review this time around.
The 3-LP set has the original album remastered, a set of Demos, Rarities and Outtakes and the 3rd LP is a live set with songs taken from various shows. It doesn’t have any where near as much as the box set, but if you have the Super Deluxe, you don’t need that stuff again. This set does have a 20 page booklet as well.
The album is packaged in a tri-fold album jacket with some stunning pictures included. The first two spaces have a large group photo, then on the 3rd tri-fold, you get individual shots of the members on both the front and pack of that section. Although the cover has Ace, these pictures all include Vinnie, who is actually on the album…not all songs, but most.
I was scouring eBay for a few of the remaining Soto albums I don’t have, and sadly, none were for sale at the time. However, I cam across something I had never seen before. It was a bootleg of Jeff Scott Soto demos. And to top it off, it was actually signed by Jeff Scott Soto. The person I bought it from lives in Germany and his name was Stefan. It turns out, Stefan is the lead singer of the band Speed Limit (check them out, they are pretty cool) and he had opened for Soto on a tour and actually met Jeff and got him to sign the CD. I thought all that was pretty cool and I love having a story behind my purchase.
LA ROCKS DEMOS:
So, what is this CD? It is a bootleg, mostly of demos from Jeff’s early years with LA Rocks and with Vinnie Vincent. We never got any albums out of those two projects, but at least we have some demos. The first set of songs say they are from his band LA Rocks. Back in 1986, Aldy Damian approached Jeff about joining the band. Jeff was busy with his own band called L’amour at the time and so he wasn’t really interested in joining LA Rocks. However, he did agree to do a couple demos for them and they paid him, so how could he say no. After Jeff, turned it down, they went after James Christian and he agreed. James became known for his other band House of Lords later.
The project didn’t end up going anywhere and the band later on became known as something you are more familiar with as we have discussed them in this series and that is the band Eyes of which Jeff sang on a couple of their albums. It all comes around full circle in the end. These set of songs here under the LA Rock Demos section, are a mixture of LA Rocks and Eyes demos and some aren’t even either band. The tracks “Hands of Time” and “Heart of the Fire” were demos for songs used on the movie ‘Rich Girl’. The songs “For You”, “Till the End of Time” and “Nobody Said it was Easy” are all demos for the band Eyes. And the song “Hold On”, not really sure where that is from but maybe it is from LA Rocks.
1982 was a pivotal year for Kiss. After the disaster of their last album, ‘Music from the Elder’, Kiss were in a do or die situation. They needed to get back to their hard rock roots and show the world that Kiss was still Kiss. Producer Michael James Jackson was brought in to produce the album and Kiss new they needed to rock. Heck, Eric Carr was telling them that all the time…and he was right. To celebrate this pivotal album, Kiss delivered the 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition Box Set and it is jammed pack with goodness. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have been paying attention to other band’s box sets and now they know how to put one of these together. If you thought the Destroyer 45th Anniversary Box Set was stellar, then this one will make you even happier.
It is jammed pack with 5 discs of music. A remastered edition of the main album; 2 CDs of demos, rarities, outtakes and remixes as well as 2 Live CDs chock full of goodness from various shows in 1982. And you also get a Blu-Ray Audio of the main album and I can’t wait to turn this baby on in surround sound and hear those drums surround the room. But that is not all, not by a long shot. The box set is packed with an 80-page book, posters, stickers, patches, photo cards, buttons, picks and all sorts of information about the band…don’t believe, look at the sticker from the front of the box set…
So sit back and let’s go through the box set in detail with a lot of pictures to show you the beauty of this set.
Alright…You Picked It! And this one was really close. It was back and forth most of the time with Slaughter taking an early lead then Tesla going out in front, but in the end Slaughter pulled ahead and never relented after that. Slaughter’s ‘Stick it to Ya’ was one of the ones in my collection. Here are the results.
Slaughter – ‘Stick it to Ya’ – 5 votes
Tesla – ‘Psychotic Supper’ – 4 votes
Daft Punk – ‘Random Access Memories’ – 3 votes
Eddie Vedder – ‘Earthling’ – 3 votes
Kanye West – ‘The College Dropout’ – 3 votes
Thanks to all for participating. The April choices will be up on Saturday!
SLAUGHTER – ‘STICK IT TO YA’:
Slaughter owes all their success to Vinnie Vincent. A strange comment for sure but true. Let me explain. Back after Vinnie left Kiss, he started his own band with a gentleman by the name of Dana Strum. The band, Vinnie Vincent Invasion, signed with Chrysalis…okay, Vinnie had a record contract, the band really didn’t. The auditioned a lot of singers including a very young Mark Slaughter. However, Vinnie didn’t like Mark so he passed and went with former Journey singer, Robert Fleischman.
2 Loud 2 Old Music 