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.
Now, to the review…We all know Kiss was started by Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley. But did you know about the band prior to Kiss? It all started with Gene (Chaim Witz) and Paul (Stanley Eisen) in a band called Rainbow with Gene’s friend Stephen Coronel. Paul was the third member and then they brought in a drummer named Joe Davidson. This band didn’t last long at all and hell, the drummer even a shorter time as he was quickly replaced with Tony Zarella. They only played one show before they had to drop the name Rainbow because that name was already being used by some other band (and no, not the Richie Blackmore band).
And that is how Wicked Lester was born. After only a couple shows as Wicked Lester, they were approached by a label and were given the chance to record some demos. After listening to those demos, the label decided that Stephen was not good enough and had to be fired. And since Gene and Paul the upstanding citizens they are, they fired Stephen. I guess you do whatever it takes to make it in this business. Ron Leejack was then brought in for guitar duties and it was time to record the album.
Now the album would take about a year to complete and upon receiving the album and hearing it, the label were not quite thrilled with it…okay, they hated it. Hated it so much, they shelved it and it was never released. Well, never in a full, pure album form. It has been leaked out as a bootleg and that is what we have here. This particular release has a total of 9 demos of Wicked Lester and it also has the 5 demos done by Eddie Kramer before Kiss did their first album. Lastly, it claims to have 5 songs from Live at the Academy of Music in New York from 12/31/73, but this is not true from what I researched. It is actually 5 songs from the Long Beach recording on 5/31/74.
2 Loud 2 Old Music 