Like so many other ponderously pretentious posts I put up here, I originally started this entry prefacing the video below with a needlessly laborious, multi-paragraph re-telling of the first time I’d ever seen a picture of Kiss and how that completely transfixed me and blah blah blah. Who cares? You shouldn’t.
The bottom line is this: Just like their make-up, it was black & white: either you immediately dug Kiss when you first encountered them, or you didn’t. Those who didn’t fucking hated them then and hate them still. Those who did, like myself, loved them and have invariably forgiven the band’s myriad lapses in taste, judgement and decorum, over the years, as… well … as the saying goes, you never forget your first kiss.
In any case, the clip below was posted on YouTube just a couple of days ago, and if you ever were a fan, it’s required viewing. Prior to the bigger-budgeted bloat and Ringling Brothers-worthy ridiculousness of later eras, this finds the band in leaner, sleazier mode than their more family-friendly incarnations.
Playing “She,” a somewhat lumpenly lusty exercise from their third album, Dressed to Kill, Kiss dutifully gives “The Midnight Special” their whole shtick, here, complete with some tragic choreography and needless preening. That all said, when this was taped, the band was still a loose, hungry outfit, and they were indeed all committed to the cause – from the three-part harmonies in the verses (who knew?) to Peter Criss’ beefy drums fills. As a commenter on Facebook noted, it’s all a cartoon until Ace Frehley steps up and takes over … then it gets real.
When this first aired in November of 1975, it would have been way past my bedtime, being that I would only have been about eight years old, at the time. But I was already onboard. That all said, I’m still not going to their final show.
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