• AllMyVinyl #13
• Band: Kiss
• Album Title: Alive!
• Release Date: 10 Sep 1975
• Date purchased: 6 Nov 2020
• Location purchased: Amazon.com
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 2
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

Well, if you know rock and/or metal, than you know this one.  It’s a foundational piece of music.  When I was growing up it was routinely referred to as the defacto best live album out there.  Which is amusing in the long run as there’s a lot of dubbing on the thing.  Still.  It’s a great piece of early Kiss, and had a lot to do with making them stupid huge popular in the 70’s.  Thing is, when it was new, I never owned it.  There was phase I was on for awhile where I thought of live albums as “fake” albums.  I also owned Double Platinum and such preferred the studio albums.  I supposed if had seen Kiss back in this era, I might feel differently but given I didn’t, it wasn’t a draw for me, despite liking a LOT of Kiss studio work.

I eventually picked up a copy of this on vinyl in 2020 when I found a 2014 vinyl re-release available at a reasonable price on Amazon.  Now as I said I never owned the original, but it looks like a pretty good replica packaging wise of the original vinyl release, down to the Casablanca art on the discs themselves.

Regarding the songs themselves…  At the time this was released, Kiss had only three studio albums (Kiss, Dressed to Kill, & Hotter than Hell). This is the best of those three albums, so some of their mega hits aren’t here – but later on they released an Alive! II (plus a III & a IV down the line).  I’m not going to get into the individual tracks too much, but I did really love the Ace solo on the end of She here.  I kind of prefer the version of Black Diamond here to the studio one.  It also has a few of my favorite early Kiss tracks (Strutter, Cold Gin, and of course Rock & Roll all Nite).  I do very much like the “Let me Go Rock & Roll” track at the end.  It’s a track I don’t listen to enough – probably enjoyed that one more than any other on this listen today.

Finding myself at a loss on what to write about this overall – I just want to go “It’s Kiss Alive – isn’t that enough?  You know this.”  Somehow I feel like I should own this one on 8-track.  ha

As far as I know, there’s no official video directly connected to the 1975 original.  There is this music video produced in the 80’s for “Rock & Roll All Nite”, but it contains the then current incarnation of the band (minus Frehley & Criss), and in the no makeup era.