A reader asked for an obituary on Ace Frehley, lead guitarist of KISS.
I saw KISS play in a 17,000 seat hockey/basketball arena in Houston in 1977 in perhaps the first rock concerts I saw. But the acoustics were bad and I didn’t know any KISS songs except the catchy one about Rock and Roll all night and party every day, which I enjoyed.
So, I mostly learned:
- Venue acoustics matter (if you find a local spot where loud music sounds good, go back).
- Smaller venues are better.
- Don’t expect to enjoy bands perform live whose songs you haven’t invested time in learning beforehand.
In other words, I learned from that KISS concert that I didn’t much like the Arena Rock experience.
On the other hand, I am not naturally contrarian or elitist.
So, while my tastes were always mainstream, my strategy became focused on seeing new bands that might someday become almost as popular as KISS, but weren’t yet. E.g., in early 1979 a trio called The Police released a pretty good first album, and then their record label paid for them to play in Houston, even though Houston tended to be a lagging market. So tickets to see The Police in a bar with good acoustics that held about 800 people cost $3.
This was an easy arbitrage to pull off in the 1970s, an era in which there was constant turnover of musical styles, so it wasn’t hard to predict who’d be big down the road. Plus, I was going to college in Houston and spending summers and Christmases in Los Angeles, then the headquarters of the music industry. So it was pretty easy to listen to KROQ of Pasadena, CA over Christmas and predict which new bands might be big in Houston in a year and in Pasadena, TX in two years.
But none of those useful general lessons had much to do with KISS themselves, so I haven’t had much to say about them. If I were 6 years older and from the Tri-State area, I might have fond memories of seeing these crazy guys with all the face paint in a bar on Long Island for $2.
I was in 4th grade in 1977 and my parents - shockingly - allowed me to go see KISS with my friend and his mom at the Omni in Atlanta. The costumes, makeup, pyrotechnics, volume, and other effects, like cherry pickers lifting band members high above the stage, were over-the-top. And, on top of all that you had Gene Simmons breathing fire and spitting “blood.” For a 10-year-old boy, it made quite an impression and I still list it as one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to.
I also saw the Police in that 1979 tour. There were maybe 50 people in my little college town venue. You could tell they were going to be big.