Alive!

Alive!
Live album by Kiss
Released	September 10, 1975
Recorded	March - July 1975
Genre	Hard rock, heavy metal
Length	74:50
Label	Casablanca
Producer	Eddie Kramer
Kiss live chronology
Alive! (1975) Alive II (1977)

Alive! is the fourth album by American hard rock band Kiss. It is considered to be their breakthrough and a landmark for live albums. Released on September 10, 1975, the double-disc set contains live versions of selected tracks from their first three studio albums, Kiss, Hotter Than Hell and Dressed to Kill. The record was recorded from concerts in Detroit, Michigan, Wildwood, New Jersey, Cleveland, Ohio and Davenport, Iowa.

Album information

Despite their reputation and success as a live act, which emphasized theatrics as much as it did music, their notoriety did not translate to increased record sales. Fans told the band that their albums were not capturing how the band sound live, so the band decided to release a live album. Kiss was essentially surviving on then-manager Bill Aucoin's American Express card. Complicating matters was the fact that their label, Neil Bogart's Casablanca Records, was having financial difficulties of its own stemming from a major misstep. The label had released a double album of Johnny Carson monologues earlier in the year. However, the album was a flop, but Casablanca had pressed millions of copies in anticipation of it being a strong seller.

Casablanca, however, did think a Kiss live album would be a respectable seller. The album outperformed expectations as it was certified gold, becoming both Kiss' and Casablanca's first top ten album. Years later, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons recounted that in the weeks after the release, they saw a significant increase in concert attendance. In the documentary Kiss: X-treme Close Up, Stanley remembers that at one particular show in Dayton, Ohio, "the place was packed; I mean you couldn't have gotten another person in with a shoehorn".

The album's title was a homage to the 1972 live album Slade Alive! from the English rock group Slade, a band that Kiss were heavily influenced by.^[1][2]

Overdubbing controversy

There has been considerable debate as to how much use was made of studio overdubs. Simmons states in his autobiography Kiss and Make-Up, that very little corrective work was done in the studio and that most of the studio time was devoted strictly to mixing down the multi-track recordings. He also emphasized that Kiss could not have done extensive overdubbing even if they had wanted to; thanks in no small part to the Johnny Carson album fiasco, the extremely meager budget allotted to the band simply would not allow it.

The original recordings from the July 23, 1975 concert at the Wildwood Convention Center, "Deuce", "Hotter Than Hell", "Firehouse" and "Black Diamond", along with the June 21, 1975 Cleveland Music Hall Concert, "Rock and Roll All Nite", have shown there was very little overdubbing used for the Alive album.^[3] According to Dale Sherman's book Black Diamond and Goldmine magazine, in the early 1990s, Eddie Kramer stated there were a few overdubs to correct the most obvious mistakes: strings breaking or off-key notes, for instance. However, in recent years, Kramer has stated that the only original live recording on the album is Ace Frehley's guitar. Stanley has noted that there's a bass mistake in the choruses of "C'mon and Love Me". He has also made comments that even though there have been live albums recorded later that make Alive! sound like it was recorded in a washroom, he has no qualms about it.

Re-release

Alive! was first issued as a 2CD set in what has now become known as a 'fatboy' 2CD case. When the Kiss back-catalogue was remastered it was housed in a slimline 2CD case, and in keeping with the rest of the reissue program, had the artwork restored. Alive! was re-released in 2006 as part of the Kiss Alive! 1975–2000 box set. The short running-time of Alive! allowed for a single, unedited CD edition in this release. The remastered CD edition eliminates the breaks between the four sides of the original LP release, resulting in this version of the album playing as one continuous performance. The 72-page booklet that comes with the CD set erroneously credits songwriting for "Cold Gin" to Stanley instead of Frehley.

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[4]
Vista Records	[5]
Robert Christgau	B−[6]
Blender	[7]
Rolling Stone	[8]
Pitchfork Media	(10/10)[9]

Alive! received positive reviews and has sold over 9,000,000 copies, making it Kiss' best selling album and one of the biggest selling albums of the 1970s. Greg Prato of Allmusic rated the album four-and-a-half stars out of five and stated that "Alive! remains Kiss' greatest album ever." Erik Rupp from Vista Records rated Alive! five out of five stars. He stated that the album "never lets up" and that "KISS sounds like a freight train roaring down the tracks at top speed." Robert Christgau rated the album a B-, stating that he and "the multimillion kids who are buying it" "fall into neither category" of those who regard the album "as a de facto best-of" and "those who regard it as the sludge."

In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, the album was rated four out of five stars. It was called "a nonstop Kiss-krieg of two-note guitar motifs, fake-sounding audience noise, and inspirational chitchat", but it was then restated as the next best thing to being there, clearly. Jason Josephes of Pitchfork Media rated it 10 out of 10 points and said that "the album may seem like a joke, mainly because it contains every arena rock cliche in the book", but called it "total sonic proof of Kiss climbing their apex".

It peaked at #9 on the album charts. The album charted for 110 weeks, by far the longest in the band's history. In 2003, the album was ranked number 159 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2006, the album was placed No. 26 on Guitar World magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Albums of All Time. In 2009, the album was placed No. 3 on Guitar World magazine's list of Top 10 Live Albums.^[10]

Track listing

Side one

Side two

Side three

Side four

Personnel

Kiss

• Paul Stanley - rhythm guitar, vocals
• Gene Simmons - bass guitar, vocals
• Ace Frehley - lead guitar
• Peter Criss - drums, vocals

With

• Junior Smalling - introduction

Charts

Certifications

References