Fourth row, center. Close enough to feel the sear of the firepots. To gawp at the sequenced light panels flashing in Ace Frehley’s smoking rocket-launcher Les Paul. Under the confetti bomb-shower finale. Too young to drink. Legally. Even in Montréal. To be emblazoned by the teen allure that was KISS.  

The Montreal Forum, Dynasty tour, 1979. Opening act New England landed the slot with a strong debut single, “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya,” and played, according to their own PR, “power-melodic-orchestrated-song-oriented rock.” Okay.

The headliner did not. But given the huge 50th Anniversary Reissue package of the Alive! album, and 60+ years of KISStory, it’s worth revisiting what they did play, and how this happened in the first place, and what it means, and what it’s left.

Because with Alive!, Kiss (we’ll drop to lowercase) brought the masses news of their prescience on one level—having correctly intuited that Vegas Megakill was overdue to crash-land its gaudy spaceship into Rock’n’Roll.

By 1975, the band had already released Kiss, Hotter Than Hell, and Dressed To Kill, which did not exactly bomb but had little impact beyond Midwest stonerland parking lots. Alive! was the detonation, blasting three poorly recorded studio albums, with a few classic nuggets, into a global six-decade brand phenomenon. 

From obscurity to ubiquity, nowhere to everywhere—and overnight, every kid in your hood owned Alive!. Every Zep, Purple, and Sabbath fan had back-bought the Kiss discography. My neighbour had all four solo-album T-shirts.

Certainly, the iconography mattered. The grand guignol cover photo of the Demon, the Starchild, the Cat and, of course, the Spaceman. The sulfurous allure of the acronym—Kids In Satan’s Service (oooooooooh)—which was, of course, accidental supernatural nonsense, but cleverly un-denied by Kiss in any contemporary media I recall.

But credit where it’s due: there was the sound—a shrieking, roaring crowd recorded as it had never been before, wiring its own power through arena-ready anthems “Strutter” (their greatest riff), “Black Diamond” (most dramatic), and “Rock Bottom” (most dynamic) into a moment. Alive! was a singular document of a singular burgeoning cultural phenomenon. Who knew it would last until holograms and AI? 

Kiss did.

So what of the anniversary album—or rather, the albums?

This Alive! is a 4CD (or 8LP) box set plus Blu-ray. You get the original remastered from the original 1975 stereo analogue master tapes. The party classics remain party classics. Decades later, though, some of this… She is more cloddishly bar-band than ‘75. Hotter Than Hell still has the agility of a band falling down the back stairs. CDs 2 and 3 bring two other essentially identical concerts from the tour, remixed by Eddie Kramer—crucially, with no overdubs, unlike the source album. Despite claims that 88 of 120 tracks are previously unreleased, I count 40 unreleased tracks.

People, there are reasons tracks remain unreleased.

However, CD 4 features half an album of rehearsals—which, surprisingly, are not without musical and anthropological interest. These include “Kiss Jam” and “Room Service,” believe it or not, which finds them blooz-rawking behind some epic Frehley twiddling, and “Strange Ways,” with Stanley establishing their work ethic and somehow their… normalcy. They sound like a rock band rather than a shtick.

But a major reason for our Anniversary Release—if you hadn’t guessed—is simple: Merch.

After all, it’s the Golden Jubilee. Did I say they were ahead of their time in one way? Two: Kiss was the first band to truly understand the manipulation of a band’s identity for commercial purposes by the players themselves. Because after Kiss commercialized the bizarro Street rebellion of the New York Dolls, they commercialized everything else, a horror comic with nuclear branding at a time when most bands didn’t know where their merch table was.

Kiss™ reportedly once sold over $1 million in merch at a single Tokyo show in the ’90s. Never mind T-shirts and hoodies—how about deodorant sticks, condoms, “Koffee,” lottery scratch cards…

Try the genius of Kiss Air Guitar Strings*. And did Paul Stanley once do a Folger’s commercial in 2000 (never aired!) singing nonsense while some gal whirls about on a trapeze? Hell, does Gene Simmons wear granny-devil boots?

At a certain point, the diehard fan (ahem) could clamber into a Kiss Kasket, “designed to be used as both a coffin and a large, waterproof cooler for drinks,” presumably not at the same time. While there are no official figures, merch sales must be past ten figures now. It wasn’t even that Kiss sold everything but did so with such aggressive gaudiness as to normalize and un-shame every possible angle. 

And for that, every artist in 2025 unable to survive on album sales or streaming or tickets can now humbly bow and scrape before the masters. They sold you-know-what that you might pay rent.

So, the Super Deluxe version of the 50^th Anniversary of Alive! (US$ 287.55) boasts a lavish 100-page hardcover book, unreleased photos, a 1975 press kit with yet more photos, a replica of the tour program, a Peter Criss drumhead replica, ticket stubs and backstage passes (too late to redeem them, ladies!), guitar picks, bumper stickers…

But let’s not undersell the recording itself. Worth remembering that the original Alive! was their 4^th album in 20 months (!), denoting an exhausting level of recording and touring and raising the question: how did Paul Stanley maintain that incessant shriek? And reigniting the spotlight on the guitar character we recently lost: Paul Ace Frehley of the Bronx.

The band’s only identifiably flash player, all of Ace’s red-lined solos were gaudy with ‘70s stoner personality, glam swagger and arena balls, inspiring more kids of the era to pick up an axe and hack out those riffs and runs than Keith Richards ever did. Ace was a loveable street superhero wrapped in a comic-book band, and the reason Kiss could never completely be dismissed—and the reason I once dressed as him for Hallowe’en. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Steve Vai:

“Ace Frehley was the embodiment of rock’n’roll attitude—unapologetic, loud, and irresistibly catchy. During my teenage years, his playing inspired me not because it was polished, but because it was gloriously unfiltered and full of life.”

The smoking guitar? That Les Paul once nearly caused an airport emergency when security detected the wires and thought “bomb!,” which, let’s face it, is not something you could ever say about Joni Mitchell.

Now, certainly, we all knew there was something… wrong.  A secret cringe about the falseness of it all that compelled us to assure our non-attending friends that, live onstage, “I Was Made for Loving You” really rocked, man, and wasn’t disco at all.

Because, as we all learned, Kiss is a phase, like puberty itself. And yes, some people become frozen in puberty itself, like stoned flies in amber. And like puberty, you grow out of it and look back on the awkward, geeky certainties of a younger you, the funhouse-mirror growth-spurt. And you are grateful the phase is past.

But Ace Frehley is forever.

_{*As pitched on the MetalSucks website, “These Air Guitar Strings are made from nothing wrapped around more nothing, with specially tempered nothing-plated high carbon nothing, producing a well-balanced tone for your air guitar. Remember: don’t just buy any air guitar strings. Demand the best!”}