KISS - End of the Road - Not Live

I had other plans this week but this one needed to go up instead. This is part of my now ongoing Not Live series. This was thrown together at the last minute so there might be some volume matching issues. I'll do an update if needed.

Last week KISS played the first show of their End of the Road tour. I'm not going to get into any of the "debates" that the different fan factions are having. For me this is the time to be celebrating one of my favorite bands as they say good night one more time to their fans.

KISS was my first musical obsession. My brother brought home the first KISS album in 1976 and by the time Destroyer came out he had all of the back catalog. My first KISS LP purchase of my own was Love Gun in 1977. 1977 was also when we first saw them live on the Rock and Roll Over tour which still featured the Destroyer stage set and costumes.

I had originally planned on making studio versions of their first two live albums (might still post then in the future) but someone posted the setlist for the first show of the new tour online and I decided to recreate that instead. It's a great setlist full of classic KISS from all eras. While a little light on the non-makeup era and a bit heavy on tracks from the first album and Destroyer, really, in the end the only song I could do without is Beth. It will be interesting to see if the setlist changes throughout the three year tour. Enjoy.

01 Detroit Rock City
02 Shout It Out Loud
03 Deuce
04 Say Yeah
05 Heaven's On Fire
06 War Machine
07 Lick It Up
08 100,000 Years
09 God Of Thunder
10 Cold Gin
11 Psycho Circus
12 I Love It Loud
13 Hide Your Heart
14 Let Me Go Rock 'n' Roll
15 Love Gun
16 I was Made For Lovin' You
17 Black Diamond
18 Beth
19 Do You Love Me
20 Rock And Roll All Nite

Reality Notes

I took a couple of liberties with the song sources. I chose alternate sources for three songs. Detroit Rock City and Black Diamond are the Double Platinum mixes. Detroit Rock City is minus the intro/outro vignette. It's cool when you listen to the album as a whole but gets a bit annoying after repeated listens in a mixtape setting, just get to the song already. Black Diamond, which closes the first album, has an effect at the end of the tape slowly slowing down until it stops. This goes on for at least a full minute and like the vignettes on Detroit Rock City. can get frustrating on repeated listens. The Double Platinum version does not do this.

The last alternate version of a song is I Was Made For Loving You. For those of you that do not know, the original version from the Dynasty album was KISS' disco hit. In 2008 KISS released the album Jigoku-Retsuden, at first only in Japan, then later included as a bonus disc with Sonic Boom. The album consisted of 15 re-recorded classics. For the most part the re-recordings are faithful to the original but I Was Made For Loving You was done more in the style of how they were playing the song live. With tougher guitars and stripped of it's disco beat the song is much more listenable if not actually enjoyable.

I assembled the cover using elements from the KISS Online landing page announcing the tour.