In 1975, a struggling band with a couple of records under their belt and a balls-to-the-wall touring reputation that was criss-crossing the country put out one of the greatest live albums of all time, KISS Alive!
The album featured the track “Rock and Roll All Nite” which became a huge single, catapulting the album and the band into stardom. Alive! peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard album charts and stayed on the charts for 110 weeks. If you ever heard “Rock and Roll All Nite” on the radio, I’d bet anything it’s the version from Alive!
For their next album, the band brought in producer Bob Ezrin to elevate the band and make something stronger than their previous studio albums. There’s little doubt that Destroyer is one of the best KISS albums ever put to vinyl.
I have a distinct memory of being at my friend Mark’s house and hearing _Alive! _ and Destroyer back-to-back, and immediately falling in love with the band.
The next two studio albums, Rock and Roll Over and Love Gun, plus Alive II, have rarely been topped. KISS from 1975 to 1978 were an unstoppable force. The live album cornerstones of that period were the only way a kid could feel like they were part of the live show experience. It still really doesn’t matter to me that they “fixed” Alive! or that Alive II never quite captured what the band was doing live at that time. I never saw KISS until 1985, with members vastly different from their late-70s juggernaut years.
Throughout this time, I collected a few VHS bootlegs of shows and clips from various appearances. I was aware of a few big multicam videos of shows at the time. At some point, I found a bad VHS copy of the Houston Summit Love Gun Tour show. I played that bootleg and my copy of KISS Animalize Live more times than I can count.
Recently, lots of old KISS bootlegs have made their way to YouTube, along with the KISSOLOGY concerts. If you want to see KISS shows from practically every era, they are just a search bar away.
In college, there was a decent record store within walking distance, and there they had KISS Destroys Anaheim on vinyl. KISS Destroys Anaheim is a landmark show and one of the most well-known KISS bootlegs. At the time, I didn’t have a record player to play it on, and while I don’t remember what they wanted for it, I’m sure it was out of my price range. The audio was always a bit hit-and-miss with bootlegs, so I didn’t own any of those recordings. I wanted crystal clear audio. I’ve been waiting for years for an official recording of that particular show, and it finally arrived on August 21, 2026.
It is worth the wait.
The album is called KISS Destroys Anaheim ‘76, and I spent a good chunk of my week with it. I’ve listened to all seventeen tracks all the way through several times now. Honestly, it’s the best live recording of the original lineup of Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss. There’s only one other show that might come close, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
KISS Destroys Anaheim ‘76 opens with “Detroit Rock City” and runs through the Destroyer-era set the way the band actually played it that night, drum solo and bass solo and all. No edits for pacing. No sneaking in of songs played later on that tour. You get that show on that night.
The history is important because 42,000 people came to Anaheim Stadium, the ballpark the Los Angeles Angels called home, that Friday and it was the largest crowd KISS had ever drawn at that point in their career. Ted Nugent played before them. So did Bob Seger. So did Montrose. That’s an undercard three other promoters would’ve killed for, and they were the opening acts.
What I didn’t know until recently was that Eddie Kramer recorded the show himself in 1976. Kramer, if the name doesn’t ring a bell, engineered Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and produced Alive!. Fifty years later, Kramer went back to his own multi-track tapes and mixed the whole thing fresh. The man who captured it is the man who finished it. That almost never happens. Usually these archival releases get handed to whoever’s available, someone doing forensics on tape they didn’t make. This one got its original engineer, working from his own source material, with five decades of hindsight and experience.
Everyone knows _Alive! _was “helped” in the studio. KISS Destroys Anaheim ‘76 does not do that. There have been so many bootlegs of this show in fan circles, but the audio wasn’t good. You can easily find the multicam video from before this audio version came out and there you can hear what fans had to endure for decades.
Not anymore. If you’ve ever wondered what the original KISS actually sounded like at full attitude and altitude, without the studio safety net, this is as close as the official catalog is ever going to get you.
It’s rougher than Alive!. Loud and loose. There’s power and hunger in this recording.
Again, history is important. Destroyer had come out five months earlier, the record where they let Bob Ezrin bring in pianos and strings and a children’s choir. It’s the record with “Beth” on it. At the time, half the fan base thought they’d gone soft. The Anaheim setlist answers that argument in no uncertain terms. They play the Destroyer songs hard and fast, sandwiched between the Alive! material, and everything comes out sounding like the same band. Whatever the studio experiments suggested, the live act hadn’t changed a molecule.
In August 1976, KISS had no idea my favorite album, Rock and Roll Over, was three months away, that the solo albums, the comic books, and the made-for-TV movie were coming, that the machine would get so big it would eventually implode the original band. All of that is in the future. On that stage in Anaheim, this is KISS on the cusp of exploding. As fans, we get to hear it happening.
Is this essential for someone who casually likes a couple of KISS tunes? No. Not at all. It’s a document, and documents ask a little more of you than greatest hits collections do. However, if you’re curious about what this band was before it became Super KISS just three years later, this is it.
Fifty years later, the proper live album between live albums is here. Time to rock and roll all night and party every day.
Be seeing you.
