KISS ‘77
We interrupt the regularly-scheduled coverage of the collapse of civilization to bring you this Extreme TBT: Forty years ago tonight: KISS at the Seattle Center Coliseum...
Not surprisingly, this concert was the first for a lot of dudes I’ve known. Like for so many white middle-aged men of middle-class upbringing, KISS was my introduction to rock music and my dominant social and artistic reference until I got to college and discovered how much more there was.
I’d barely missed them on the ‘77 tour. But the subsequent years’ biding, while agonizing, had given me a chance to immerse in the band-- to really go to school. By November 1979, I not only knew every song and lyric, but all the members’ birthdays & birthnames, favorite foods, musical influences and accent colors. I could draw pictures of KISS all day and often did. I could forge their autographs and I practiced drawing what they’d look like without their makeup.
There was no way for me to have known that the band was already well beyond its creative peak by the time I arrived at the party. I didn’t have a crystal ball, get off my fucking back already. It is amusing to consider now, however, that this Dynasty tour was billed at the time as The Return of KISS. It was still the ‘70s! No way could I have been expected to know the band would spend most of the next four decades returning. I did recognize-- in my own soft, pink heart late at night in the solitude of my own bed-- that this new record wasn’t as good as Love Gun. But I wore it out just the same…
In a creative outburst considered productive even by the busy standards of the day, KISS had produced seven studio records, two live double records, a sprawling greatest hits collection and the ambitious set of four coordinated solo albums between 1974 and the turn of the decade. Add to this the made-for-TV movie, the Marvel comic book and all the lunchboxes and action figures, model kits, wastebaskets, sleeping bags, transistor radios and pinball machines—and this was one hard-working, high-grossing act. Rock bands these days (whatever that term even means in the modern entertainment economy) aren’t usually allowed to make even two records in six years. This was a different era. The vinyl only weighed 90 grams and it cost $6. The concert tickets were only 8.
We were just kids, we didn’t know how it was supposed to work. Dennis Gregory (not a flying toy) and I camped out overnight at Mervyn’s in Burien to buy tickets to a festival seating show that would never even sell out. Then we waited, listening to Dressed to Kill as summer slouched away unnoticed.
At last the day of the show arrived. Instead of driving us to school in the station wagon, Dennis’ mom (with my own parents’ reluctant blessing) dropped us off at Seattle Center, near the Jetsonesque arena originally constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair (what is now Key Arena was less than 20 years old at the time).
The crowd we encountered once reaching the Coliseum was a bit unsettling. Dennis & I were reasonably sheltered suburban orchestra geeks in the very early stages of exploring any semblance of independence. We weren’t tripping balls and weren’t even drinking vodka and orrrange juice. What I remember about this particularly sunny late-autumn morning is that most of the other kids milling around were.
We got in line. There were only about 50 people in front of us, but by the time the doors opened a couple of hours after dark, we were several hundred deep-- back closer to the fountain. Some of our line-mates didn’t start moving once the traffic finally did, sprawled out in puddles of barf in the mulch beneath the great Elms. Those guys will have their own versions of the day’s events, surely posting on social media tonight as well, in observance of this important anniversary.
Again—we didn’t know what we were supposed to do. No one had briefed us. Once inside the arena, we ran directly to the stage which as it turns out WAS the exact correct thing to do. We were two rows from the fence. But being so green, we quickly second-guessed our position. Maybe we should get a killer seat instead. We just didn’t know! Eventually we began ebbing backward against the fierce tide rushing in from the front doors, the vomitty Southern Comfort breath of the each new wave washing over us until eventually we were standing in the middle of the main floor, out of the thick and closer to the sound board. We went to the souvenir table.
The Rockets were a band from Detroit. They spent the 1970s serving at the pleasure of a variety of headliners, kind of the equivalent of a career minor league baseball player. I vividly recall during their opener, with the sound up loud, and the stage lights pulsing down that this is what it’s really like. This is how live music looks and sounds. How perfectly shitty it was! The sound was muddy and sightlines were poor and the band looked tired and the whole huge building smelled like burning soap on a rope. I looked at Dennis trying to figure out if he was feeling the same disappointment. I tried asking, but he couldn’t hear me. The Rockets closed with Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well” and left the stage to deafening indifference, most of the 12,000 kids having come to see something else entirely.
My eyes burned. The houselights between bands were harsh, the air sticky with smoke. We didn’t know what to do in between acts. We’d forfeited our squares of concrete in the pit and all the decent seats were taken by now too. We didn’t smoke or drink and we didn’t know how to pick up chicks. We went back to the souvenirs.
I’d spent the past two years of my life imagining this moment, the moment when I finally would get to not only see and hear the only rock group I liked, but to actually commune with KISS—to wordlessly discourse semi-personally with Ace, Gene, Peter and Paul. I’d spent so much time manifesting what this experience would be like—finally witnessing their movements in three dimensions and actually seeing them see me. I wanted to be more than a spectator-- I wanted to be an acknowledged participant. I had gained admission to the Temple and it was finally time to at least worship, if not partake in an unholy sacrifice at the altar of disposable, self-conscious increasingly commercially processed rock and roll.
The show, of course, was just okay. Gene flew and Paul called us See-a-tal. But Ace looked bored and Peter very tired. Since I knew all the songs, my mind could color in the voids left by a bassy PA booming in a concrete sports arena. Since I knew the faces and the costumes, my mind could sharpen what detail was blurred from a distance of 300’. Since I’d come this far and invested so much, my mind could clean up in post what the actual moment lacked. In all, though, it was a fairly disappointing realization. It’s never as good as you imagine, if you imagine it too much. Romanticism is romantic-- unless you at some point are forced to face down True Reality, in which case a good stiff drink really does come in handy…
But not that night. Not on Wednesday November 21, 1979. That night we settled for a weird setlist and an overpriced program, a handful of confetti and a poignant memory. Patrick McDonald trashed the show in the next day’s Seattle Times and I don’t even remember who came to Thanksgiving dinner. I got better at enjoying rock concerts as I grew older, and in fact got to be something of an expert eventually. I’ve attended hundreds of shows by now, maybe a thousand. I’ve even seen KISS another half-dozen times, although they would never be as authentic as they were that night, with all-original members and five weeks remaining in the 1970s. I was there, of that much I can be certain. The time—where does it go?
