"Rock and Roll All Nite"

Kiss

album cover

And, as Homer Simpson Once Said, Party Every Other Day

"You drive us wild, we'll drive you crazy." That's one of several insanely catchy refrains on this defining Kiss hit. It's also the karmic law of live rock, and for a time in the middle 1970s nobody worked it better than Kiss. The four remarkably average musicians from New York wore superhero costumes and painted their faces (in a style they went so far as to trademark) to look like horror-film castoffs. The band understood that if music alone wouldn't drive listeners wild, they'd have to haul out some high-concept theatrics. Kiss shows channeled the alienated roar of metal into cartoonish poses and garish pyrotechnics, several involving the distinctively protruding tongue of bassist Gene Simmons. The music itself was almost always secondary—except, that is, when the band was playing a song like "Rock and Roll All Nite."

Written by Simmons and guitarist Paul Stanley, the song was a response to a recordcompany executive who heard the third Kiss album Dressed to Kill and decided the band needed an anthem. He got one. "Rock and Roll All Nite" is the frenzy of great rock and roll in highly concentrated form. From the first note, Kiss seemed poised to erupt. The "definitive" version of the song is on the band's commercial breakthrough Alive!, from 1975. There's some debate about how much post-concert "sweetening" was involved in Alive!—Simmons says in his autobiography that the band couldn't have spent much time, because the label was nearly broke at the time—but the end result is undeniable. The crowd's already wild when the song starts up. And Kiss, true to its word, drives them crazy.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1975, Casablanca (Reissued 1997, Mercury)
Appears On: Dressed to Kill; Alive!
Next Stop: Thin Lizzy: Live and Dangerous
After That: Various Artists: Dazed and Confused
Book Page: 429

Buy this Recording

Share this page: