 "Alive II"
was released on October 24, 1977 and shipped Platinum.
Eddie Kramer, who
produced the first Alive album, Rock and Roll Over & Love Gun was
brought in to produce "Alive II".
The Evolution of KISS book.
The original vinyl
copies of "Alive II" came with tattoos and a booklet (pictured
above) featuring live photos of the band. The image of the band that
adorned the center spread of the booklet has a serious 'photo retouching'
error. The error was not corrected in the remastered CD version that includes
all the photos as part of the CD booklet. If you look carefully
you will see a part of Paul's guitar headstock floating in the air around
the mic stand.
A couple of the songs
were not played live. According to Gene Simmons in Kiss-Behind the Mask, "Some of the songs we didn't do live, they were some afternoon
recordings done at sound check with "Hard Luck Woman" and "Tomorrow
and Tonight."
Ace Frehley only
played guitar on one of the four studio cuts on side four of the two record
set. Ace plays on his own "Rocket Ride", which also happened
to be the most popular of the studio cuts.
"Rocket Ride" peaked at number 39 on Billboard's Top 100, making it KISS's seventh Top 40 hit.
Bob Kulick played
lead guitar on the other three of the four studio tracks.
According to producer
Eddie Kramer an entire live album was recorded in Japan at Budakon, but
the band and Eddie didn't feel the performances were good enough, so the
album was never released officially. This was mostly due to the band concentrating
on jumping around stage and putting on a show. Because of this, sometimes
the music would suffer a bit.
"Rocket Ride"
was originally written for Ace's solo record, but the band needed material
for the fourth side of "Alive II" so Ace kicked in this song.
The song was written by Ace and Sean Delaney. Ace wrote the riff, Delaney
came up with the lyrics and vocal melodies.
There exists
a promo version of this album which includes "Take Me", "Do You Love Me",
and "Hooligan" on the track listing of the back cover. This is extremely
rare with only around 50 copies making it into circulation, though in
addition to the US version, some Mexican copies also have a similar misprint.
Due to the similarity of the lightning bolt "ss" in the Kiss logo to the Nazi "SS", the logo was changed to avoid controversy. After 1979 most of the band's album covers and merchandise in Germany had modified versions of the logo, in which the "SS" looks like a backwards "ZZ." (pictured left) |
