Kissing Time

I stopped by my friend Jeff's house the other day, and he had a couple extra pieces of vinyl that he offered me. The covers were a little beat up, but the vinyl was mint, so I took advantage of a couple of free records. 70's rock. I love it.

I worshipped Kiss as a kid. Well, maybe that isn't quite right. I was probably around 7 or 8 years old, and I was really only familiar with the song Beth. I held "Kiss parties" in my room (complete with constuction paper chains for decoration), and I remember being facinated with Kiss on TV shows and in the movies and comics. I guess I didn't worship Kiss, so much as I was in awe of the Kiss image. By the time I started to seriously get into music, Kiss had dabbled in disco, and I no longer had interest in checking out anything they had done. I was more interested in AC/DC and Judas Priest, and Kiss was no where close to my musical radar with the Lick It Up album.

Fast forward 20 years or so, and on Jeff's recommendation I finally open my mind and check out the first three Kiss albums. I don't know what I was expecting, but there was no Beth, no disco, and no weak 80's rock. This was just straight forward 70's Hard Rock. Hell yeah.

For the next few years, I didn't dare break out of my Kiss comfort zone, and I just stuck with those first three studio albums. Somewhere along the line, my Mom's boyfriend gave me his vinyl copy of Destroyer, and I found myself forced to check it out. It started out promising enough with Detroit Rock City, but the song Great Expectations irritated me so much, it took me another year to bother with the album again and begin to appreciate it. I've slowly branched out with Love Gun, and now, thanks to Jeff, I've got a copy of Rock and Roll Over as well. I can now appreciate and enjoy those first six studio albums for the guitar driven 70's Hard Rock that it is.

The other album that Jeff sent my way was UFO's 1974 album, Phenomenon. While not the band's first album, it is there first with guitarist Michael Schenker, and is my starting point for the band's discography.

When Jeff was giving me these albums, he slid each one out of the record sleeve, checked the label on the vinyl, and mentioned that they were first pressings. It got me interested in the different designs that record companies would use for the labels on vinyl. I geeked out and took a couple pictures to see different labels that both Casablanca and Chrysalis had used.

I'm not going to go over the top, and collect the different labels for this stuff, but I do find this stuff cool.