While Kiss's farewell tour might be winding its inexorable way towards a final show, some rare footage of the band playing live in 1975 has been uploaded to YouTube, giving many fans a new glimpse of the band during their rise to prominence.
The first video to appear was uploaded to an account belonging to a user by the name of Sam Loomis late last month, and featured an entire show from the Alive! Tour, filmed at the Capitol Centre in Largo, Maryland on November 30, 1975.
A week later, another video appeared, from one of Kiss's most famous shows: more than 30 minutes of the band's Dressed To Kill performance at the Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan, on May 16 the same year. The band's Alive! album was recorded at the Cobo Hall, and while footage of the set has been rumoured to exist for years, only a few seconds have been made public previously, on a VH1 Ultimate Albums documentary released in 2003.
A third video was uploaded earlier yesterday, and features almost two hours of black and white footage of Kiss in rehearsal in 1976, including close-up footage of drummer Peter Criss singing Beth without make-up.
Quite where the footage comes from is unclear, although the video blurbs credit Curt Gooch and Ross Bradley, both well-known members of the Kiss collectors' community. Gooch co-authored Kiss Alive Forever: The Complete Touring History and Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records. But whatever the source of the material is, fans are delighted.
"Thanks for the upload," comments one. "It's nice to know that after all these years there's still some incredible gems locked away waiting to be liberated!"
Another says: "I still can't get over how you found this show! It's crazy! I've only seen small portions of these songs live at Detroit in Kiss documentaries, but never the whole songs from this show until now. Thank you!", while a third adds, "This is awesome. Glad to see this get released instead of being hoarded by somebody for almost 50 years!"
Kiss fans? You should probably keep an eye on this.
