Crowbar vocalist/guitarist Kirk Windstein gets all starry-eyed at KISS’ Alive! and denounces the myth that it’s not really a live album.
Kirk: Probably the album that had the biggest influence on me is the first KISS Alive! record. Ace Frehley made me want to play guitar, and when that record came out I was 10 years old ,and that’s also right around the time when Destroyer came out and I became an absolute KISS fanatic. I’m 49 years old, so I was born in 1965, and I would say from late ’75 to ’79 my whole life was nothing but KISS, and that’s the truth.
Did you paint yourself up and have all the posters on the wall, the whole deal?
Oh, the whole nine yards, fuck yeah. My entire room was posters from floor to ceiling, and the entire ceiling, there was not one space; you could not see any wall at all. Not all it was KISS, you know, but I’d say a good 75% of it was KISS. I still have some of those original KISS posters hanging up in our apartment, one from ’76 and one from ’78, so they’re in pretty rough shape because they’re so fucking old, but…
There’s a rumour that the album isn’t actually live.
Um, I saw a show about the making of the album with Bob Ezrin and how he mixed it and all of that. It’s live, but… the only band that makes real live albums is Motörhead, where they fuck up and they don’t even care. But any other live album you ever listen to, there’s tweaks on it. They showed Ezrin playing the harmonies on vocals, like “Black Diamond,” for instance, and he showed what the real thing was, and then what it sounded like when he patched it up. And it’s a really just a thing where when you’re watching the show you’re caught up in the visuals and the high volume and the vibe of the show, so it’s really difficult to make a live record that’s truly a live record and have it sound great, where no one made a mistake. That’s pretty much impossible, you know? Maybe a band like Rush could pull it off, but most normal bands will just go in and patch up a few things. So it’s a live record, they just patched up a few things.
Do you still listen to it regularly?
I haven’t listened to it in awhile, but I’m actually about to get that down-tuned on iTunes. I’ve been talking about it so much lately and I met Ace at the Revolver Magazine Golden Gods Awards and he’s actually on our label with his new album, so I really went on a KISS kick lately.
-Jason Schreurs
Crowbar‘s Symmetry in Black is out now on eOne Music.
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