In honor and memory  of Paul Daniel “Ace” Frehley, April 27, 1951-October 16, 2025

Francisco Albanese

Kiss is one of those bands whose audience knows exactly what to expect at their concerts: pyrotechnics, guitar smashing, light shows, blood, choreographed moves, and so on. But once upon a time, there was a band that had not yet managed to achieve success with their studio albums, and so their live performances had to be especially captivating to make up for the success they had not yet attained. Thus, in September 1975, Kiss released their first live album, Alive!, featuring songs from their first three records, though mostly from the self-titled debut. At the time, Alive! received harsh reviews from the specialized press; nevertheless, it managed to capture the attention of the public, who rushed to fill every seat during the supporting tour for the newly released live record.

Central to this tour are the dates when the band performed at Detroit’s Cobo Hall, on January 25, 26, and 27, 1976. Of all the live and video recordings that exist of the band, there is probably none that surpasses the second night at Cobo Hall. (At this point, the importance of online video platforms must be acknowledged, as they have made it possible to circulate material that, twenty or thirty years ago, would have been nearly impossible to find.) Dressed in the same costumes featured on the cover of Alive!, Kiss performed almost all the same songs from the live album (omitting “Got to Choose,” “Watchin’ You,” and “Rock Bottom”), though the band appears far more comfortable on the second night, unlike the first, where the instrumental execution was solid, but the overall performance lacked the same intensity that marked the night of January 26. The feverish and disproportionate paroxysm displayed in songs such as “Black Diamond” (with Peter Criss singing in the most heart-wrenching way ever recorded from him) and “Let Me Go Rock ‘N’ Roll” is the ultimate reflection of what rock truly is.

Without the visual extravagance or technological spectacle that Kiss would later become famous for over the next four decades, the members of the band appear frenzied, violent, tireless—immersed in a two-hour ecstasy where the songs follow one another almost without pause (indeed, they are never seen standing still). The band’s physical energy and emotional delivery are remarkable, especially in Peter Criss and Ace Frehley. One discussion that is hardly worth having is over the spirit of Kiss: Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley are, and always will be, the architects of what is rational, logical, and transcendent in Kiss. Yet the dimension tied directly to creative force—that is, the animic element—is inevitably embodied in Space Ace and The Catman: both are possessed by an ecstatic trance, personifying somatosemiotic manifestations, torn between the execution of the song (that is, the ritual) and the celebration of the ecstasy that allows for improvisation and the destruction of the structures conceived by Stanley and Simmons:
“. . . the type of trance that first occurred in connection with a religious experience had a different quality. It presented the awakening human mind with the capability to intentionally leave the common reality and enter another reality, the abode of the spirits. To distinguish it from other types of trance, we call this special altered state of waking consciousness “ecstatic trance.” (Goodman & Nauwald, 2003).

In that sense, what happens Cobo Hall is not simply a concert but the reactivation of an ancestral ecstatic mechanism. The pulse of the drums, the roaring of amplifiers, and the synchronized movement of thousands of bodies are the modern counterparts of those rhythmic stimuli around 210 beats per minute that open the gates of the other reality (Goodman & Nauwald, 2003) —the horse that we ride into the alternate reality.

Peter Criss’s drumming acts as an instrument of induction, while Frehley’s contorted posture and tremulous hands embody what Goodman called “ritual body postures”, through which the body itself becomes a tool to alter consciousness.

After the performance of “Cold Gin,” for some reason Ace Frehley plays a guitar that appears to be (if my eyesight does not deceive me) a Veleno Original for “Rock And Roll All Nite,” before returning to his classic Gibson Les Paul Deluxe for “Let Me Go Rock ‘N’ Roll”—probably one of the greatest rock performances of all time, comparable only to The Who’s rendition of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (one of Kiss’s formative influences) at Shepperton Studios on May 25, 1978.

The execution of “Let Me Go Rock ‘N’ Roll” (following an unnecessary and rather ridiculous entrance to the stage wearing robes) is so furious and incendiary that Gene Simmons’s mistake—beginning to sing the opening lines of “Rock And Roll All Nite” instead of the song actually being played—goes almost unnoticed. The bass lines, performed flawlessly, fit perfectly with Peter Criss’s finest musical moment, who, after 1976, gradually declined due to excess and never again reached the level he displayed in the mid-’70s. It is worth remembering that following Kiss’s reunion, the weakest performer was always Peter Criss; compare the drumming at Cobo Hall ‘76 with his performance in Kiss Symphony: Alive IV.

Ace Frehley, whose talent has not diminished through the years, appears to be in an altered state throughout the entire concert, immersed in a kind of electric trance, letting improvisations flow through his guitar, culminating in the final song, where multiple solos unfold while Paul Stanley maintains a rhythmic backdrop, allowing Space Ace to devote himself entirely to his craft. Ace—merged as a single entity with his guitar—rises above the band, giving free rein to his creativity. As Goodman suggests, the body becomes a vehicle of the spirit’s movement, expressing its presence through vibration and rhythm. This allows for a greater spontaneity compared to the solos recorded on the albums, which fail to capture the “possession” experienced during the live performance. In the terms of Eliade (1958), one could say that the concert “reactualizes mythical time,” transforming the stage into a sacred space where chaos becomes form through the violence of sound.

As if all the foregoing were not enough to establish Cobo Hall, January 26, 1976, as the greatest Kiss performance of all time, it must also be mentioned that The Starchild sets aside his Flying V during the final part of the concert, taking up another guitar for the closing chords of “Let Me Go Rock ‘N’ Roll,” and then—covered in confetti—proceeds to his first onstage guitar-destruction ritual in the name of Kiss, emulating his hero Pete Townshend.

This act, far from being mere spectacle, mirrors the sacrificial moment of dissolution and renewal present in all ecstatic states. The shattering of the guitar is thus the symbolic death that allows for rebirth, the culmination of a trance that—like the ancient shamanic journeys—returns energy to the community through an act of destruction that recreates the world.  A gesture that, in Bataille’s sense, releases accumulated energy back into the world through a creative act of destruction.

Cobo Hall was not just a concert—it was a Dionysian ritual enacted through electricity and distortion, a ceremony of ecstatic embodiment in which Kiss became the modern medium of an ancient human impulse: to lose oneself in rhythm, to become one with the sound, and to find, in that disintegration of the self, the brief and luminous flash of transcendence, for, Bataille (1936) says, “in those disappeared worlds it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy.”

References

Bataille, G. (1936). The Sacred Conspiracy.

Eliade, M. (1958). Rites and Symbols of Initiation. New York: Harper & Row.

Goodman, F. D., & Nauwald, N. (2003). Ecstatic Trance: New Ritual Body Postures. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company.