Nothin' To Lose The Making Of Kiss (1972 1975)

Description

Nothin' to Lose: the Making of Kiss (1972-1975) chronicles for the first time the crucial formative years of the legendary rock band Kiss, culminating with the groundbreaking success of their classic 1975 album Alive! and the smash single Rock and Roll All Nite, a song that nearly four decades later remains one of the band's most enduring anthems. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, the book offers a captivating and intimate fly-on-the-wall account of their launch, charting the struggles and ultimate victories that led them to the threshold of superstardom. Constructed as an oral history, the book includes original interviews with Paul, Gene, Ace, and Peter, as well as producers, engineers, management, record company personnel, roadies, club owners, booking agents, concert promoters, costume, stage and art designers, rock photographers, publicists, and key music journalists. Many of Kiss' musical contemporaries from the time, most of whom shared concert bills with the band on their early tours, also lend their perspective via new interviews; these include Bob Seger, Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent as well as members of Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Rush, Slade, Blue Oyster Cult, Mott the Hoople, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Styx, Raspberries, James Gang, New York Dolls, Iggy and the Stooges, The Ramones, Suzi Quatro, Savoy Brown, Argent, Nazareth, Uriah Heep, and Wishbone Ash among others. The end result is an indelible and irresistible portrait of a band on the rise and the music scene they changed forever.

Reviews

"A fascinating chronicle of the construction of a multimedia phenomenon."--Publishers Weekly

Author description

Ken Sharp is the author of Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy (Gallery/VH1 Books, 2010), KISS: Behind the Mask (Warner Books, 2003), and numerous other books. He lives in Los Angeles. Known as rock's iconic ultimate showmen and larger than life co-founders of hard rock supergroup KISS, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons founded the band in the early '70s. Since then, KISS has gone on to sell over 80 million albums and to perform over 2,000 shows around the world. The band is still touring and performing today.