Kiss
"Rock And Roll All Nite" from Dressed To Kill
When I was a kid, I was one of the biggest marks in the world for Kiss. I’d read about them in my precious copies of Creem every month and I couldn’t wait to track down each album as it was released. First of all, Kiss came from New York City, which to a teenage rock fan stuck in the hell of rural suburban Nashville, seemed to be a strange, exotic land that was about as far away as you could get from Tennessee and still be in America. Kiss haunted the same whispered-about NYC clubs as the Dictators and the New York Dolls, two other fave bands of mine.
Most importantly, with their 1975 album Dressed To Kill, Kiss managed to express my angst-ridden teenage philosophy within two minutes and 49 seconds of perfect Socratic logic: "I want to rock and roll all nite, and party every day." Not exactly the stuff of literary genius, but it said what needed to be said. Sure, I’d tasted from rock’s buffet of cheap thrills before. "This ain’t rock & roll, this is genocide!" "Born to be wild." "School’s out for summer!" But none of them hit me like "Rock And Roll All Nite," the last song on Dressed To Kill.
Whether going to school or to work on the weekends, I listened to the song every morning before leaving home during my last semester of high school. If I went out on Friday or Saturday night, I cued up Kiss, and by the time that I crapped out of college and went on a "Christmas vacation" that I’ve yet to return from, I’d wore that poor album’s grooves to a nub. The funny thing was, although I grabbed onto the song’s chorus for dear sweet life as an expression of my personal credo, I was really doing very little partying at the time. School, graduation, girls and a sorry semester of college mostly spent reading Abbie Hoffman books and listening to classical music in the school library took time away from my non-existent "party schedule."
Of course, after busting out of my scholarship-fed opportunity at a higher education and going to work full-time in a greasy kitchen, I shelved my Kiss records and moved onto other new sounds – Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen and Peter Frampton became the soundtrack of my young adult life. We didn’t exactly "rock and roll all nite," just to about 11:00 PM, ‘cause it was back to work at 6:00 in the morning. As for "party every day," well, it was damn hard to do working 60+ hours a week with a single day off to cram most of your drinking and amourous activities into. But I was young, making a couple hundred a week with only a $105 car payment and $150 in rent and utilities to pay; besides, Frampton’s live album lured plenty of teenage girls to my "bachelor pad" and if it wasn’t exactly Gene Simmons’ or Paul Stanley’s life, it was good enough for me.
Hearing "Rock And Roll All Nite" on the car radio these days brings back fond memories of those days thirty years ago. I managed to make it into middle age with most of my liver, some of my hair and a little of my sanity left. As for "rock and roll all nite, and party every day" well, I’m still in bed by 11:00 PM every night, and every day’s a party that you don’t wake up with some new ache, pain or muscle strain. Growing old ain’t for sissies and if my life still isn’t that of the original Kiss foursome, it’s still better than Vinnie Vincent’s, isn’t it?
(Click on the album cover to go to Amazon.com)
