KISS performing without makeup at Ace Frehley’s 1976 wedding, (upgrade)

Jeff Giles | Ultimate Classic Rock


The members of Kiss played their first official concert without their signature makeup in 1983, but they took the stage together au naturel years before that — at guitarist Ace Frehley‘s wedding in 1976.

The foursome’s brief reception set was captured for posterity in the 8mm footage above, which was initially uploaded to YouTube in 2012 but was more recently dug up by Dangerous Minds, whose report includes a passage from C.K. Lendt’s book Kiss and Sell: The Making of a Supergroup that helps set the stage for what you see in the clip.

Calling it “a huge affair at New York’s Americana hotel,” Lendt says the wedding — which culminated the long courtship between Frehley and his girlfriend Jeanette Trerotola — was somewhat complicated by the fact that her father and grandfather were high-ranking Teamster officials, and definitely not the sort of guys who were prone to putting up with rock stars’ flamboyant antics. As Lendt puts it, “One friend of the band, a gay musician who came dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket and knee-high boots, supposedly came close to inciting a riot when he congratulated members by giving them bear hugs and huge kisses.”

Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances and the vintage of the footage, it’s fairly low-fidelity stuff, but it should still prove fascinating viewing for Kiss fans who haven’t had many opportunities to watch the band perform in such a low-key setting. Unfortunately for the newlyweds, their domestic union wasn’t destined to last — although Frehley claimed to still be legally married to his former bride as recently as 2014, when he responded to a query about setting a date with his new fiancee by admitting, “I still have to get divorced.”