From: Steve Haynie
The Atlanta KISS concert was better than expected. My friends and I arrived about and hour before showtime. At the T-shirt stands we saw Ace and Peter large face shirts like those at KISSONLINE, but no Gene and Paul shirts.

Skid Row played a half hour set, and the new singer sounded good to me. Some people have to get over the fact that this is a new Skid Row and accept it like we did with Eric Carr replacing Peter Criss. The new guy mentioned being in the band for only three months. After the concert Skid Row was playing The Masquerade, a club in Atlanta.

Between Skid Row and Ted Nugent, I saw people walking around the stands selling T-shirts with KISS on the front and on the back there was a picture of Ted Nugent. I suspect they were bootleg shirts, but the people selling them were operating right in front of all the security people. One of the sellers had a laminated badge, but anyone can make one of those. It seemed suspicious to me.

Ted Nugent played about an hour. The man is always consistent in putting on a good show. His partner for many years, Derek St. Holmes, lives in the Atlanta area so Ted had him on stage for the song Stranglehold. It was great hearing the right vocals on that song and the harmony guitar parts. Derek was wearing a "got kiss?" T-shirt. Seeing the Ted Nugent portion of the show was worth the ticket price to me.

KISS put on a show that lasted around two hours, maybe a few minutes longer. They started off the show playing Detroit Rock City as they were being lowered to the stage. There weren't any major glitches during this show like on earlier shows. Everything seemed to work right. If there were any problems, I didn't notice anything other than a lighting error during Ace's solo.

Early on I noticed there was a box of tissues on Gene's mic stand. He used them to wipe sweat off of his face frequently and he was sweating much more than the rest of the band from the start. I suspect that Gene was ill for the evening, but it really didn't show in the way he performed. He sang everything without any trouble, stuck out his tongue and flirted with the girls, and moved around like he normally does. If I'm right and Gene really was sick, he didn't let anyone else on stage take up the slack for him.

Ace started singing the second verse of Shock Me and so Paul stepped up and sang beside him to get that first verse working. They both laughed about it. During Ace's solo he didn't play any parts of older KISS songs like what's been reported on previous shows. Ace was dead-on with everything he played on his guitar.

Peter sang backup on nearly everything. His solo part of the show was short, but definitely entertaining. Beth sounded beautiful. He was happy and playing well the whole night.

Paul looked good! He was all over the stage putting on a great show. When he sang Psycho Circus the melody didn't follow the recorded version. The song sounded great, but if you tried to sing along you would have been lost. Whatever was running through Pauls mind during that song gave us a new version for the evening. In the Black Diamond intro Paul sang I Still Love You right up to the part where the chorus should have been and then dropped back into Black Diamond.

Overall I think Atlanta got a great KISS concert. Having seen the Alive/Worldwide and Psycho Circus tours multiple times I'd say this show was one of the better shows. My only real complaint is that the set list could have been altered a bit more. It would have been great to hear I Stole Your Love as an encore and more songs from Rock And Roll Over. Aside from that I feel I got my money's worth on this show.

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