Very cool and hard to find poster.  Bruce signed this for us in a private signing in Evansville, IN in April 2022.   He signed these in blue paint pen.  Comes with our Certificate of Authenticity. Measures 24 x 30 inches.

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I don’t want to blow your mind or anything, but Kiss didn’t break out because of their albums. It’s not that the music is woeful or anything, it’s perfectly serviceable power-pop with a little bit of hard rock frisk to it. There were countless bands playing similar sorts of party-time rock ‘n’ roll when they formed in 1973 and continued to do so for the entire decade. No, if you know the slightest thing about Kiss, you know that it was their live shows that really marked them out as something different.

Because if you’re not an obsessed Kiss-a-holic, what you may not realise is that the comic book villain getups, Earth-rattling pyrotechnics and extended solos didn’t come with success. The platonic ideal of Kiss is of the band in front of a packed out arena with Gene Simmons flying into the audience on a harness, shooting sparks from his nipples. However, the genuinely cool thing about Kiss is that they didn’t wait until they were in arenas to do that cool stuff.

They were absolutely a part of the band from the very beginning. It’s probably the most genuinely exciting thing about the whole band, the fact that for years, they were able to cram a demented Broadway nightmare’s worth of special effects into the bars and clubs of New York. Needless to say, it got them a die-hard local following. The one thing it didn’t translate to was any success on the radio.

Which kind of makes sense. Spectacle is one of the things that radio can’t provide, and at the time, taking away Kiss’s spectacle was like taking away Tyson Fury’s boxing. They’re literally not capable of anything else. However, you don’t take an act like Kiss into rock clubs in the 1970s without ambition. The band was dead set on being the biggest in the world, so if something needed to change about them to achieve that ambition, they were going to do it.

How did Kiss get their music on the radio?

Mainly because, as you can probably imagine, Kiss was an expensive band to run. It may have been ludicrously exciting to see a band set up pyro machines in venues only a little bigger than a bar, but there’s a reason why most save those stunts for arenas. If Kiss wanted a future, they needed a radio hit, and none of their early albums were translating to radio.

However, as drummer Peter Criss explained to the documentary series Metal Evolution, they eventually figured out that the secret lay not in adjusting their sound for radio consumption, but putting their live show on the radio. He says: “We were so frustrated that we could not get our sound on vinyl. We had a lot of other bands, all these English bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who… they did do live albums and they sounded phenomenal. Why can’t we do this?”

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“This week, we crack open one of the most explosive, chaotic, and mysterious chapters in rock history — the story of Vinnie Vincent. The man who not only saved KISS at their most desperate hour, but also became the unpredictable fuse that blew the band apart from within. From his arrival during the Creatures Of The Night era, shredding solos like a man possessed, to reshaping KISS’ sound with Lick It Up, Vincent was both a savior and a storm.

As the Egyptian Ankh Warrior, his glam-metal reinvention electrified fans — but behind the scenes, ego clashes, lawsuits, and demands for control turned his tenure into legend. He was fired, rehired, fired again, and vanished into a fog of lawsuits, missed comebacks, and urban myths. His Vinnie Vincent Invasion cranked glam metal into overdrive, but imploded in spectacular fashion. While his bandmates struck gold with Slaughter, Vincent became rock’s most infamous enigma — brilliant, volatile, and impossible to pin down. This is the untold story of the guitar genius who rebuilt KISS, then walked away from everything — and left the world wondering what really happened.”

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