It started not with a bang, but with a whimper. As bassist Gene Simmons remembers it, there were “more people on stage than in the audience” on January 30, 1973 when Kiss played their first New York show, at a club called Coventry on Queens Boulevard and 47th Street in Queens. But, having initially bonded over a shared vision to be “the band we never saw on stage… The Beatles on steroids”, the four young musicians were determined to seize their moment, and had prepped accordingly.
At the group’s Manhattan rehearsal space on 10 East 23rd Street – “a rat-infested fire trap”, an unsentimental Simmons remembers it – vocalist/guitarist Paul Stanley and drummer Peter Criss had sewn eye-catching ‘glitter pants’ stage costumes for the four band members, and Simmons and Stanley later ducked into a local ‘adult emporium’ to purchase studded BDSM collars to complete their glam-rock streetgang look.
