The latest archive footage to emerge from The Midnight Special's recently launched YouTube channel takes the viewer back to 1975, and Kiss's second appearance on the show. The clip comes from a show broadcast on November 28 of that year, and finds the quartet performing an epic, seven-minute version of She.
Kiss has first appeared in the show in July 1975, when they played Deuce and Black Diamond from the previous year's debut album. Four months later they were back, playing Deuce for a second time and She, from third album Dressed to Kill. It's a version which is three minutes longer than the studio cut, there's a small amount of pyro, and Eddie Van Halen fans may be interested in Ace Frehley's guitar at the 5'50" mark, where he engages in some nifty two-handed tapping.
"Gene discovered Van Halen, and I remember Eddie Van Halen sitting in the pit watching me tap at Madison Square Garden," Frehley told Guitar World's Dear Guitar Hero column. "I'm not saying Eddie got it from me, but I definitely didn't get it from him. I just picked that up over the years from experimentation."
"Most bands who appeared on television shows in the seventies opted for the safety of recorded music and lip-synching," wrote Frehley in his 2011 memoir No Regrets. "Not Kiss. Same thing when we went on NBC's The Midnight Special. Kiss was a live band, a spectacle. There was no point in faking it."
The November 28, 1975 edition of The Midnight Special was hosted by Australian-American singer and actress Helen Reddy, and also featured live performances from Barry Manilow and Frankie Valli.
