I have a weakness for KISS that has come back to salt my palette every ten years since I first started listening to them three decades ago.

(And before I continue, let me insert here: Whatever you think of KISS, this particular performance of “Cold Gin” is close to a Platonic Form for a live hard rock show. One could write an entire treatise on authority by restricting oneself only to Gene Simmons’ punctuative kicks.)

When I was about ten, a grade school friend gave me the first KISS album at a birthday party, and I was aghast at what I thought was the satanic cover, showing the four band members’ faces emerging from total darkness in full and — especially for a suburban kid — frightening makeup.

I rediscovered them around age twenty while I was in college and sinking happily into glam rock of the late 80s, like Ratt, Winger, Whitesnake, Kingdom Come, and I felt that these bands, in their foppish testosteronicity, reminded me of the delightful glam pop-rock sensibility that KISS had inaugurated.

Then, when I was about thirty, I frequented the Someday Cafe in Davis Square, Somerville (Massachusetts), while I was in graduate school. Someday (now, sadly, closed) was a hard-core coffee joint catering to the pierced, tattooed, and otherwise “alternative” college and young adult set in the shadow of Harvard and Tufts. Nothing was really “clean,” and the bathrooms featured graffiti from floor to ceiling that would amuse any moderately educated person for hours. I remember Radiohead’s “OK Computer” being played again and again. And the owner had placed every KISS album ever made on a ledge near the ceiling running the perimeter of the cafe. There wasn’t much KISS played, that I recall, but those albums made some kind of statement about the okayness of the glam character of that late ’90s moment, and so I checked them out again for a while.

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