Nothin' to Lose by Ken Sharp

Author:Ken Sharp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

In February 1974, during KISS’s short Canadian tour, one of the band’s shows was held in a most peculiar venue: a school cafeteria. Returning to Canada a few months later, the band were once again confronted with performing at an unusual, less-than-rock-and-roll setting.

FRANK WEIPERT: I co-promoted three KISS shows in May of ’74 in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Lethbridge, all just a few months since they played their first shows in Canada. Savoy Brown and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band co-headlined and KISS was the opening act. People that had seen them a few months before showed up to cheer them on and KISS were very well received. So we get to Lethbridge, Alberta, and arrive at the Exhibition Hall only to find that it was used for one thing and that was exhibiting livestock. It was a barn, basically.

MIKE McGURL: Boy, was that a weird venue [laughs]. It smelled like a cattle barn; the awful smell of manure was in the air. It was like a stable for cows and horses, with dirt floors and sawdust.

FRANK WEIPERT: About a thousand kids showed up and the band played well. But it was a strange gig. Lethbridge, Alberta, is the closest you’d come to a Texas small town. We got back to the hotel and the next morning the band and I were sitting in the coffee shop of the Holiday Inn. We were planning to fly up to Calgary on a small commuter airline. All of a sudden the local police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, are in the hotel. The hotel had called the police about a disturbance from one of the bands. And the culprit wasn’t KISS but Savoy Brown, who decided to do a number like the Who and toss the TV out into the swimming pool. We were guilty by association, being in the same hotel as the two other bands. Everyone was put up against the wall and questioned by the police. The local airline bans us and refuses to take our passage up to Calgary, which was a forty-five-minute flight. We found ourselves having to scramble that morning to get rental cars to escape out of Lethbridge alive. Thank you, Savoy Brown [laughs].

MIKE McGURL: Once we played an outdoor show at a drive-in theater in Alaska [June 2, 1974]. It was held at night but it felt like the daytime because during the summer in Alaska it never got dark. Savoy Brown was the headliner and Kim Simmonds, the guitar player for Savoy Brown, was drunk out of his mind to the point where he was totally incoherent and couldn’t function.

KIM SIMMONDS: I was drunk as a skunk and having trouble standing. I was under a lot of strain at the time because of my heavy workload so this was a rare occurrence for me to be that intoxicated onstage. I could barely manage to stand upright and kept falling down. The guys in KISS were on the side of the stage and kept coming out to push me back up [laughs].

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