Inside The KISS Off The Soundboard Series

“You can’t just throw stuff out, you have to make it special, so people say, ‘I love this!’ If you can do that, you’re on to a winner.” KISS manager Doc McGhee knows a thing or two about what the band’s devoted fanbase, The KISS Army, want from their heroes. McGhee became KISS’ manager back in 1995, a pivotal time for the band. With McGhee’s guidance, KISS began to embrace their past – their “remasking” and reunion tour paved the way for a massively successful few decades of sell-out tours and huge-selling, back-to-basics albums.

Of course, KISS fans have long been spoilt for choice with all manner of band-branded memorabilia, from Pez dispensers to coffins. McGhee estimates that over 3,000 items of official KISS merchandise have been released worldwide over the years. The manager sees it as an integral part of KISS’ appeal, “I’ve had some of the biggest artists of all time come into my office. They’ll sit there and see a KISS snow globe, pick it up and say, ‘Can I have that?’ There’s just something about KISS and collectibles.”

Order KISS: Off The Soundboard: Live in San Antonio 12/3/1985 now.

The Off The Soundboard series

In recent years though, KISS’ archival music has been a major focus. McGhee and the band have started plundering the KISS archive for the Off The Soundboard series of live albums. The releases have delighted fans with their no-frills, back-to-basics approach. Tommy Thayer (AKA Spaceman, official KISS member since 2002) agrees, “We’re famous for packaging, but in this case, you want to present something in a form where it’s more of a bootleg – it’s not a big production in terms of the package. I think people like that the Off The Soundboard series is raw and rough, it definitely brings the focus down on the music and the recording itself.”

How Thayer became a member of KISS is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. A lifelong fan of the group, the Portland, Oregon-born Thayer formed the glam metal band Black’n’Blue in 1981 and enjoyed local success before signing to Geffen in 1983. By 1985, Black’n’Blue were supporting KISS and Gene Simmons even produced two of their albums. Thayer began collaborating with Simmons in the late 80s and two of the duo’s songs made it onto the 1989 KISS album, Hot In The Shade.

In the early 90s, Thayer was recruited by KISS to work on their coffee table book, Kisstory, which led to him conducting a total inventory of the band’s archives, as Thayer remembers. “I thought, ‘This is a dream job.’ Obviously, they had a lot of material – photos, videotapes, and recordings in all kinds of different formats. When I came on the scene, I went to Paul Stanley’s house in Beverly Hills, and there was a room stacked with these old, dilapidated cardboard boxes that were falling apart. Inside the boxes were binders, filled mainly with 35mm slides. They were just really poorly stored; things hadn’t been cared for properly.

“My job was to start going through these binders and not only select photos for the book but identify what was there and start a crude inventory. I knew KISS inside-out and recognized a lot of the photo shoots, so was able to start making notes and organising them. We put together a digital filing system on Filemaker Pro and would identify each individual item, take a photo of it, and add a description with all the specs.

“Today we have a complete, well-ordered inventory of the KISS archive with almost 10,000 individual items in the database. That includes film, video, and photo sessions. I estimate that we have over 50,000 individual images, starting from the early 70s, up to the present day. This is all stored in a temperature-controlled, professional storage facility in the Los Angeles area. I’d say KISS probably has one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated databases and inventory systems put together for an artist.”

Cleaning up the tapes

Deciding which shows should form part of the Off The Soundboard series is just the beginning of the process. Once plucked from the archive, those tapes are transferred and professionally restored. Dan Johnson of Audio Archiving Services Inc, California, is the man entrusted with this task. Usually, the process is relatively simple. But, as Johnson puts it, “sometimes the tapes don’t cooperate – you never know until you put the tape up on the machine.”

Luckily, tapes that have been damaged over time can be restored by baking them. Literally. “Over time, as the tape ages, it starts sucking in moisture from the environment. And that moisture causes the tape to become sticky. If you try to play the tape on one of these machines, it’ll scrape the oxide which holds the music off the tape. And the tape is pretty much destroyed at that point. So, we put them in a regular food dehydrator for 12 to 15 hours at about 130-135 degrees, and then it has to cool for roughly the same time, and that sucks the moisture out.”

For most of us, the idea of “baking” an extremely fragile and priceless part of musical history would be incredibly daunting, but for Johnson, it’s become part of a day’s work, “When you first start out, everything you do is under a microscope and you think, ‘This is the master tape to KISS’ Destroyer or Led Zeppelin’s debut album or whatever – I don’t want to be known as the guy that screwed up that tape!’ Over time, it becomes more routine, and with experience, you think, ‘OK, I’ve seen this before, I know how to deal with it.’”

As a long-term KISS fan, the chance to work on the Off The Soundboard series has been a dream come true for Johnson, “I used to play in bands when I was a teenager. And every band I was ever in played KISS covers. So, they’ve always been a part of my life. It’s been surreal to work on the KISS master tapes, that’s crazy to me. Never in a million years would I have thought this would happen.”

Johnson has also been impressed by the approach the group has taken to these live shows. “The Off The Soundboard series is especially great because there’s no fixing of anything, they don’t go back in the studio and add more audience or more kick drum or whatever. It is what it is. That’s been really refreshing because I’ve worked on a lot of live releases, where the only thing that wasn’t redone in the studio was a hi-hat or a tambourine. It’s great to actually hear actual live recordings that haven’t been tampered with.”

As well as working on the Off The Soundboard series, Johnson was the man behind the audio restoration of 2012’s Super Deluxe Edition of KISS’ 1976 classic, Destroyer, a 4CD and Blu-Ray box set that included the original album newly remastered, demos from Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley’s personal archives, studio outtakes, alternate versions/mixes and single edits and a May 1976 live show from Paris.

With the audio receiving Dan Johnson’s expert care, the presentation of the Destroyer box set had to be top-notch. The KISS Army were not let down – the set included a 68-page hardcover book, replica KISS Army newsletters, facsimile press photos, bio sheets, an iron-on KISS logo, stickers, posters, trading cards, a reproduced program and more. “It took probably six months to put it all together,” reveals Doc McGhee. But it’s all worth it, in the end. Preserving the band’s legacy and giving the KISS Army plenty to shout about is of paramount importance to the band, as McGhee explains, “You have to embrace the past. We don’t want to sound like Pearl Jam, we don’t want to sound like Billie Eilish – we want to sound like KISS… One of the great strengths of KISS is that we’re very connected to the KISS Army. Those kids are part of the team.”

Order KISS: Off The Soundboard: Live in San Antonio 12/3/1985 now.