KISS - ABC In Concert 1974 (50th Anniversary franKENstein Redux)

This video is KISS’ first appearance on television. Most copies of this show look pretty rough and sound even worse. Since this was the very first time most people ever saw this new band called “KISS“ and since it’s the 50th anniversary, I thought I’d have a little fun trying to clean it up. Video: I’ve adjusted the colors and a few other things to take some of the over-saturation and blurriness out of the image and upscaled it to 1080p. I also did a little shot-swapping in a couple places to hide some glitches, to break up the choruses a bit and mostly to include the “missing“ 2nd half of the first verse of “Nothin’ To Lose“. I did some “creative“ editing to fill in the video from that section. I also made the transitions a little smoother between songs, extending the “Black Diamond“ intro a bit to make it less abrupt and to give the whole video a “mini concert“ appearance. I’m not sure if the songs were original aired back-to-back or as separate segments, but the edits between them is very abrupt. I also extended the intro of “Nothin’ To Lose“ since it was all but buried under the audience on the original. Audio: Drums were all re-created using Peter’s original isolated kit. I then blended polyphonic samples I made from his drums to replace everything exactly as he played it. The cymbals were enhanced with actual Peter crash samples. Same for the cowbell. The toms were blended hit-for-hit with samples created from his Alive! toms. Bass is 100% from the show with just a tiny bit of “dirt“ added to the high end. Since this was a mono recording and I wanted to create a true-stereo mix, I used the original guitar for Ace since he was louder in the mix throughout. His parts are 100% from the actual show. Paul’s guitar parts for the intro of “Firehouse and “Black Diamond“ (and a few other spots) come from the show. In order to create a stereo mix, his other rhythm parts come from Alive!, mixed to match the show’s guitar tone and edited to match exactly what he plays here. Vocals are 100% from the original live recording, aside from the “missing“ verse in “Nothin’ to Lose“ which I pulled from Alive! and matched to the sound of the rest of the show. Other than that, I blended some high frequencies from the Alive! tracks just to fix a bit of sibilance. Like I always say, my videos are NOT for the purists. It is a fan’s attempt to make these classic videos hopefully look and especially sound better for a more enjoyable experience. All care was taken to preserve as much of the nuance from the actual performance as possible. Others have done a good job cleaning up the original audio on various versions which are available if that’s more your thing, but you’ve never heard the show like this before. It was a bit of a rush job since after starting it a few days ago, I realized the 50th anniversary was coming up and wanted to try and post it on that date. KISS fans Enjoy!
Back to Top