And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (18 page)

Alive!
had won Gold status in early December 1975, and we’d received the plaques marking this achievement soon afterwards. This was a first for KISS, and I don’t know who was more thrilled—us or the band. It was our first legitimate Gold record, too; Carson’s album had technically qualified for that status, but I don’t think there was a soul alive who didn’t know that was a sham. KISS was on the road when the plaques arrived at the office. (When weren’t they on the road?) To surprise them, I flew to New York on New Year’s Eve and went to Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the big arena out on Long Island, where the band was playing. Just prior to the show, I gave them the awards backstage, and we made a little photo-op of the impromptu event.

A matter of weeks later, the album passed the one-million mark for units sold. Again, it was a first for KISS and us. The RIAA, the industry association responsible for tracking sales and handing out awards, had created a Platinum award at the beginning of the year for albums that had sold one million units. Prior to that, no matter how many units you’d sold, you would never get anything other than a Gold award. So, it seemed that
Alive
! would be our first Platinum album. However, the new award was not retroactive: it only applied to albums released after January 1, 1976. There was no way Neil was going to let the occasion go unheralded just because of some arbitrary RIAA rule, so we had Platinum awards made up and I again flew out to a gig, this time at Cobo, in Detroit, on January 27. We made a big event of it. I arranged with KISS’s road manager, J.R. Smalling, to present the awards onstage just before the group did their encores. The record industry was often a glamorous gig for me, even just sitting behind a desk in the office bullshitting with distributors or artists could be a rush, but there’s nothing quite like walking onstage in front of twelve thousand screaming people and a battery of spotlights to raise your heart rate. The event was an even bigger thrill for me than it was for the band. I left the stage with the most intense high I’d ever experienced. No matter what drugs I’d experimented with in the past, none of them ever had that effect on me. Kinda makes you understand why people become entertainers.

Being head of promotions can be fun, but to pull it off you need to be a full-timer, not a pinch hitter. We needed a permanent replacement for Buck, and I took it upon myself to find him. In early February, I was browsing through one of the many trade publications that came my way each week when by chance I read that Scott Shannon, a fairly influential Nashville program director, had been let go. I knew Scott reasonably well. He had been heavily involved in getting the kissing contest promotion off the ground back in the spring of 1974, and Buck had maintained our relationship with him. Scott helped promote our product and got it on the air whenever he could. I had met him a few times through Buck and was impressed by his line of bullshit, so I gave him a call, and, with Neil’s blessing, I offered him the job of director of promotion. It wasn’t a tough sell. Scott was working promotions at an influential industry publication called
Radio
&
Records
, which to me sounded like a fill-in-the-gap gig. I offered him double the salary he’d made as a PD, an unlimited expense account, and a Mercedes convertible. He gladly accepted, and we had our man.

I was thrilled to have Scott on board. He brought something to the table that I could not: solid relationships with PDs nationwide. Scott had been in radio for a long time, mostly in the South. He’d had great success in places like Mobile, Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta, often increasing ratings for his stations. The name Scott Shannon carried some weight in radio circles and beyond. The other program directors in Top 40 radio knew him by reputation, if not personally, and they took his calls, which was not always the case when I rang them. He was smart and ambitious, but he was still out of his element somewhat, and Neil and I provided him with extra support during his first months on the job. I called in favors from a couple of our distributor reps—namely, Brian Interland and Bruce Bird (both of whom we’d hire before long). I asked them to help Scott in whatever way they could. It was a great hire for us and for Scott, and within a matter of months, he would play an integral role in cementing KISS’s superstar status.

KISS, in the meantime, had completed
Destroyer,
and we were ramping up for a mid-March release. The record was an ambitious project for the band. It was produced by Bob Ezrin, who was in his mid-twenties and already renowned for his successes with Lou Reed and Alice Cooper; later in the decade, his work with Pink Floyd on
The Wall
would push him into the pantheon of elite producers.
Destroyer
showcased a grand level of production and musical arrangement. It was far more nuanced and complex than anything KISS had ever done. We sent the initial single, “Shout It Out Loud,” to radio stations and stores at the beginning of March, and it received good airplay in some markets. Despite some pans from critics (including our friends at
Creem
)
,
the album sold well, but not as well as we’d hoped—which is to say that it wasn’t doing
Alive!
-like numbers. A second single, “Flaming Youth,” followed at the end of April, and it was one of only a handful of singles we’d ever issue that featured a picture sleeve.