hoarr

marjoree:

Inspired by this recent post from hoarr, today’s scan is terribly blurry and also terribly embarrassing ‘cause I look like such a nerd, and not the cool kind. I had a good friend in high school named Alice who was a year older than me and an honest-to-goodness groupie — she swore she lost her virginity to Rick Wakeman when she was 14. When KISS came to Tokyo for the first time in 1977 it was a HUGE deal and they held a press conference at the Hilton Hotel. Alice was half Greek, half Japanese, and she spoke Japanese fluently. I don’t know how she did it, but Alice not only managed to get us into the press conference, she got us right up front. These blurry photos were taken with a Kodak Instamatic by a nervous sixteen year old dressed in possibly the dorkiest outfit ever (see first photo, taken in my bedroom by Alice before we left for the press conference).

Click on the pic for bigness. Oh, and here’s the ticket from the show — I couldn’t get it to come out of the album without it tearing:

(ascanaday, just so’s I can have them all in one place)

Cool story!  KISS had a automatic connection with Japan due to their cover for Hotter Than Hell, so they were treated as gods whenever they finally got their way overseas for their Rock and Roll Over Tour.

So, you actually went to the first Budokan show in Japan?  That’s a pretty nifty story and I have a couple of bootleg VHS tapes from those shows that are quite enjoyable.  I clicked on some news stories about KISS in Japan and found this cute blurb:

I remember us going to the toy store in Ginza and Ace just went crazy in there.  We all did to a certain extent, seven stories of just toys.  We were somewhat awed by it all, plus the dollar to the yen was so good in those days that we spent thousands and thousands of dollars on little shit to bring home.

Thanks for posting.