"Rock and Roll All Nite" is a song by Kiss, originally released on their 1975 album Dressed to Kill. It was released as the A-side of their fifth single, with the album track "Getaway." The studio version of the song peaked at No. 57 on the Billboard singles chart, besting the band's previous charting single, "Kissin' Time" (#79). A subsequent live version, released as a single in October 1975, eventually reached No. 12, the first of six Top 20 songs for Kiss in the 1970s. "Rock and Roll All Nite" became Kiss's most identifiable song and has served as the group's closing concert number in almost every concert since 1976.
In 2008 it was named the 16th greatest hard rock song of all time by VH1. The members of Kiss were under intense pressure to put together their third album, 1975's Dressed to Kill. They were abruptly called off tour to work on a follow-up to 1974's Hotter Than Hell when the album began to die on the charts - even though they had no new songs ready. The sessions were being produced by the head of their label Neil Bogart, who was upset that the band had yet to successfully capture the excitement of their live act on record and wanted to correct the problem himself.
The band was being so rushed to come up with material that they dipped into their backlog of older songs, as well as write new ones during the day and record them immediately after. Bogart suggested that the band's head songwriters Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, come up with an anthem that would serve as a rallying cry for Kiss and their fans - suggesting something akin to Sly & the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher." While writing back at the hotel, Stanley came up with the line "I want to rock and roll all night, and party every day." After showing the new line to Simmons, he added parts from an older song, reportedly titled "Drive Me Wild."
While it had a great singalong chorus, when the song was issued a single a few months later, it did not storm up the charts. With record label Casablanca in deep financial trouble, Kiss was thinking of leaving for another label, but on the insistence of the others, decided to issue a live album later in 1975 Alive!. The excitement and energy of a Kiss show was captured perfectly by rock producer Eddie Kramer, and the song that benefited perhaps the most from the live setting was "Rock and Roll All Nite." The version was a bit longer than the studio take (including an Ace Frehley guitar solo that was absent from the original), but as Bogart hoped, it became an instant rallying cry and a hard rock classic, becoming a number 12 hit and pushing the album it was taken from straight up the charts. Since 1975, there hasn't been a single Kiss concert that did not feature "Rock and Roll All Nite" as an encore and is the band's most instantly identifiable song.
Read more about Rock And Roll All Nite: Recording, Live Performances, Other Versions, Appearances, Personnel, Cover Versions, Poison Version
Famous quotes containing the words rock and/or roll:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Roll on, thou ball, roll on!
Through pathless realms of Space”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)