Cold Gin: an Introduction
Click to viewFull disclosure. This was made for Jelly-Town's! Flashback Fridays series and inspired by this great review of KISS Alive. Here's the last paragraph:
"Cold Gin", too, deserves special analysis. Drinking straight gin is no one's idea of fun, and it's hard to imagine how the song could refer to it being "Cold gin time again" when it's so unlikely that there ever would have been a first time. But this doesn't stop Stanley from promoting it as the ultimate thirst quencher after proclaiming that "some people back stage" told him that the crowd "liked a taste of al-kee-hol" and that some of them "liked to drink vodka and orange juice." The idea of Paul Stanley rapping backstage about getting fucked up with some of the bowl-cutted, zit-faced teeners like the ones you see on the back cover, and the people in the audience believing it, is just too rich an image to ever lose its humor. But more importantly, it solidified youthful notions of what one of the primary purposes of going to arena concerts was, namely to get wasted in the parking lot drinking whatever hellacious concoction of stolen booze we could get our hands on. In this retarded rant, you can hear social drinking being defined for an entire generation of kids. And that's why Kiss Alive! retains its charm: it never fails to recall a time when partying seemed like innocent fun rather than pathological escapism. And that, ultimately, is the myth that rock and roll lives to preserve.
Hell ya.