Apocalypse Sound has sourced this print from Digital Video Gang and produced what will be a staple and must have DVD for KISS fans and collectors. They pressed the show to silver DVD and packaged it beautifully in their superb Foldout Digipack.
Back in 1977, when the premier Cable TV Pay-Per-View source in the USA was Home Box Office (HBO), they were known for their musical offerings or events. This DVD by DGP contains what can only be described as a Master Broadcast sourcetape of the HBO production, "KISS Live In Tokyo 1977", an April 1st performance/broadcast. The video is absolutely perfect and shot in a much more creative fashion than most other performance-based productions for the following 12 or 13 years, in my opinion. Any concert from the 80's you can identify immediately just by the mundane and cookie-cutter camera angles that were utilized. But with KISS and their show, it demanded creative, multi-camera positions and HBO had to be creaming in their jeans during this period to document the band at the peak of their zenith.
The performance itself may be cookie-cutter and the song-selection for the actual broadcast could have been somewhat sharper, but the show captures everything KISS is about in the way of theatrics and pure entertainment value. The audio is very strong and a good stereo mix. Let's put it this way, it provides a solid base for a professional engineer to really beef it up in the proper environment. As is, it will certainly do! It seems HBO had their top staff of professionals for this event and all details on the production were synched up beautifully. The problem was, back then everything was chunked out in 1-hour broadccast blocks. That is how the programs were sold, produced and canned. It would be quite a find to come up with outtake video from a show like this. But I digress because this show does leave you wondering where the rest is? It comes off as a "sampler" or to put it in contemporary terms, an "infomercial" or a potential promo for the show coming to town.
Highlights for me here include the opener "Detroit Rock City". Hands down, a classic. Everything else in between that and the "Black Diamond" encore just seems like filler when you consider what the actual set list consisted of. In retrospect, this broadcast could have used a stronger dose of "Rock And Roll Over" material. Again, that's me just wishing away because this DGP release is absolutely awesome. From a DVD production standpoint, the Interactive Menu could have been produced a little more effectively. It only presents 3 songs per screen and you have to keep scrolling through if you want to jump around to a particular performance and the screen photo of Gene Simmons doesn't change screen-to-screen.
This is a great title to seek out.
