On 28. September 1976 Kiss entered the studio to record “Rock and Roll Over”. It was recorded at the Star Theatre in Nanuet, New York, with Eddie Kramer as producer.
To work on the album, the band decided on Eddie Kramer who had done so much for them on “Alive!”. They also decided to record the album in a 1,000 seat theatre in Nanuet, New York, called the Star Theatre in order to get the natural echo that came with a live recording. In setting up the theatre so that it could be used as a studio by the band, Kramer placed the band on the sunken stage, with the amps facing the tunnels that led out away from the stage and under the seats. Occasionally, a member, such as Ace, would be stationed near the end of one hallway in order to get an even deeper echo sound to his instrument. Kramer also set up another room in the building for his recording set-up, and kept a constant eye on the band members through the use of video cameras down on the stage.
Except for Peter. Peter had managed to be stationed in another room that was only viewed by the video camera, and Peter took sheer demented delight in making it difficult for Kramer to keep an eye on him, as he told Ken Sharp. “It was the first time they separated me from the boys. I played up in the bathrooms with a video camera and they played down in the theater. It was my idea and Eddie Kramer’s. I liked the idea. It was like, ‘A bathroom! Great! Do you know how fucking loud it will be?’ I liked the idea because I could see the guys on the camera and I was in the bathroom all by myself and I’d play games on them. I would make funny pictures and I’d put them in front of the screen and they’d lose me. And they’d see these weird things like flying saucers from Mars and ‘fuck you’ or I’d draw a dick. Eddie just couldn’t handle it. He’d say, ‘Stop this shit, we gotta get this done.’”
Ace found the recording of the album just as enjoyable as Peter did, as he mentioned in the same article. “ROCK AND ROLL OVER for me was a lot of fun because it was working with Eddie Kramer, who I always got along with. We recorded the album about 15 minutes from my house. I’d recently gotten married and I got a new car and it was nice. It was like on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge [in upper New York]. I was living in Tarrytown and we recorded it at a theater in the round. We actually built a recording studio in some room. Eddie Kramer just brought in all this stuff and actually built a recording studio. That album was a lot of fun.”
– “Black Diamond: The Unauthorized Biography of Kiss” by Dale Sherman
