31. March, 1974: Kiss plays their first outdoor concert at KSHE Kite Fest

On 31. March, 1974, Kiss played their first outdoor gig at ‘The 4th Annual KSHE Kite Fest’ in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri. This free entrance daytime festival was organized by the local radio rock station KSHE-95. A local group called the Thirteenth Floor played various popular songs, including several by The Steve Miller Band and Santana. The show was reported as having an estimated audience of 100,000 in Billboard Magazine (Apr. 20, 1974). One local press report on the clean-up of the aftermath noted just 22,000 in attendance (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4/2/1974). The band’s appearance was plagued by technical issues with the generators provided being deemed insufficient for the show and no hydraulics being available for Peter’s drum kit riser.

The setlist:

Deuce
Strutter
Cold Gin
She
Nothin’ to Lose
Let Me Know
Black Diamond
Let Me Go, Rock ‘n’ Roll
Strutter

See 8 mm footage from Kiss’ gig at the KSHE Kite Fest below:

UMSL Current 4. April, 1974:
“People were everywhere. Of the 105,000 people at the park Sunday, which incidentally was the biggest recorded crowd ever at Forest Park at one time. By 3 o’clock, the crowd was ready for music. A local group called Thirteenth Floor played various popular songs including several by the Steve Miller Band and Santana. They were followed by KISS, who was described by KSHE Radio as being the top group in Los Angeles. KISS smacked the audience with hard rock and bizarre costumes. The group was dressed mainly in black, although the bass guitarist brightened up his costume with knee high silver platform boots. The members of the group had also painted their faces with white makeup and encircled their eyes with various designs ranging from bats to golden stars.”

Joyce Bogart-Trabulus:
“Neil [Bogart] and Larry Harris and I flew into St. Louis for a festival concert that KSHE, a radio station, was sponsoring. [The band] were playing to an enormous crowd of over forty thousand people. KISS had never played during the day outside in the sun and bright lights—they’d never played an outdoor concert before. As the day got hotter the makeup melted and the wind and sun obliterated the special fire effects and even made them dangerous to the band and the rest of us on the stage. But the worst thing was the way the stage was constructed. It seemed to be just boards over risers that were not tied down well, and every time the group jumped — about every sixty seconds — the amps behind them would start to fall down. Neil, Larry Harris, and | spent the whole concert holding up the amps. We couldn’t hear for weeks.”
– “Nothin’ to Lose: The making of Kiss (1972-1975)” by Ken Sharp, Gene Simmons, and Paul Stanley.

Larry Alan Harris:
“Casablanca bought time on the station and booked KISS for what was termed a “live performance promotion,” which turned out to be a headlining spot at KSHE’s Kite-Fly on March 31. The kite fest, the station’s big annual outdoor event, was held in Forest Park, St. Louis’s version of Central Park. To help promote it, we scheduled an on-air appearance at KSHE a week or so before the concert. The day of the band’s radio appearance, one of the worst storms in decades hit St. Louis. When the band and I showed up at KSHE, it was closed. No one was there. The station, the size of a shoebox, was located about ten feet away from a drive-in theater on old Route 66 in Crestwood, a St. Louis suburb. Both the theater’s enormous screen and the station had been damaged by the storm. So, there we were, the band members (sporting their costumes) and I, standing on top of a hill at the side of Route 66, the wind blasting us with dust and debris, wondering what the hell we were going to do. Afterwards, Shelly felt so sorry for us and was so impressed that we’d even shown up in that weather that he began to play KISS like they were the biggest thing ever to hit the city. It paid off: the kite fest drew over forty thousand people, and KISS was a smashing success. Given that KISS was still almost completely unknown and had released their first album just a few weeks prior, getting to play in front forty thousand people was an astounding opportunity. St. Louis and KSHE would become strongholds for KISS. Shelly, his wife, Emily, and I remained good friends for years.”
– “And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records” by Larry Alan Harris

Ron Stevens and Mark Klose, KSHE 95:
“And we were using North County Sound, Howard Hunzey, a small company up in North County for sound and they really didn’t have a large enough generator to handle a band like Kiss. I don’t know anything about power so I rent four Honda generators. Lawnmower generators. Like, you know, the things with the little bars like… So Kiss’s management comes up to Mark and says, you know, we can’t play. They’re not going to play unless you get a bigger generator. This is really, it’s going to blow up. And Mark says, all right, well, let me talk to Shelly Grafman. Now Shelly, very wisely, stayed off to the side, stayed away from letting me and Mark take all the heat. And Mark finds Shelly and goes up to him. I said, Shelly, the road manager seems to be a little bit upset. He goes, what? What’s wrong? I go, the power. He goes, well, you got the four generators. And I go, he wants like a bazillion watts. And he goes, all right, tell him to go home. I said, say what? He’s a poker player. So Mark gets it, goes back to the guy and says, Shelly says, okay, don’t play. He goes, what? And I said, he told you to go home. The guy’s a little taken back by that. Thinks about it per se and goes, no, no, no, we’ll play. Because he sees thousands of kids out there. I mean, you’ve seen the pictures, huge audience out there. By the time Kiss made it to the stage, we had one generator working. One Honda six horsepower gas generator. And I got it in turn with a can of gas. And I go, buddy, whatever you do, don’t let this mother run out of gas or we got no show. I just had a rip roaring time and rocked the house. And saw all these kites and saw all these cool people. That was the Casey kite flying contest, yeah. Good times.”