On 2. April 1977, Kiss recorded the first of select shows for their second live album “Alive II”, with songs from their previous three albums as well as five brand new studio songs.
The origins of “Alive II” go back to early 1977 when the band’s manager Bill Aucoin suggested that Kramer record a live album during the evening show at Budokan Hall in Tokyo, Japan on April 2, 1977. The plan was to release a live album to give Kiss some much-deserved time off before recording the album that would become “Love Gun” later that autumn. Kramer finished work on the album, but Casablanca and Kiss deemed it unusable, and the band forged ahead with their “Love Gun” sessions.
Most of the live tracks on “Alive II” were recorded during the band’s August 26–28 shows at the Forum while on their “Love Gun” Tour. The 3 p.m. soundchecks at the August 26 and 27 shows were recorded and later used on the album (i.e. “I Stole Your Love” with crowd noise being dubbed in later). “Beth” and “I Want You” were lifted from the aborted Japanese live album and used on the finished “Alive II”. As the band did not want to duplicate songs included on “Alive!”, the songs chosen for the three live sides of the album were all drawn from Kiss’ three preceding studio albums: “Destroyer”, “Rock and Roll Over” and “Love Gun”.
On the original double album, the songs on side 4 (tracks 6–10 on the second CD) are tracks recorded live without the audience at Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, and overdubbed and mixed at Electric Lady Studios in New York City in September 13–16, 1977. Although Ace Frehley was originally credited for lead guitar on the studio tracks, the remastered version released in 1997 confirmed what had been speculated by Kiss fans for years: Bob Kulick played lead guitar on the tracks “All American Man”, “Rockin’ in the U.S.A.” and “Larger Than Life”. “Rockin’ in the USA” had references to both the previous year’s “Spirit of 76” main act European debut in England, France, Germany and Denmark and to that spring’s Japan debut. Frehley’s sole involvement for the studio songs was “Rocket Ride” (originally written for a solo album), on which he sang lead vocals and played both guitar and bass guitar. Paul Stanley played all guitars on “Any Way You Want It”, which was originally recorded by the Dave Clark Five in 1964.
