On 26. October 1974, Kiss did the photo session for the Dressed To Kill album with Bob Gruen. The front cover photo was taken on the southeast corner of W23rd Street and 8th Avenue looking east in New York City. The band also did a second photo session with the suits.
The name Dressed To Kill was come up with after Gruen’s photographs. Up to then, the third Kiss album was going to be entitled “Kiss At Midnight”.
Bob Gruen:
“We were working on a photo novella for Queen magazine (now Harper’s Bazaar UK). The story was about Kiss in their secret identities going to work in the morning. You can see that they’re wearing suits, so no one would recognize that they were Kiss. Nobody knew who they were, it was still early days, and Kiss wasn’t well known at all, even in New York. You have to be more than weird to get attention here. People kind of glanced at them, they may have thought it was a little early for Halloween. It takes a lot to shock a New Yorker.”
Bob Gruen:
“I was working for Creem and they came up with the idea of a Kiss photo novella, which was a comic book-type story in photographs. In the story, Kiss starts off as mild-mannered reporters in their secret identity wearing suits and ties. They’re in the subway station reading the newspaper getting ready to go to work and they read that there’s going to be a concert by John Cleveland, which was Creem’s play on an artist like John Denver but subtly disguised. Creem had that kind of sense of humor. Kiss was outraged that mediocrity was so widespread and they decide they had to save the world with rock and roll. They went into a phone booth, pulled off their clothes, and emerged as Kiss. They went around town putting up posters for this phony concert by John Cleveland, and when all the people show up Kiss comes out and saves the world with rock and roll. For this great service that they’ve done they receive an award and get medals pinned on them, and then they have an orgy. That was a staged photo taken backstage after one of their shows at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. I was watching the audience while they were playing to see where they were cheering the most. I told some girls, “I need some of you to be in a picture hugging and kissing the band,” and I promised I could take them backstage. So I brought four or five girls backstage. The girl with Peter was Lydia, his wife at the time, and the girl with Gene was his girlfriend of several years.”
– “Nothin’ to lose: The making of Kiss (1972-1975)” by Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and Ken Sharp.
Ace Frehley:
“Two things really distinguish Dressed To Kill. The first was the album cover, which featured the four of us standing on the corner of 8th Avenue and 23rd Street wearing suits & ties in full makeup. We’d done something similar for a Creem photo shoot and liked the concept so much that we went with it for the album. Here we are world; just regular guys going to work!”
Bob Gruen:
“We were in the subway. We took one picture where they’re going into the phone booth pulling off their coats and ties. And then, we actually went to a different subway because I didn’t want the picture to go backwards in the page. I wanted them to run into a phone booth and then run out in the same direction – so that they weren’t running back towards themselves.
As we came out of the subway, I said, ‘Why don’t you stand over by the lamp post, let’s take a couple of pictures.’ We had no thought that it was going to be an album cover. It was really just part of this comic book.
If you look at the suits, Gene is wearing my suit – which is why it’s three sizes too small for him. And he’s wearing my wife’s clogs – which is why his feet look like a monster. He looks like he’s got hoofs instead of feet.
Ace is also wearing my suit and my shoes. Had I known how much they’d be worth, I would never have given those shoes away to Goodwill 40 years ago. I remember the white shoes, they had a stain on them and I wasn’t going to wear them, so I gave them away.”
– Metal Mayhem ROC
